Black Hole: A Graphic Novel (Pantheon Graphic Library) - Hardcover

Charles Burns

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037542380X ISBN 13: 9780375423802

Publisher: Pantheon, 2005

Synopsis

“The best graphic novel of the year” (Time) tells the story of a strange plague devastating the lives of teenagers in mid-1970s suburban Seattle, revealing the horrifying nature of high school alienation—the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety, and the ennui.

We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways—from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable)—but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back.

As we inhabit the heads of several key characters—some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it—what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself.

And then the murders start.

As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it—back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird.

To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin…

About this title

About the Author

CHARLES BURNS grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman’s Raw magazine in the mid-1980s and took off from there, in an extraordinary range of comics and projects, from Iggy Pop album covers to the latest ad campaign for Altoids. In 1992 he designed the set for Mark Morris’s delightful restaging of The Nutcracker (renamed The Hard Nut) at BAM. He’s illustrated covers for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He was also tapped as the official cover artist for The Believer magazine at its inception in 2003. Burns lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two daughters.

Reviews

Starred Review. Grade 11 Up–Set in a Seattle suburb during the mid-1970s, this dark, atmospheric story is a gripping (and often unsettling) journey into the psyche of suburban teens on the brink of adulthood. The bug is a sexually transmitted disease that causes strange and irreversible mutations: one boy grows a miniature second mouth above his collarbone, a girls skin begins to molt, and another grows a preternatural tail. Some are able to conceal their mutations and live a normal life, while others are shunned and forced to seek refuge in a supportive, but tenuous community deep in the woods among the homeless and the homicidal. The impact of the plague on the community is seen through the eyes of two teens, Keith and Chris, both of whom become infected and develop mutations. Burns skillfully explores the inner drama of high school alienation with tenderness, precision, and grace. His masterful black-and-white illustrations evoke an eerie surreal tone that beautifully complements the underlying horror of the textual narrative. This accomplished graphic novel is a serious work of artistic and literary merit and is essential for any collection that includes adult graphic novels such as Dan Clowess David Boring (Knopf, 2000), Craig Thompsons Blankets (Top Shelf, 2005), and Gilbert Hernandezs Palomar (Fantagraphics, 1989).–Philip Charles Crawford, Essex High School, Essex Junction, VT
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A good deal of the scary-story genre relies on babes in the woods and creatures waiting to pounce on them. From Little Red Riding Hood to Hansel and Gretel to Dorothy in Oz to Frodo's trek to Mordor, monsters lying in wait have given children nightmares for as long as such stories have been told. Charles Burns's new graphic novel, Black Hole, offers a variation on that theme: a coming-of-age nightmare in which the children no longer get the nightmares, they give them.

Published this month as a novel, with a fantastic cover designed by the author, Black Hole has been an ongoing comic book serial since 1995. Readers unaccustomed to the subculture of comic book shops might know Burns as the house artist for the Believer magazine or from his work for Time, the New Yorker and Iggy Pop albums. Comics fans will know him as a charter artist from RAW, the Art Spiegelman imprint that published Burns's first cartoon masterpiece, Hard-Boiled Defective Stories. In Black Hole, Burns's careers in the comics subculture and the wider world of pop culture merge for the most deeply felt work of his career.

The story takes place in Seattle in the 1970s, where Burns spent his own teenage years, and our sympathies to him if the tale he delivers here is autobiographical. This is not Cameron Crowe's Seattle of peppy coffee houses and space needles but the Pacific Northwest of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" and the sonic gloom found in the music of Eliot Smith or the Screaming Trees. Black Hole covers the high school years of a group of kids who find themselves catching a venereal disease known as "the teen plague." After sex with an infected partner, they deform and mutate. The infected person might develop a tail, like Eliza, who encourages lovers to grab it during sex. Or there's Rob, who develops a second mouth on his lower neck. Some can hide it, but others turn into freakish social pariahs and join a teen leper colony in the woods. "It was like a horrible game of tag," writes Burns. "Once you were tagged, you were 'it' forever."

