Two Reviews of Burns's Black Hole / Geof Huth, R. W. Watkins

Because a film version is due out soon (not to mention the fact that a first edition would simply seem empty without some Charles Burns)...

Two Reviews of Burns’s Black Hole

1.

The Indelible Stain of Adolescence

Geof Huth

(Originally presented as an entry at Huth’s blog, dbqp: visualizing poetics, Thursday, July 20, 2006)

When I first found Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole, it was sitting sedately in a Barnes and Noble bookstore trying to pass itself off as a novel. Maybe ten copies sat there among the other new novels, all of these segregated from the rest of the novels so that readers eager for something new could easily pick up one of these. The stark black and white cover captured my attention, especially because of the bold red bar crossing the middle of the cover and obscuring the eyes of an anonymous girl. When I opened the book to read the opening lines—which is how I always evaluate a book new to me—I was immediately struck by the fact that this was a graphic novel in the clothing of serious literature. And I thought that maybe this placement of this book was a sign that the graphic novel had made some inroads into our culture.

I didn’t buy the book then, since I was at that time temporarily opposed to the purchase of new books, but when I returned in a couple of weeks all the books were gone and the store clerks said each had been returned. No-one had purchased a single copy of the book. The graphic novel had not made any cultural progress (at least not in this store); it had merely made the attempt. And if I had believed that the graphic novel was accruing some scent of acceptability now, I was disabused of that when I sat down to read the book last Sunday. I read slowly, I read pictures as well as words, and this was a large book,* so it took me a few hours to read it. While I read, my extended family occasionally asked me what I was reading. When they realized it was a graphic novel, they made fun of me for reading picture books.† What did I care? I was enjoying the story, which means I was enjoying the telling of it.

Charles Burns, Spread near the Beginning of Black Hole (2005)

The narrative of Black Hole jerks backward and forward via the voices and perspectives of a handful of 1970s high-school students, particularly those of Keith (a half-nebbish infatuated with the comely Chris) and Chris (a popular girl attending the same school as Chris).‡ The story is not a clear narrative from A to B. In fact, the story starts in the middle of a small epidemic, where a sexually transmitted disease (which appears to affect only adolescents) changes the physical appearance of the infected teen. In most cases, these transformations are dramatic, creating horrible disfigurations that sometimes make the infected person resemble some kind of monster. Other manifestations of the disease include goiter-like growths, an extra mouth nestled in a neck, a tail, or even small pedicles of skin that flap beneath an arm. Sometimes, these disfigurations are small, and the adolescents continue to live in their suburban Seattle community. Those most horribly mutated, however, spend most of their time hiding in the woods.

Charles Burns, Chris' Memories Recalled in Black Hole (2005)

These transformations, of course, replicate the physical metamorphosis that accompanies any adolescence, and it is therefore appropriate that the first full-page illustration of the book is of a frog (an amphibian that once was a tadpole), lying on its back and in the middle of being dissected. Upon some reflection, I suppose this novel is a multi-focal noir Bildungsroman and horror story. It recalls the heyday of EC Comics with its almost ghoulish story and art. And the entire story is told in a teenage American English demotic that is realistic, unpoetic, and effective. But what makes the story work for me is Burns’ visual vocabulary.

Charles Burns, Chris' Later Memories Recalled in Black Hole (2005)

Burns plays with the conventions of comics from the opening few pages, where in one remarkable spread a series of six concentric circles, divided into four separate vertical panels, presages the themes and narrative of the entire book. In some memory sequences—all of which include panels outlined in a wavy line that recalls water—Burns stuffs more visual information on a page than can easily be processed at once. And each of the sections of the book begins with a small illustration swimming in a sea of perfect black. These illustrations are usually vaginal or phallic, and the opening micro-illustration (which precedes the illustration of the frog) succeeds in being both at once. Most importantly, the book is dark, suffused with black. Black takes up most of the page almost everywhere, and when it doesn’t (as when Chris meets up with his friend Eliza again or when Chris contemplates her future while sitting on a beach) the contrary whiteness of the scenes clearly registers as a sign of happiness and hope.

Charles Burns, Chris Prepares for the Future in Black Hole (2005)

Charles Burns originally created this story as a series of twelve comic books serialized over the course of ten years, but the story holds together as if it were written in the course of one harrowing month of creativity. He tells the story with panache and reserve, allowing parts of the story to remain unexplained, including the source of the virus spreading through the town. The virus is simply the Hitchcockian MacGuffin of the story. It starts the wheels of the narrative moving, so we don’t really need to know anything else about it. We don’t even need to know why the adults in the town seem not to know of this plague, even though their children are disappearing, even though their children understand what’s happening to them. In the end, this is a simple story of the necessary trials of adolescence, which the characters must go through in order to become the able near-adults they almost are by the end of the book.

