Black Hole

Sep 07, 2008 Jessica rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: bad teenagers

Shelves: leetle-boys, love-and-other-indoor-sports, kind-of-depressing, people-turn-to-creatures, wee-ones-and-bored-teenagers

Well, the art was very lovely, and there were a lot of points at which I was like, "How does his brain manufacture this shit??" which is kind of the ultimate for art in one way, isn't it? But I do wish this had been around when I myself was a bad teenager, because I'm sure it would've affected me a lot more then. Burns does get at some extremely dark and real stuff about the horrific experience of adolescence, particularly that bizarre combo of fear, curiosity, and nihilism that drives so much s...more

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Apr 22, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: graphic-novels, merkins

I was caught up in that lamentable period of American cinema (has it stopped?) where implausibly attractive actors in their late twenties pretend to be nubile teenage virgins hiding from serial killers or participating in leery innuendo-laden unfunny antics with ex-sitcom stars. Oddly enough this phenomenon was helped along by Wes Craven’s Scream, a film that satirised all the clichés of a genre it single-handedly repopularised—the layers of irony gradually falling away until the reliably bankab...more I was caught up in that lamentable period of American cinema (has it stopped?) where implausibly attractive actors in their late twenties pretend to be nubile teenage virgins hiding from serial killers or participating in leery innuendo-laden unfunny antics with ex-sitcom stars. Oddly enough this phenomenon was helped along by Wes Craven’s Scream, a film that satirised all the clichés of a genre it single-handedly repopularised—the layers of irony gradually falling away until the reliably bankable properties of cheap sexism and hack writing were fully reinstated at the top of the box office. Where they belong.

This collected comic strip dates form the early nineties and beyond so can be excused for leaping on any sexy-teenagers-and-the-supernatural bandwagons that have popped up in recent times. My central problem with Black Hole is my weariness at having sexy American teenage brats as protagonists, especially those undergoing coming-of-age experiences with an added macabre aspect. Especially if the sympathetic characters are overly sexy teenagers drawn to look like actors in their twenties. I have no time for this shit. The teenagers in American films resemble no teenagers I have ever met in my short life. They might as well be bepimpled alien creatures with tails and horny schnozzles.

Still, despite this bulging bias, I found Black Hole compelling for its structural cleverness, its striking plunder of the dark imagination, the uneasy union of the erotic and perverse. I still resented how the sexy chick escaped with only a partial tear down her spine, and distanced herself snootily from her fellow freaks, but those are my own armchair issues. (I suppose it makes a change to have a graphic novel where the nerd isn’t the hero). As for the dialogue, it clearly escaped from a teen movie of some description, but the drawings redeemed the whole shebang. Hopefully no movie will ever be attempted.

Edit, following admonishment from friend:

I have been informed by an absolutely furious friend this GN has more in common with fifties horror B-movies and ye olde pulp comics than the nineties teen-slasher parodies mentioned above. There also isn’t really a hero (even though the sideburns guy is sort of a hero), so apologies for that misleading piece of shoddy reviewage. Also, “reviewage” isn’t really a word, and only highlights my own desperate ploys for lexical originality in these hastily typed literary judgements. And finally, the forthcoming film should be written/directed by David Cronenberg or someone of his ilk, not written by Neil Gaiman and directed by some other geezer. I apologise for the distress this misinformation has caused. P.S. I also have issues with sexy beauty-queen freaks. Thanks.(less)

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Jan 28, 2008 Darcy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: graphic-fiction-and-non-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The "high school" story is pretty well established, and in many ways Black Hole doesn't deviate from the genre standards. Pair of star-crossed lovers? Check. The Nerdy vs. the Cool? Check. Drugs, alcohol, and awkward sex? Check. Teen angst directed mostly at the parents who ruin their lives? Well, that one would work if any adults lasted in this book for more than four panels. But the thing is, if you are going to have a teen plague that distorts infected bodies so that kids grow tails, bumps, h...more The "high school" story is pretty well established, and in many ways Black Hole doesn't deviate from the genre standards. Pair of star-crossed lovers? Check. The Nerdy vs. the Cool? Check. Drugs, alcohol, and awkward sex? Check. Teen angst directed mostly at the parents who ruin their lives? Well, that one would work if any adults lasted in this book for more than four panels. But the thing is, if you are going to have a teen plague that distorts infected bodies so that kids grow tails, bumps, horns, or webbing, then having adults in your story kind of gets in the way of . . . everything. This is a story that persistently resists any kind of resolution, and it seems to suggest that adults are simply that--resolution. Adults are what teens become when they settle down into a life that attempts to eliminate through acceptance or rejection the odd and the grotesque and no one in this book is quite there yet; Chris ambiguously ends up floating in the Sound, and while Eliza and Keith have "escaped," their dream of finding a safe place is brittle at best. Sure, the desert is bright, suffused with the kind of white spaces that are noticeably absent in the panels depicting Seattle, but it is a brightness that is fairly empty. And besides, Keith and Eliza's hotel room is disturbingly dark. Sure, they've found each other, but Chris's mantra that Rob could be everything for her isn't guaranteed to work for Keith and Eliza.

