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Doug is having a strange night. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there, across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat, Inky. Who died years ago. But who's nonetheless slinking out through the hole, beckoning Doug to follow.
What's going on?
To say any more would spoil the freaky, Burnsian fun, especially because X'ed Out, unlike Black Hole, has not been previously serialized, and every unnervingly meticulous panel will be more tantalizing than the last ...
Drawing inspiration from such diverse influences as Hergé and William Burroughs, Charles Burns has given us a dazzling spectral fever-dream - and a comic-book masterpiece.
"Starred Review. Burns has turned out a haunting first chapter in what promises to be a spellbinder ... The only disappointment about X'ed Out is its brevity - the first of several installments, it will leave you begging for the rest of the story." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Like an apocalyptic hallucination … the visionary artistry of Burns exists beyond the bounds of time and constraints of conventional narrative." – Kirkus Reviews
"Long awaited first chapter in what promises to be a trippy, wildly experimental and typically disquieting epic." – NPR
This information about X'ed Out was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Charles Burns
Charles Burns grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman's RAW magazine in the mid-1980s, and since then he has worked on a wide range of projects including album covers, ad campaigns, and set design. He has illustrated covers for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is the cover artist for The Believer. His full-length graphic novel, Black Hole received Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz awards. He lives in Philadelphia.
If you liked X'ed Out, try these:
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by Alice McDermott
Published 2018
Rendered with remarkable lucidity and intelligence, Alice McDermott's The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today
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