The artwork is very nice, so is the suspense, the sense of something approaching. The Tintin allusions are also very nice, especially with the whole setting be so unsettling and alltogether unsavoury. After reading these 56 pages however, one can't help but thinking things have hardly begun. It's all very nice and surreal, but really, the premise to the story is not even finished. I'm glad I don't have to wait for the second and third installment of the trilogy and hope this will turn into some kind of story. Or come up with some twist so it doesn't have to anymore... (Complete Spoilers.) (This review is of the whole trilogy.) After reading the first book in this trilogy I waited until all three were out to read them all at once. It turns out Burns wasn't going where I had hoped with it after the first one, which was toward a more socially and politically conscious, macroscale type of horror story. Instead this is a simple story about a dude abandoning his girlfriend and their child, told from the dude's smug, self-pitying perspective in a highly stylized and psychologically detailed way. I was reading Black Boy at the same time as this and it didn't throw this into a very favorable light given the actual (not self-inflicted, not self-exacerbated) horror Black Boy's protagonist confronts. The Sugar Skull protagonist and by proxy this whole story itself just seemed inconsequential and not worth writing about. Still, in general I don't begrudge the existence of this kind of self-involved, mewling protagonist bawling insufferably about his own (admittedly real and severe) shittiness and inadequacy as a human being, so long as the book is as stylistically satisfying and well crafted as this. I can dig it in the same way I dig No Longer Human by Dazai Osamu or Notes from Underground by Dostoyevsky. This isn't quite as good as those though. Good for what it is, not required reading.
What do You think about Tóxico (2011)?
Maybe even squigglier than Black Hole, but just as tasty. I dub it breakfast surreal.
—rfeemen
Burns does strange well. And detail. He does detail well.
—walderak