I used to teach this in my freshman composition class--I thought it would be a good way to talk about the transition from being a high school teenager to being a college adult. I was very surprised by the reactions to this text: 1.) disgust/dismissal and 2.) the majority of the students read this as a warning against teen sex and drug abuse. Huh? Part of me thinks that the average middle class kid is so conditioned to think that drugs, sex, and alcohol are bad, bad, bad (in and of themselves), that this was mostly a knee-jerk reaction. But the oddity of the book seems to be that you can only really appreciate the idea of transition in the novel (the movement from narrator to narrator, the shift from cool kid to outcast, the amphibians littered throughout the text, or going from "normal" to "mutant") if you've already experienced that transition. Or, alternatively, if you are at the fringes of the social structure described in the novel--if you are the "weirdo" kid in high school, rather than a Chris, Keith, or Rob type. That said, I think it was really worthwhile teaching this text to my freshmen--I think it is the kind of novel that will stay with them (not to mention get passed around in a "I had to read this for college" sort of way). Eventually quite a few of them will have a headslap moment in which they finally figure out that the book is a lot less about the consequences of teen sex, and a lot more about the consequences of growing up. (less)

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Jun 21, 2007 Marissa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: comix, horror

In truth, Black Hole should probably only rate three stars, but it's such an impressive effort and intriguing concept I'm giving it four. Stylistically, Burns' art is extremely intricate and has a very nice noir quality to it. I have a soft spot for any really well-done horror comic book. Like Adrian Tomine, Burns has obviously taken plenty of tricks from Clowes and Crumb. The strange thing about his art style is that even though it is very slick and eye-catching at first, the more you look at i...more

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Apr 09, 2008 Jason Pettus rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary, comics, hipster, smart-nerdy, weird, dark, personal-favorite

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

It's definitely true, that although I personally am a big fan of so-called "comic books for grown-ups," I rarely review such projects here at CCLaP, for a variety of deliberate reasons: because of the medium's sketchy reputation with the public at large, for example, because of CCLaP's emphasis on bei...more (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

It's definitely true, that although I personally am a big fan of so-called "comic books for grown-ups," I rarely review such projects here at CCLaP, for a variety of deliberate reasons: because of the medium's sketchy reputation with the public at large, for example, because of CCLaP's emphasis on being a destination truly for adults (as opposed to a destination for extra-smart adolescents), because of so many such "graphic novels" barely qualifying as reviewable literature in the first place. (So in other words, many of these projects are not bad per se, but are merely not substantial enough to have a lengthy analytical essay written about them.) Ah, but I'm making an exception today for writer and illustrator Charles Burns, again for a variety of deliberate reasons -- because I've been following his work since the early 1980s (originally through the pages of RAW magazine while in college), because he does lots of other interesting things besides just comic books (he was the set designer, for example, of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's controversial 1992 production of The Nutcracker, and is also the full-time cover artist for lit-crit magazine "The Believer"). Most importantly, though, Burns' creations over the decades have mostly been a far cry from the usual navel-gazing whining and postmodern superhero discourses of most "alternative comics;" he is instead a master of the grotesque and macabre, the unsettling and weird, a bastard love-child of David Lynch and Walt Disney, with a little Robert Crumb and Hieronymus Bosch thrown in for good measure.

And thus do we come to Burns' magnum opus, 2005's Black Hole, actually written over the course of a decade and originally published serially through hipster comics outfit Fantagraphics. (DISCLOSURE: As is the case with many small presses mentioned here, I am personal friends with several people associated with Fantagraphics; it makes me pre-inclined to like their projects more than other critics do, something you should be aware of when reading this review.) Like many of his other projects, Black Hole is a "body horror" tale, in which otherwise normal people slowly mutate into horrible freaks over the course of the plot; instead of the pulpy noir tales of many of his most well-known past projects, however, Burns here tackles a much more complex and down-to-earth story, using his creepy visual style to metaphorically evoke terrors which are usually only psychological in nature. And indeed, I don't think it's any coincidence that the dust jacket of this book features dual illustrations of Burns himself, one from the 1970s and one from our times; although not literally an autobiographical tale, you do get the sense that Burns is working out at least a few personal issues from his own youth here, using an otherwise fantastical tale to intimately explore many of the emotional subjects that come with being a teen.

