A palpable tension is generated between the ice-cold, hard-edged, clean look of the art and the warm, odorous, messy organic processes that it depicts. Structurally and visually, Black Hole is a tour de force. Proving the author has a wry and sardonic sense of humor, one of these ogre-like monstrosities is a former chess club geek. (As if it weren't hard enough to get a date.) With a new physical taxonomy for labeling and ostracizing "weirdos," the most hideously deformed flee school and home altogether, setting up camps in the woods outside the city. One character grows a mouth on his chest. Some sprout horns, others become full-on, rotted-flesh zombies.
When the story begins, a sexually transmitted affliction that causes a smorgasbord of physical deformities-from dermatological oddities to genetic mutations to leprotic abominations-is starting to spread among the teen population. The subject matter is not all that dissimilar from, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High-except there's no gratuitous nudity, cheap jokes, or Spiccoli. Like typical high schoolers, their symbiotic existence is defined by a Darwinian struggle for social standing among their peers-they are concerned primarily with being cool, fitting in, or, at the very least, being left alone their bodies and minds are hostage to their pituitary and reproductive systems they have crushes and infatuations they feel love, lust, jealousy, and betrayal they smoke pot, drop acid, get drunk, and have sex. This graphic novel holds its own as a novel in the literary sense, plumbing emotional depths with complexity, subtlety, and multilayered symbolism.īlack Hole relates the trials and tribulations of a group of high school students in 1970s suburban Seattle. The final and most impressive quality, revealed only after the hallucinatory narrative takes hold, is the writing.
The second is Burns's eminently recognizable artwork-swaths of solid black chiseled with white, impeccably rendered, like woodcuts printed with pure oil-each page is a revelation, and, at over 300 pages long, it's no wonder it took ten years to complete. The first is the appearance of the book itself, a hefty and striking hardcover. But spend a little more time poking around, and several qualities of this amazing work will prove that initial impression radically incomplete. The pages, after all, are filled with freaks, violence, sex, drugs, and depravity. With only a cursory flip through the pages, Charles Burns's epic graphic novel Black Hole might seem to be a schlocky horror comic with antecedents such as EC's Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror from the fifties, or the gleefully crude and lascivious underground "comix" movement of the sixties.
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