In the story young people begin to develop physical abnormalities as a result of developing sexual desire for someone, or actually having sex with someone. Four characters take center stage, Chris, Rob, Keith and Eliza, though a once bullied boy named Dave also plays a central role. The story is set in one summer post-high-school-graduation from a Seattle high school in the late seventies, when Burns himself would have been graduating from a Seattle high school. The artwork is amazing, and the disruptive and discontinuous representation of chronology, of time, is innovative and consistent with the disruption of adolescence Burns represents. I was creeped out about it in an initial reading 6 or 7 years ago, but in close readings with summer and fall 2016 classes I began to see some warmth and compassion running through it. If a “black hole” is the effect of gravity pulling so hard on a site in space that light cannot get out, the black hole of this particular summer of sex and drugs looks at times like it is a vortex you could not recover from. Ho hum, eh? It is also one of the best graphic novels and novels of any kind of the new century.
To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin…Ĭharles Burns’s Black Hole is a strange and somewhat disturbing graphic novel depicting some teens engaging in drinking, smoking pot, and sexual acts. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself-the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape.Īs 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. There's no turning back.Īs 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. 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. We learn from the out-set that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact.
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