The story is simple enough -- it is the late '70s, and a mysterious new sexually-transmitted disease is starting to affect the high-schoolers of suburban Seattle; but instead of being an AIDS-style killer that eats away from the inside out, this virus actually attacks a person's exterior, manifesting as a series of random genetic mutations depending on who you are but otherwise leaving the inside of the body healthy. And since these are very prominent mutations for the most part (mysterious tiny mouths appearing on people's throats, bodies covered in rotting boils), it soon becomes quite apparent to all which teens are sexually active ones and which aren't, leading not only to a moral panic among the parents but a whole new system of class stratification among the high-schoolers themselves. Burns' 400-page tome, then, is a detailed and complicated look at the lives of half a dozen of these suburban teens, as well as the dark milieu they inhabit -- including a dangerous shantytown in the outlying woods where many of the teens relocate after becoming family outcasts, as well as the various complicated relationships these post-outbreak kids all have with each other in their little self-contained new society.

That's probably what's most interesting about Black Hole, to tell you the truth; because when all is said and done, what this book is mostly about is the natural awkwardness and alienation that most people go through during their teen years, and especially about the endless ways such teens hurt and disappoint all the people around them because of a whole series of romantic misunderstandings and miscalculations. And the reason this is so interesting, I think, is because Burns shows how it's almost more efficient to tackle such a subject through the bizarre metaphor of sexually transmitted genetic mutations, rather than a traditional plot; to cite just one great example, there's a sex scene in this book involving a vestigial tail that explains the erotic-awfulness / awful-eroticism of young sex in a better way than a thousand John Hughes movies added together. This is what I mean when I say that Black Hole is both autobiographical and not, and why I think it's one of the rare graphic novels worth reviewing here; because although the story is definitely one that can only be told in comic-book form, it still rings emotionally true from the very core of the plot, in a way that straight-ahead dramas about teen angst often fail to do. It's a big book, one that takes a surprisingly long time to actually get through (welcome news for regular comics readers, I know), but certainly one that is worth the effort, and one I highly recommend to those who only tackle one or two graphic novels a year.

Out of 10: 9.3(less)

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Feb 04, 2008 Cathy rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Adventurous readers; not for the squeamish

Recommended to Cathy by: Thompson

Shelves: horror

I don't usually read graphic novels -- especially not gruesome graphic novels about teenagers with bizarre sexually transmitted deformities. But I loved this! Well, "loved" might be the wrong term, but I thought it was incredibly compelling.

With some graphic novels, I've found that the text distracts from the art, or vice versa, but Black Hole is seamless. The art and words equally carry the story. And that art is stunning -- the book looks like one long, detailed woodcut.

For a sometimes graphi...more

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Aug 20, 2007 Punk rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: graphic-novel

Graphic Novel. It's called the bug. It's a plague, transmitted by bodily fluids, and seemingly ignored by the world at large. In fact, the world of Black Hole is a world almost entirely populated by teenagers, who are the only ones affected by the disease. As in Peanuts, parents are distant figures, rarely seen, and speaking another language when they do appear. Kids get sick, start to mutate, and run away from home. Many of them end up in the woods where a small camp of mutants has formed. No o...more Graphic Novel. It's called the bug. It's a plague, transmitted by bodily fluids, and seemingly ignored by the world at large. In fact, the world of Black Hole is a world almost entirely populated by teenagers, who are the only ones affected by the disease. As in Peanuts, parents are distant figures, rarely seen, and speaking another language when they do appear. Kids get sick, start to mutate, and run away from home. Many of them end up in the woods where a small camp of mutants has formed. No one seems to miss them or try to help them.

Obviously a metaphor for AIDS -- less obviously one for simple adolescence -- when it comes down to it, these are just stories about kids who are growing up scared and alone, and can't see far enough ahead in their lives to think to protect themselves against something that could kill them. Every minor disaster in a teenager's life can seem like the end of their world so they've got no perspective when they meet the real thing. This is normally where parents or other authority figures would step in and offer guidance, but there's no such thing in Black Hole, which is maybe the most depressing part of it.

