Featured: New Charles Burns

Charles Burns, The Hive

Hardcover

"Doug is still in the netherworld. He's working a cleaning job in the Hive's stinking hallways, trying to ignore the screams, and reading romance comics to the breeders. But as the stories unravel on the page, frame by frame, mirrored memories plunge him back into his waking life. And that's where the real nightmare is.

In Burns's trademark hard-edged style, The Hive is horrifying and completely absorbing: an incredible new installment from one of the most exciting artists in the comics world." -Random House, UK

"The second volume in Charles Burns's head-scratching series about a man trapped in a creepy netherworld is outstanding." -Rachel Cooke, The Observer

"At the juncture of fiction and memory, of cheap thrills and horror, lies the dark world of Charles Burns. His stories, which first attracted notice in the pages of RAW during the early 1980s, take comic book clichés — wiseacre kids, sinister scientists, tough-as-nails detectives, teenage lust and EC-style horror — and rearrange them into disturbing yet funny patterns. Beneath this interplay of familiar iconography lurk the real traumas of childhood, traumas of loss and alienation.
Similarly, Burns' ice-cold artwork polishes a "conventional" comic look to the nth degree, underlying the artificiality of what we take for normal. At times, Burns's work suggests that our worst fears about mainstream comics are true: that they are stamped out by machines programmed by someone who is going slightly insane." -Fantagraphics

"The work of Charles Burns is a vision that’s both horrifying and hilariously funny, and which he executes with cold, ruthless clarity... It’s almost as if the artist... as if he weren’t quite..... human!" – R. Crumb

"Burns is a central figure in a generation of artists who have absorbed Pop Art and pop culture as integral a part of their work as any classical tradition." – Spin

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

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Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
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