It’s part satire, part parable, part nursery rhyme and part disaster movie, and it’s an utter joy to read.

Clever, funny and beautiful to look at… A fairytale for adults that children will also adore, The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil is surely destined to become a classic.

As splendiferous as its title… An inspired swirling of the mundane with the surreal, the plot may be simple but his satire on modern life is witty and thoughtful.

Collins’ wonderful debut unfolds with slow and simple elegance through black-and-white panels.

It reminds me of nothing so much as a Roald Dahl novel.

Charming.

Happily as splendiferous as its title.

A gorgeously penciled fable… The pacing and page design are immaculate.

There’s a touch of Roald Dahl to this dark, beautifully drawn and wonderfully surrealist tale.

A witty and surreal response to conformity, and how we should embrace our difference. Accompanied by incredible pencil drawings, you will be blown away by the quality, and be humbled by the underlying message.

My pick of next season’s graphic novels.

A rich allegorical work with a certain Kafkaesque quality, with the story told in a rolling, rhyming blank verse.

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.