In keeping with the story, the artwork is flat, black, and razor sharp, with repeating visual themes and enough vagina imagery to make Freud spin in his grave -- the first page is nothing but a white slit surrounded by black. That'll happen again and again. The book is strictly black and white, working in the negative, with most panels white on black instead of the reverse, as if Burns carved out each figure from the nothingness that surrounded it. It's beautiful and awful, like Mexican folk art filled with devils and death. My one complaint about the book is that neither the text nor the art gave me enough information to easily distinguish the male characters, and I often had a hard time recognizing them. The two main boys were Rob and Kevin, and thanks to their similar haircuts, I didn't realize they were two different kids until I was halfway through. They were both after the same two girls, how was I supposed to know they weren't the same guy? So maybe a little character development was in order, still, it was marvelous and horrible to read, with my favorite character getting a happy, if not entirely believable, ending.

Four stars, not because I "really liked it" -- it's too painful to enjoy on that level -- but it's an amazing work of art with a story that stands up to it.(less)

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Mar 22, 2009 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars

I learned: don't sleep with people who have tails or throat-vaginas that whisper truths in the night.

That's pretty unfair--but I half-expected to find this book falling down one of two critical paths: a) the literalization of body/sex angst would become outright silly or b) the body/sex angst would be altogether too adolescent. (My trusted goodreads commadres Montambo and Jessica not-T situated the book in the "b" pile, here and here, respectively.) Yet I found myself pretty engrossed, in (yes,...more

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Apr 02, 2008 Imogen rated it 4 of 5 stars

This reminds me so much, in so many superficial ways, of Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, except with a slightly less amorphous (more morphous!) plot. I read it in a night, which was nice, and it made me feel like I was on acid a bunch of times, but overall I don't feel a hundred percent fulfilled with it as a story.

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May 16, 2008 J rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: comics

When I read a short review of Charles Burns’ new graphic novel, Black Hole, the description of the work it proffered (quoting from the book’s jacket: “the mid-1970’s…a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact.”) made me wonder if the man ever wrote about anything else. When I later read that he’d spend the better part of the last ten years writing and publishing this work in a serial format, I realized that I’d probably read portions of it over that p...more When I read a short review of Charles Burns’ new graphic novel, Black Hole, the description of the work it proffered (quoting from the book’s jacket: “the mid-1970’s…a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact.”) made me wonder if the man ever wrote about anything else. When I later read that he’d spend the better part of the last ten years writing and publishing this work in a serial format, I realized that I’d probably read portions of it over that period.

Which is not to say that apocalyptic scenarios involving teenagers and sex isn’t something of a theme that runs through Burns’ work. In a world in which authors routinely retell the same story, this is not a particularly distressing thing. It only means that unless you share the author’s particular obsession or bent, a little can go a long way.

Nevertheless, when I happened to walk past Black Hole at the library with the bright yellow “NEW” sticker on the cover and realized that it was just sitting there, no one was snatching it up, I did exactly that. Clocking in at 368 hard back novel-sized pages, Black Hole continues to demonstrate that the graphic novel field is a rich field in which only the topsoil is regularly tilled by leotard clad fanboy books of the Marvel sort. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl is all full of hot air in declaiming that this art form will stagnate and slide down hill in the aftermath of the blistering comet that was (and is) Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan.

(As a side note, Ware’s Acme Novelty Library, while it appears at first to be a disconnected collection of random pieces from his own comic, is in fact further proof of exactly how much open space there is in the realm of graphic novels. They have as much room to grow as novels have, but have only stuck about one foot into that particular hokey-pokey. Ware’s collectibles collectors in that latest work are presented to us in mostly unconnected vignettes, the sum definitely larger than the parts, as we watch a friendship, and one collector’s mind, disintegrate completely. As loathsome as one character is, flashbacks to his childhood often have that bitter tang of sympathy you sometimes feel for monsters.)

As the jacket quote goes from above, Black Hole takes us back to the 1970s in suburban Seattle. For some time at the book’s beginning, a plague has been working through the local teenagers, passed through sexual contact, which mutates their bodies in peculiar and different ways. One girl grows a tail, a boy’s face melts into just a skull shape with eyes sunken back into the sockets, bulbous growths develop, tentacles, and other such mutations.

We follow through this story mainly a quartet of teenagers. Keith is a young boy who falls in love with a girl named Chris in his biology class. Chris is in love with Rob who she meets at a party. Rob is in love with Chris. Keith later falls for Eliza (the girl with the tail). Rob, of all the characters, has the most haunting of deformities, and perhaps one of the easiest to hide. Just at the base of his throat is a small mouth, with teeth, tongue, and a tiny, tiny voice. We find, through the course of this book that the mouth speaks as if in prophecy, the various little things it says being repeated much later on in the story, at moments where those words become clear.

