The Hive

The Hive picks up where X'ed Out left off.  Doug is in his dream world where he has gotten a shitty job surrounded by green, mucus-looking creatures.  He remembers the past, with Sarah.  In the past, Doug's father has just died, and she and he are going through the father's things, taking pictures and the like.  In the dream world, one of the breeders needs the same issue of a romance comic that Sarah needs.  Of course, everything is different in the dream world.

Basically, Doug is fucked up on opiates, and he can't distinguish reality from fantasy.  In the fantasy/dream life, he has become the mask that he wears to look different.  That's what differentiates The Hive from a work that's just weird for the sake of being weird, like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (I know, this is an oversimplification, but that's really how I see that movie).  The Hive, like X'ed Out, is really, really weird, but it gives off an aura that the weirdness really does mean something, like David Lynch's more mainstream work.

I got The Hive and X'ed Out at the San Diego Public Library, but as I mentioned in my last review, I have a deep need to own this work, to go over it again and not just in my mind.  As the great Stan Lee once said of comics, "they are like breasts.  Good on the screen, but even better in your hand."  While I was writing that last sentence, I ordered Sugar Skull, the third book in the trilogy, off Amazon.  I got a cheap library copy, and it won't come in two days, but I'll have it, and that's what counts.