Here it is in all its glory:  the complete X'ed Out Trilogy – X'ed Out, The Hive and Sugar Skull – altogether in a single, attractive and affordable, full-size, softcover collection.  Conceived as a Burnsian tribute to Herge's TinTin, the tale told in Last Look is a tortuously twisted take on those epic adventures in which the polyanna-ish innocence of TinTin is replaced molecule by molecule with the corruptions that are so readily at hand in the world as we find it and, crucially, in the world as our human imagination makes it, as well.  Perhaps most of all, Burns demonstrates the way in which these two worlds intersect.  It is here that the interpretive layers really pile up as, in a meta-fictional fashion, readers are led to understand how comics – and expressive acts of artistic creation and performance in general – can and do act as a bridge between these worlds, between reality and imagination, in which the latter can and does gradually, almost imperceptibly, at first mask and and then remake the former, until they seem to be one and the same...