And there are moments like that all through the work, little phrases said by one character that turn up again in unrelated places, the book echoing constantly. We start about halfway into the tale and then fill in the rest through flashback and as we do, things said, lines that appeared just filler dialogue take on deeper, darker meanings.

While the clear metaphor for AIDS runs through the story, Burns’ interests aren’t simply for drawing clear parallels to our own society in such a specific way, but focuses more on the idea of infection as a kind of social ostracism. Once infected, the teenagers aren’t rushed by their parents to the hospital and no one at any point in the story speaks of a cure. The one sadly amusing parallel that does turn up is when Chris, after having become infected and gone to live out in the woods where others like her live, wakes an old school friend at home to use her shower. As they sit and catch up, Chris is repulsed by a Halloween photo of her friend and her boyfriend with Bowie make up on, Bowie being too strange and transgressive for some at that point, even for a girl who molts and sheds her entire skin.

Burns’ story then is a nightmarish vision of high school and early college, on conformity and deliberate isolation, and a sideways exploration of the pain we all suffer in growing up and growing apart. It is also a tail of doomed love, of psychotic obsession, and a recollection of that heady drug induced decade where all the promises of the sixties’ flower children turned twisted and repulsive.

Relying heavily on dark lines and shadows, Burns’ art has a kind of expressive broody quality that quickly moves into phantasmagoric. There is a purity in his lines and his framing though that grips you whether it’s mere outlines in shadow or fully detailed renditions of a tent in the deep woods or the caverns the plague has carved through one boy’s face. There are pictures exuding an intense realism (the endpapers’ run of yearbook style pictures is one instantly recognizable page) and others that seemed carved on a chimerical woodblock of nightmare and bad acid. It is indeed a talented man that can pose a naked tailed woman in just such postures as to be still arousing, then turn around and draw a mutant hand holding a chicken bone bit in two with such a revolting degree of specificity.

Burns’ earlier work may indeed be prone to the ridiculous and the absurd. Black Hole, on the other hand, is a work of mordant sympathy that hooks our hearts rather piercingly, alternating between the grotesque and the tragically commonplace. From its opening pages of a frog dissection to its desperately quiet and strangely beautiful yet suicidal conclusion, Burns captures the distilled essence of teenage heartbreak and fear and renders up a work that demands to be read and reread and reread again. Black Hole will suck you in.(less)

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May 04, 2008 Stephen rated it 3 of 5 stars

While I am usually a sucker for underground graphic novels and indie comics, this one, for many reasons, is not one of my favorites.

For starters, Burns gets a lot of the power for this book from his grotesque, clinical illustrations of the disease that affects the young population in this town. His graphic depictions of ripping skin, boil-covered faces, and disfigured teenagers are meant to underscore the horror of the disease, but they really only served as distractions from his point.

And that...more

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Mar 18, 2008 Gphatty rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Burns is an amazing artist. His ability to convey time and emotion with his art in unbelievably good. I would almost recommend this book to anyone that needs proof of the power graphic novels can have . . .

but this story will probably be too disturbing for many people. A virus that gives people disfiguring mutations. Said virus is communicable through sex. All the main characters are teens dealing with identity crises, sex, and drugs. The story goes from frank and unflinching to horrific and gha...more

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Feb 15, 2008 Hillary rated it 5 of 5 stars

Jared and I have been discussing whether this graphic novel merits four or five stars. On the one hand, it's still not quite up there with truly great works of literature. On the other, it's about as good as it gets for this medium. It ends abruptly, without a true wrapping up, but, hey, so do a lot of good books. Mostly, it reminds me of Dan Clowes's _Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron_ in its dreamlike but indelible images. I laughed when I opened the book and saw a drawing of a slit on the firs...more

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Sep 03, 2007 Christopher rated it 5 of 5 stars

About 12 years ago I pre-ordered a copy of Charles Burns' collected Black Hole comics sight unseen. I'd never read any of his books before, but I was really into reading alternative comics, especially big fat ones with beginnings, middles and ends. You know; real stories. I'd had enough of reading continuous, never-ending, soap opera story-lines from the big comic publishers, and the really good single issue comics from Drawn and Quarterly only came out sparingly; maybe one issue every two years...more About 12 years ago I pre-ordered a copy of Charles Burns' collected Black Hole comics sight unseen. I'd never read any of his books before, but I was really into reading alternative comics, especially big fat ones with beginnings, middles and ends. You know; real stories. I'd had enough of reading continuous, never-ending, soap opera story-lines from the big comic publishers, and the really good single issue comics from Drawn and Quarterly only came out sparingly; maybe one issue every two years or so.

