Many regard Black Hole as one of the greatest graphic novels, and it's not hard to see why. Burns's black-and-white strips are so cool, and his story - sex, drugs and teenage mutants - grips like a vice.

Drawn in [Burns’] signature woodblock style, and [is] visually memorising

A bleak but brilliant tale of suburban alienation

Black Hole just might be the most perfect book going, if not the sexiest... As startling and evocative a work as the medium has ever produced.

Make no mistake: this is a bleak book that tries desperately in its final frames to introduce a note of optimism in resignation. It's also brilliant.

A tour de force to rival Maus

An adult and difficult story but [accompanied by] very simple black and white illustrations, comic book style, and it is exceptionally powerful...show the amazing power and depth that can come from a literary story shown through words and images

My pick of next season’s graphic novels.

This incredible fable is rich with subtext and allegory… It is a singularly spectacular graphic novel… Timeless, uniquely insightful into the human condition, witty and poignant.

With The Gigantic Beard that was Evil, Stephen Collins has produced a book too profound to be serious, too good for the patronizing pat of mainstream media...In The Beard That Was Evil, Collins has created a total work of art which elevates itself beyond comparison.

Collins’s [book] is a love song – or is it? – to facial hair and all who get tangled up in it.

A book to make you sing with the genius of it... A book of revolution, and a beautiful story told with imagination, grace and a lot of pencil lines. And you feel the hard effort on every page. Those individual hairs don’t draw themselves.

In exquisite pencil drawings, Stephen Collins pursues Dave’s absurd quandary through its logical stages, from infamy to celebrity, from vast scaffolding to hot-air balloons. It’s a timely fable about any government’s attempt to impose conformity on the “becauselessness” of humanity.

With The Gigantic Beard that was Evil, Stephen Collins has produced a book too profound to be serious, too good for the patronizing pat of mainstream media...In The Beard That Was Evil, Collins has created a total work of art which elevates itself beyond comparison.

Collins’s [book] is a love song – or is it? – to facial hair and all who get tangled up in it.

A book to make you sing with the genius of it... A book of revolution, and a beautiful story told with imagination, grace and a lot of pencil lines. And you feel the hard effort on every page. Those individual hairs don’t draw themselves.

In exquisite pencil drawings, Stephen Collins pursues Dave’s absurd quandary through its logical stages, from infamy to celebrity, from vast scaffolding to hot-air balloons. It’s a timely fable about any government’s attempt to impose conformity on the “becauselessness” of humanity.