Final Cut

I returned to another author of an all-time favorite this month. I often name Charles Burns''s 2005 graphic novel, Black Hole, a jet-dark story of a disease sweeping through '70s teens, as my favorite Seattle book, but I've never found another book of his that wove a spell like that one. This new one, set in a similar place and time, is a smaller story, without the majestic scope (or the granular weirdness) of Black Hole, but it's a very good one, an almost simple tale of looking and wanting so much you lose sight of what you were looking at (if you ever really had it in the first place), made concrete, yet again, by the meticulous strangeness of Burns's inky-black lines.