Anyway the promised first collected edition of this book never happened, and my pre-order was canceled. I forgot all about it. Then a few weeks ago I was in a comic shop for the first time in years and noticed this big book sitting there on the shelf. It apparently made it out of the publisher sometime in 2005. I was considering buying either this or John Porcellino's King-Cat Classix, and then suddenly, without warning, I decided to buy that Jay Ryan poster book instead.

Anyway again, the local library recently revamped it's inter-library loan system so that it now includes a lot more collections from a lot more libraries in Illinois. Some fairly obscure stuff that I never could have gotten from there before (like this book) suddenly became available. Step 1: Internet. Step 2: Search. Step 3: Reserve. Step 4: Wait. Step 5: Read.

Thanks Joliet Public Library for sending this book to me. It is absolutely freaking beautiful, creepy, and sexy all at the same time. I can't say I know exactly what the story is about. Through the entire book, I walked a line between understanding and total confusion, sometimes stepping on one side and sometimes the other. Luckily, Burns has laid tons of tiny, visual clues in the corners of his panels to help decipher the meaning during subsequent rereads. I guess it is mostly about sexual awakening and the teenage aversion toward becoming a responsible adult, wrapped up in the guise of a sexually transmitted disease that turns teens into freaks.. There's also a lot of vagina/gaping-wound/gnashing-teeth/crawling-insect visual metaphors for you woman haters to read something into. Oh and there’s also a hot girl with a sexy tail.
(less)

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Feb 26, 2008 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

I grew up reading Spawn, so I'm more or less inured to comic book violence. Which is why I've never been creeped out by a comic before.

Charles Burns creeped me out. In a good way. He has a really clean, tight style and his storytelling is very evenly paced. There are entire sequences devoted to glass extracted from an open wound.

His nightmare sequences are amazing as well--wonderfully hypnotic--even if I'm not sure how they're serving the narrative. But whatever.

How's the story? It's all righ...more

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Jan 28, 2008 Christine Giraud rated it 4 of 5 stars

OK! Now we're talking. This is the first graphic novel that I've read and I think a great one to start with. It's graphics are well done, the text flows well, blah blah blah. But what really works is how I can finally understand why anyone would consider this a new genre of literature. The graphics tell you as much, if not more, than the words. The plot was good but would have been dull in a traditional short story. The graphics really help build the characterizations as the plot progresses. I l...more

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Mar 06, 2012 Ghirardelli rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: gives-me-spooks, um-what, science-fiction, look-something-original

I read this over the previous school year during my AE: Graphic Novel class and I will say that at first glance, I thought, "What the fuck am I reading?"

But the more I got into the story (with no chronology and no page #'s I might add), the more I came to enjoy what was going on. To put it flatly, there is a bug that changes how a person looks. The two main characters catch it, and it's basically acing social standings and struggling with life with "the bug".

I don't enjoy Burns' harsh contrast s...more

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Mar 28, 2007 Aaron rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Hardcore comics readers, lovers of the surreal

Holy shit, what a strange and affecting book. Charles Burns's art is exquisite; the almost woodcut-style black-or-white comics visually echo and reflect themselves over the course of a very surreal narrative and make suburban Seattle into a dark and sometimes terrifying dreamscape. The teens suffering from the disfiguring 'plague' of the story, like in Clowes's Ghost World, linger in that liminal space between childhood and maturity with a discomfort with which we are all painfully familiar, yet...more

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Nov 11, 2011 Jeff rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Although I've found Charles Burns' graphic style to be somewhat unappealing in other contexts, there's no denying that Black Hole is a triumph both in terms of its visual and narrative storytelling aspects. Burns weaves a highly dramatic (yet realistic) portrait of teenage angst, with an invocation of a specific locale that rings true - as a current Seattle resident, I find that his method of depicting local weather and topography is easily recognizable, even when delivered in necessarily small...more

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Jan 29, 2009 Andrew rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: graphic-novels-comic-books

Synopsis:
Black Hole is set in 1970's Seattle, WA. The cast is a group of high school teens - most of whom just want to have sex, do drugs and other standard teen-time-wasters. However a mysterious and un-classified STD causes mutations among its victims (i.e. one character grows an extra mouth in his neck, another character grows a tail, etc). These victims quickly become estranged from their families and friends, resort to running away or living alone in the woods, and all feel lost and alone.

