The Hive

Charles Burns’s The Hive is a singular, ongoing graphic novel from Pantheon that began in 2012, a hypnotic and unsettling journey into a surreal, insect-obsessed underworld. Burns, the sole writer and artist, crafts a meticulously detailed black-and-white nightmare where a teenage boy’s search for a missing girl leads him into a bizarre, hallucinatory realm of strange creatures and body horror. A masterwork of slow-burn dread and intricate linework, it stands as a defining work of modern alternative comics from one of the medium’s most distinctive voices.