Now I’ve read Sugar Skull, named after the macabre sweets we saw our hero, Doug, buying in the last frame of The Hive, it’s clear to me that the only thing to do is to go right back to the beginning of the saga and start again, the better to be sure I haven’t missed some essential symbol or sign, some deeply buried meaning. My strong feeling is that this series is one of the most vividly drawn and painfully honest expositions of male guilt I’ve ever read. But I can’t be definitive about this. Burns isn’t in the business of neat endings.

Burns brings it all together in Sugar Skull. I don’t know which impressed me more – the slow build-up, over three books, to the revelation and knowledge that the final volume delivers, changing entirely how we see Doug, or the way in which Burns pulls his pieces together into such a coherent whole.

Charles Burns's comics are fluid, smooth and as solidly built as a vintage TV set, but they shudder with the chill of the uncanny.

[Last Look] bring[s] together one of the most intricate and seamlessly told stories in the history of graphic novels.

As much grotesque fun as it was reading these books instalment by instalment, Last Look is absolutely the way it should be read. And re-read. And then read again.

A complex, multi-layered narrative with a classic unreliable protagonist… Burns’ art is sensational. The images from Johnny’s story are genuinely disturbing on every level. As always, his characters tap into various archetypes of American youth and family life, but with a sinister edge showing darkness behind the American dream. Burns’ work is seductive, disquieting and original and if you don’t already have the separate volumes, this is a great chance to read the story for the first time.

A sleazy, slow-burning, page-turning exploration of a midlife crisis…. He’s not a million miles off [a Noble Prize].

It rewards the times and attention you can justifiably spend on it, with Burns layering artistic and literary magic beneath the already rich veneer… [A] brilliant book.

A great gift.

I think it may be a masterpiece… [Last Look] manages things faster and more masterfully in graphic form than I can easily imagine in a literary equivalent.

An intricate, secretive book with a hard truth at its center.

Greenberg speaks of storytellers but she's a great storyteller herself, and it's easy to be pulled into the worlds that she writes, housed neatly by tight drawings in a style that is bright enough to bring these worlds to life, and detached enough to feel a little otherworldly.

‘It’s a book about many things – love, snow, god, poisoned sausages...but mostly it’s a celebration of storytelling itself. Strange and wry and funny and beautifully drawn.’

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is a delightful accordion of a book. This graphic novel casts a spell like that of Scheherazade – when you sit down with it, prepare to stay until the last page.

One of the most anticipated debuts of 2013.

A playful yet wise graphic novel.

A welcome return - just as thoughtful, intellectual and valuable as Wilson or Mister Wonderful, but with an added sci-fi angle that's a perfect blend of weird science and paradoxical time travel.

Clowes is a master of immediacy. Even without his elegant illustrations, his dialogue…is so sharp, he establishes characters in just a few bubbles… I read it in one sitting and wanted, like Jack, to start over again.

A beautiful graphic novel that pays equal tribute to 50s comics and the contemporary confessional memoir.

A time-travelling masterpiece full of anger, with the fabulous art for which Clowes is renowned

A brilliant time-travelling rumination on love, bereavement and obsession.

A time-travel epic propelled by slabs of bright, confectionery color and the unhinged grief of a widower… In a year when so much art felt undone in light of current events, Patience is right on time.