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Burns, Charles. Black Hole. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005.

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* The book is unpaginated, and the cataloging-in-publication data unhelpfully notes that the book has pages and is centimeters tall without giving numbers for either—but I have discovered that the book is 352 pages in length.

† Of course, I love reading picture books, and I think the world is now producing among the best picture books of all time.

‡ An English major such as I am has to think of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying at this point, but the narrative voices change hardly at all from narrator to narrator. What changes most radically are the points of view.

2.

Inside the Black Hole

R. W. Watkins

(Originally published in The Morning Dew Review No. 2, 2006)

Black Hole No. 11 (comic: Dec, 2003)

Charles Burns, story and artwork; 32 pp.

($4.95 US / $6.95 Canada; Fantagraphics, 7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle, WA, 98115)

Charles Burns’s most ambitious project to date is proving to be his most exquisite, groundbreaking, and (possibly) autobiographical work so far. Recently nominated for seven Harvey Awards, the mini-series Black Hole is like the X-Men stripped of their powers and consigned to the American Pacific Northwest of the 1970s, as plotted by William Burroughs, with an imaginary soundtrack by Todd Rundgren. Sure, Burns’s Big Baby strip was more definitive of his overall style (given its black humour and iconographically loaded accessibility), and his scattered El Borbah stories were more outright and hideously funny, but the sheer magnitude of the impeccable black and white imagery and nonlineally unfolding plot lends a sophistication to this comic that is rare in any literary and/or visual arts medium these days.

Briefly, for those completely unfamiliar, Black hole revolves around the angst-ridden high school students of an Oregon or Washington coastal town circa 1974. Besides the usual exaggerated concerns of adolescence (sexual [in]adequacy, family vs. peer-group conformity, drugs and alcohol, a perceived no-future), the relatively large cast of this title have to deal with a sexually transmitted disease that manifests itself in physical mutations somewhat resembling those of a most extreme form of leprosy; the stricken even take refuge in small forest ‘colonies’ on the outskirts of town. Each issue tends to focus on a different subplot and set of characters, and only now, towards the end of the projected 12- or 13-issue run, are these subplots and characters beginning to intertwine, thereby gradually developing protagonism and a clearer, more traditional sense of narrative.

Issue #11 offers up two new ‘chapters’ (for lack of a better term) in the dark saga, ‘Rick The Dick’ and ‘Driving South’. The former opens with a scene of unmitigated retribution, in which one afflicted young man, Dave, while buying a bucket of chicken at one’s typical KFC, forces an antagonising, studly young jock-type to his knees at gunpoint and spits into his ordered-open mouth. “Have a nice life,” utters Dave sardonically, as he departs the restaurant for the ostracistic safety of the wooded outskirts, only to instigate a more intense and climactic tragedy shortly upon meeting his friend Rick there.

The latter chapter lacks these explicit, sudden plot developments, but compensates for them with attributes more typical of Burns’s palette: an inexplicable and life-threatening menace, apocalyptic landscapes, confused youth on the run (from themselves to a large degree), and the suspenseful development of plot through slow-moving flashback. The result is a vignette of both internal and external horror, dreamlike narrative, and southbound getaway; a road movie of the mind and body which resembles nothing so much as a combination of David Lynch’s Wild At Heart and Jim Morrison’s ‘The Celebration of The Lizard’—complete with The Doors on the car radio and a girl with a reptilian tail.

Black Hole is a beautifully grotesque examination of the dark side of ’70s youth culture, an often surreal comic epic in the traditions of Lynch, Cronenberg, Laird Koenig, and even Lee Ranaldo’s contributions to the Sonic Youth songbook. In fact, for my money (and in spite of its cold-molasses delivery—only eleven issues have seen the light of day thus far in its 9-year existence), this series is the best on the manga-saturated, pubescent-targeted market today. Seriously, folks. Each issue is a twilight dive into the murky depths of human fear and contemporary suburban apocalypse, and is worth waiting for like a total eclipse of a dementia-inducing moon. Rating: **** (out of 5)

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One last note: Is it just me, or is the young lady on the front cover of the Black Hole graphic novel (see above) truly reminiscent of Elizabeth ‘Tippy’ Walker circa 1963, around the time she was making The World of Henry Orient...? (Hi, Elizabeth. I hope you’re no longer mad at me. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings....—Rob)