R...more

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Dec 28, 2008 Karin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: dark, graphic-novel, horror, mystery, disease, nudity, violence, borrowed-from-the-library

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Graphic novel. Black and white drawings, crisp lines, mostly dark, but fit with the dark theme, or add to it. High school or early college students are slowly catching some kind of disease that manifests itself in various ways, but alters their bodies. Some of them can pass as normal, while some have deformities that are too obvious. The ones who can’t pass generally leave. A group of them live in the woods nearby. Their existence is gradually revealed, as is the existence of the disease. There’...more Graphic novel. Black and white drawings, crisp lines, mostly dark, but fit with the dark theme, or add to it. High school or early college students are slowly catching some kind of disease that manifests itself in various ways, but alters their bodies. Some of them can pass as normal, while some have deformities that are too obvious. The ones who can’t pass generally leave. A group of them live in the woods nearby. Their existence is gradually revealed, as is the existence of the disease. There’s Keith who has a crush on this girl in his biology class, Chris, and he has this vision of what’s about to happen to her while they’re dissecting frogs during their lab one afternoon. Chris hooks up with Rob who has the disease (manifested in a little mouth that appears on his throat, located just low enough that he can pass for normal). When he tries to tell her about being “sick” she says, “I know,” meaning something else entirely. Chris catches the disease from him, but doesn’t know it until she skinny dips and her friends all turn away from her – she has a long slit in her skin down her back – and she actually sheds her skin later on. Chris runs away, Keith pines after her, Rob is murdered. A host of other characters step in and out of the story – Keith’s friends, and the kids in the woods. Keith still wants to save Chris somehow, or show her that he doesn’t care about her disease, but she’s never been interested in him. After Rob is killed she cares less and less. Another one of the mutants, Dave, also has feelings for her, and he’s much more dangerous than he appears. She ends up running away in the end, and we’re left not knowing what happens to her, but it doesn’t seem she will survive being alone and her somewhat self-imposed exile. All she knows is that she can’t go back to how she lived before. Keith, meanwhile, after making his last ditch effort to save Chris and show her how much he cares, rediscovers the lizard woman, someone he was strongly attracted to. They decide to leave town together, as well – especially after Keith discovers that Dave has murdered a bunch of the mutants in the house where he was supposed to be housesitting. He doesn’t want to clean it up or make the explanations that people are going to require of him. His future remains uncertain as well, but there’s a bit more hope.

Remniscent of V – visitors the television series, and of Robert R. McCammon’s Swan Song where people were transformed by a terrible lesion that began to grow over their faces/features and which upon completion of the transformation fell away to reveal their true nature reflected in their features. Also could be a statement about AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases – how these separate you from the community, how others see you differently afterward. Haunting, and sometimes disturbing. There are a lot of adult themes here, which teens may not object to, but that adults will probably object to on their behalf. A lot of nudity, some sexual encounters, and violence. Teens will probably gravitate to it anyway, but may have to shelve this with the adult graphic novels.

I thought this was very well done.
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Dec 22, 2008 Jack rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: comics

A deeply unsettling but intriguing horror comic. In 1970's Seattle, a sexually transmitted disease spreads among a group of teenagers, causing them to become disfigured in bizarre ways. As the infected become social pariahs (and the subject of a myriad of twisted fetishes), they also fall prey to a mysterious killer.

The first time I started this I had to put it down as body-related horror tends to freak me out and the surreal disfigurements the characters are so vividly and grotesquely illustrat...more

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Jun 14, 2013 Tacosletsjes rated it 5 of 5 stars

Black Hole - Charles Burns

Black Hole is a fictional fascinating story that drags you into the fast changing lives of a group of teenagers. The time sets in 1970. By subtle indications like haircut styles, rising artists that are now a days generally well-know (David Bowie) and habits, for example: smoking joints on regular basis, you get a good view on how youth lived those days. It makes it easy for the reader to get sucked in the story and to place themselves in position of the characters.

The...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Shawn rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a bit over-hyped. It's good, don't misunderstand, but it's so very far from great. Much of the story dances dangerously close to edge of being a bad cliche. A 70s teen drama with sex, drugs, runaways, literal & figurative outcasts, and mentions of David Bowie & Neil Young. See? That tells you it's nineteen seventy-something. There's a neat idea here of a disease, transmitted thru sexual intercourse, that actually causes mutations. Burns could've gone deeper with the concept but...more

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Mar 24, 2013 Petergiaquinta rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: graphic-novels

Charles Burns' graphic novel captures the anxious, awful ugliness of being a teenager, and if there was a worst time to be a teenager in America it must have been in the 1970s, certainly the ugliest and most angst-ridden years of my life. If you don't believe me, I have the pictures to prove it (or my mother does), but if you didn't live it you'll just have to trust me; this was an ugly, awful time.

