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La Colmena (2013)

by Charles Burns(Favorite Author)

3.93 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Reservoir Books

series

X'ed Out Trilogy

review 1: I've always been a sucker for Burns' surrealistic dream-state comics and The Hive is a successful continuation of this. Comics are the perfect medium for things to be really fucked up and odd. I'm not a super fan of realist comics with everything making sense all the time - it doesn't seem to exploit the medium in the way I really groove to.Now this does feature a (gasp) art student who seems to be questioning the meaning of life or at least his life and the sad fate of his father who seems to have died of cancer. An artist writing/cartooning a story about a young artist full of angst and possible a head-injury and drug problem! Your tolerance for this sort of navel gazing might be tested. It is like when writers write about writing - it can be a trial for the poor reader.... more But I think Burns is a good enough of an artist to muddy things up enough to make this intriguing. It has a lot of his obsessions in it that I've seen in works like EL Borobah and Skin Deep and especially his work before this one Black Hole. But because Burns is such the consumate cartoonist (and a slow painstaking producer of his work) he's able to revisit/recycle those body horror and bondage themes without them seeming tired to me (so far). And yes there is the nice addition of Tin Tin/Nit Nit going on as well. There was a two year gap between X'ed Out and The Hive, I'll happily wait another two years for the next - absorbing what's seeped into my brain in the meantime.
review 2: The Hive is the second installment of Charles Burns horror graphic novel that started with vol. 1, X'ed Out. The story follows Nitnit (Get it? You will.) through his "real" life and a dream or fantasy life he cannot control. I'm not going to pretend that I know what is going on but when Nitnit dreams his way into following his cat through the hole in the bedroom wall, his world changes forever into a bizarre world of sewage, strange sentient and semi-sentient creatures, in a MIddle Eastern looking milieu. The other half of the story follows his "real" life either through real time or flashbacks (it's not always certain). He ages, his father dies, he changes girlfriends but in his opiate addled state (he's an addict to pain pills he got from his father when he died, but he's gonna run out soon.), it's not quite certain what is real, flashback, or dream. Eggs seem to play a big role. The art is pure Tintin (Get it now?) and Nitnit's "mask" alter ego is suspiciously like a Tintin clone.If you are a fan of original graphic novels and non-traditional comic artwork you will enjoy this bizarre comic. less

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