Chris is a typical victim: a straight "A" student from a good home. At a house party, she drinks and has sex outside with Rob, who gives her the plague. Days later, when she is skinny-dipping with friends, her skin peels loose like a reptile's. As much as Chris appears to fall from grace, this girl next door enjoys alcohol, exhibitionism and risky sex. She feels a stifling boredom in her overachieving, flat suburban world. After catching "the bug," Chris falls in love with Rob and moves in with other plague victims. But the same jealousies and rivalries that made them outcasts in high school develop again within their plague community, and soon passions lead to murder. The killer, living deeper in the woods than the other kids, hangs broken dolls from trees. If they are an obvious piece of symbolism, the dolls are also effectively frightening. It's in drawing them and a menagerie of warped faces that Burns makes use of his particular genius for the grotesque.

Black Hole reads like a downer dream one might get while suffering from the flu, and Burns is not interested in making his story work outside that dream. When reality intrudes, such as when Chris's mom realizes that her daughter needs help, the reader gets shaken out of the torpor long enough to ask questions: Why aren't more parents doing something about this? Where's the panic in discovering your boy has two mouths? But ignoring those questions is part of the point: Burns properly keeps his kids in their own angst-ridden world, that space in life that every teen is convinced no adult will ever understand.

Longtime fans who know Burns from Big Baby or Hard-Boiled Defective Stories may miss the ironic humor-horror of those earlier works. Here, Burns builds up to a comic-book symphony of dread and self-loathing about that scarring experience called "growing up." Burns's art is thick with black ink -- so much so that even daylight scenes sop with pools of shadow and dark ooze. His kids drag clouds of despair with them. Often drawn in photo negatives, Black Hole depicts a world in which the white lines of order hold back the nocturnal depths of emotion, but just barely.

Anyone who has driven the lonely highways of Washington state and seen the eerie moonlit silhouettes of pine trees lined up against the road knows that the instinct is to drive faster, to press the pedal harder, as if hidden eyes are watching your every move. Don't listen to Charles Burns; this is where he wants you to pull over.

Reviewed by Ben Schwartz
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. The prodigiously talented Burns hit the comics scene in the '80s via Raw magazine, wielding razor-sharp, ironic-retro graphics. Over the years his work has developed a horrific subtext perpetually lurking beneath the mundane suburban surface. In the dense, unnerving Black Hole,Burns combines realism—never a concern for him before—and an almost convulsive surrealism. The setting is Seattle during the early '70s. A sexually transmitted disease, the "bug," is spreading among teenagers. Those who get it develop bizarre mutations—sometimes subtle, like a tiny mouth at the base of one boy's neck, and sometimes obvious and grotesque. The most visibly deformed victims end up living as homeless campers in the woods, venturing into the streets only when they have to, shunned by normal society. The story follows two teens, Keith and Chris, as they get the bug. Their dreams and hallucinations—made of deeply disturbing symbolism merging sexuality and sickness—are a key part of the tale. The AIDS metaphor is obvious, but the bug also amplifies already existing teen emotions and the wrenching changes of puberty. Burns's art is inhumanly precise, and he makes ordinary scenes as creepy as his nightmare visions of a world where intimacy means a life worse than death. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Burns' Hard-Boiled Defective Stories (1988), Skin Deep (1992), and Big Baby (2000) are pretty weird, but satiric elements keep them from being disturbing. Black Hole isn't satiric, seems emblematic, and is definitely disturbing. In a middle-class suburb in Washington State in the seventies, what the teenagers call the bug is spreading among them, physically marking its hosts. Eventually, the afflicted kids disappear from school. When Keith wanders away in the woods from his pot-smoking pals, he discovers a tent community of disappeared kids. Each has become more marked; for instance, one boy's face has become decidedly catlike. Keith has a crush on his biology lab-partner, Chris, but since sex with him after a party, she's fixated on Rob, who has a tiny mouth on his throat. They fall in love, and Keith is desolate until he meets Eliza, who has a short, hairless tail, a second time. Both young-lover pairs are ill-starred. All have horrible nightmares, Eliza is abused before Keith meets her, Chris has to run away, Rob is attacked by one of the tent kids, and Keith leaves town implicated in a mass murder. Is the bug "punishment" for sex (of which there's plenty, frankly rendered)? Maybe, but the tent-kids may be virgins; it's not indicated that they aren't. And at the end, Keith isn't showing his bug stigmata, and Chris may have lost hers. As always, Burns' gorgeous high-contrast art deepens the atmospheric darkness, and this time he really gets under the skin. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037542380X
• ISBN 13: 9780375423802
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368