Although Burns never directly incorporates any of the historical framework into his story, it's al...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Chip rated it 4 of 5 stars

Needing to give myself a respite from Great Expectations, finally got around to reading this. I think perhaps I was waiting for the right moment....still not knowing exactly what to expect and thinking it would go somewhere else. I was definitely not expecting to be moved as much as I was. Last time I felt close to tears was at the end of D Clowes' Wilson, and pretty much every Maggie and Hopey story from Love and Rockets.

What we have here is such a vivid sense of time and place-Charles Burns is...more

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Feb 12, 2013 Jukka Kuva rated it 4 of 5 stars

Black Hole is Charles Burns' take to what it means to grow up and become an adult. It depicts the changes in an adolescent body as mutations caused by a sexually transmitted disease. It's a viewpoint that manages to deliver the fear of everything that has to with growing up quite well. In addition to the more philosophical and metaphorical side of the comic, there are also some trippy dream sequences that make you wonder whether Burns had taken the same drugs the characters had. I loved those. B...more

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Oct 22, 2012 Shaun rated it 5 of 5 stars

Actually read this over the weekend. It is a great graphic novel and worth every bit of its five stars. I am trying to read all of the best graphic novels at the same time as I am reading all these heady, heavy religious books this year.

This one is exceptional in my opinion. It captures so well the angst and and existential dread growing up in the Seattle "'burbs" during the mid to late '70's. I can say that with a knowing confidence because I was there, in junior high and high school no less,...more Actually read this over the weekend. It is a great graphic novel and worth every bit of its five stars. I am trying to read all of the best graphic novels at the same time as I am reading all these heady, heavy religious books this year.

This one is exceptional in my opinion. It captures so well the angst and and existential dread growing up in the Seattle "'burbs" during the mid to late '70's. I can say that with a knowing confidence because I was there, in junior high and high school no less, right at that period of time Charles Burns wrote and illustrated this book. He has it spot on! This was a period of time or "lost innocence" when David Bowie and other androgynous singers, bands and concept albums (yes, albums; not CD's) were coming into fame and when disco was about to be unleashed on the world. Ugh! Somethings are best left unsaid.

On the one hand, I can't help but feel this graphic novel is a primer on the hysteria that preceded the AIDS epidemic of the late '70's and early '80's. There is a dark tone to this graphic novel that will leave me thinking about it for some time to come. On the other hand, the teenage angst does eventually end. One of the protagonists appears to go on and reach a state of satisfied and fulfilled stasis by leaving the cloudy, moody Pacific Northwest and settling in or near Mounument Valley, Arizona; not too far from near where I reside at present. Transition seems to be the theme: from teen to young adult, from "virginal" to "experienced", from innocent to, well, . . . not so innocent.

Seattle as a city was experiencing tremendous transition and upheaval during this same pre-Microsoft, pre-Starbucks, pre-Amazon period. I remember in the early '70's seeing a billboard sign that read, "Will the last one out of Seattle please remember to turn off the lights!" This was right after Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin "awarded" the Boeing S.S.T. program a "Golden Fleece" award which essentially killed federal government support and funding for the S.S.T. program. Boeing's employment dropped from 110,000+ to something under 35,000 virtually overnight. Seattle wasn't such a hot place to live then as it is now. This was also around the time real estate values dropped because folks were leaving Seattle for warmer, dryer climate and the opportunity to work and earn a decent wage. Around the time this graphic novel portrays, folks from California were about to invade the city looking for real estate deals to snap up. A feeling of xenophobia pervaded the Seattle zeitgeist which, to some extent, remains to this day.

Anyway, kudos to Charles Burns for drafting a graphic novel with a darn good plot and point to it! I will probably pick this up again later in life and reread it. There be depth here, me hardies! Well worth the effort expended locating and reading. Rock on! It's a GREAT reading life! (less)

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Apr 23, 2012 Sarah-Anne marked it as to-read

Shelves: graphic-novels

Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the out-set 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 p...more

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Jan 27, 2012 Tom Bensley rated it 3 of 5 stars

I think I read Charles Burns's Black Hole a year too late. It's a great story, the art is fantastic, it's funny, creepy and damn entertaining, but the whole thing feels very "High School" which is now a couple of years behind me. This has been mentioned many times on Goodreads reviews, but it is important to know. All the angst, violence and random sex with beautiful (ly drawn) characters just seems like a cash in on teenagers wet dreams and fantasies.
Black Hole is about a disease that mutates t...more

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