Having now read X’ed Out, I understand what the problem is that people have but it doesn’t have anything to do with the book itself (or not really).

I look forward to reading the second episode, The Hive, to see where this strange-adventure-down-the-rabbit-hole leads me. For that finale I’ll drop the trilogy rating to a three-star average but it’s still worth checking out if you’re an indie comics fan, especially those who enjoy the work of David Lynch. Burns's work might be described as alternative, experimental, hallucinatory, surreal, horror, but while this does not reflect on adolescence, there still seems there may be some ties to his Seattle life. Doug is still deeply troubled that the love of his life Sarah is no longer with him, though we still don’t know what happened to her. After he gets out of the hospital, Doug moves back into his parents’ house where he spends his time in his father’s basement taking pain medicine, sleeping, and avoiding any contact with the outside world, including Sarah.Doug escapes from the Hive and then falls into a river where he floats until he climbs onto a rickety wooden bridge and passes out. In 1991, choreographer Mark Morris commissioned him to create illustrations that were then used as a basis for his version of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, The Hard Nut. X'ed Out is what life would be like if you were listening to Pink Floyd and reading Kurt Vonnegut while living in a David Cronenberg film.

Then, in a warehouse full of red and white eggs (Tintin fans will recognize their alien coloring from Hergé’s “The Shooting Star”), he encounters salamander men (in office attire) who toss him out onto the street. Sugar Skull and its companions come with a brutal message: only fear and loathing awaits those men who leave their growing up until it is too late. Last Look is the collected edition of Charles Burns’ X’ed Out Trilogy comprising X’ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull.

They didn’t lead to gainful employment immediately, but those years in California gave Charles enough creative stimulation to get his comics career off the ground. Accidentally picking up The Hive without prior knowledge of the trilogy is a bewildering experience, and one that Charles is keen to exploit.

In the lecture, Burns describes a sequence that appears in The Secret of the Unicorn being the first time that he ever saw an intercom: “I don’t know what an intercom is…When I’m looking at it, I see this voice coming out of the wall…this mouth that’s embedded into this wall. It is difficult to move much beyond that because, as mentioned, this novel seems to be only partly completed, and in a way, it also felt a little rushed, and somewhat confusing, however it is certainly on a level that is much greater than many of the other rubbish that you see around the place. If “X’ed Out” feels short, on multiple levels of storytelling and art, Burns has still outdone himself in sheer ambition, and to this point, has pulled it off. And, furthermore, the way that this ickiness seems to bleed over into the "real world" parts of his comics seems to be strangely appropriate for the teen characters that inhabit those sides of his stories.In the end neither Doug nor Sam is able to save the women they love, and both men meet very different ends. The ending is cliff hanger which sneaks up on you with all the stealth of a (insert clever reference to something very stealthy that also draws a sneaky parallel to what i've been talking about above). Even with the innocuous panels, just looking at the characters' mouths slightly agape, the bulbous pimples on their faces. I don't want to sound like a phony and use the world 'tantalizing' to describe Burns' artwork (just so-so, but then that's just me).

The characters are as one-dimensional and lifeless as the ones in Black Hole and nothing really exciting happens plot-wise (which would have been fair if the author was building up suspense but he wasn't). It begins with a man tormented by nightmares that we all morphed from strange events that happened in his life. As I reach the climax of his latest work of fiction, Sugar Skull, I’m preoccupied with an interview I’ve read in which he mentions there are autobiographical elements in the book.One figure he sees stands out from all of the others because of his distinct lack of strangeness, an old man sitting in a room wearing the same clothes as Doug. But I like that feeling of collecting puzzle pieces with the hope that by the end I'll have some understanding of the bigger picture. So Sarah has Doug’s kid, Danny, but Doug’s such a baby himself that he can’t deal with any level of responsibility, let alone being a father, so he runs away and totally shuts himself away from Sarah. While I had a hard time understanding what is going on, I discovered this volume is the first in a trilogy, and I liked it well enough that I wouldn’t mind seeing how the rest of the story played out.