Black Hole (graphic novel)

AUTHOR: Burns, Charles

ARTIST: Charles Burns (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Kitchen Sink Press; Pantheon Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1995-2004

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2005

Publication History

In 1988, as part of what would become his Big Baby cycle, Charles Burns created a story entitled “Teen Plague,” which was first serialized in a number of weekly papers and then compiled and published as a complete work in RAW magazine, Volume 2, issue 1, in 1989. In addition to the work’s slowly unfolding appearance, key aspects of its verbal elements—including the use of crosscutting narrative voices and the intertwining themes of adolescence, escape, dream, and illness—along with the stark visual architecture and imagery—suggest that “Teen Plague” served as the primitive precursor to Black Hole.

Burns stripped away the absurdist humor and overt use of classic horror comic and film tropes from his original experiment and refined a more serious vision in Black Hole, which originally appeared in limited-series comic books between 1995 and 2005. Kitchen Sink Press published the four original issues; after Kitchen Sink Press folded, Fantagraphics Books republished the earlier volumes and released another eight volumes.

Pantheon Books gained rights to the work, and in 2005, released a hardcover edition, with a compelling jacket designed by Chip Kidd. The book version, including the trade paperback edition that followed in 2008, does not include some key panels from the original comic books that provided rapid pictorial insight into the characters and implied a potentially significant story line regarding how fear of the other often results in violence.

Plot

Black Hole is a multiple-perspective, coming-of-age novel that unfolds in an alternative and geographically significant Pacific Northwest coast suburb of Seattle during the era of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974), when promiscuous and unprotected sex, while perhaps not necessarily wise, was not considered deadly. The book examines the relationships, psyches, dreams, and psychological terrors of several white, mainstream teens during their closing years of high school.

Eschewing a linear narrative structure, the story is both propelled and halted along the course of nineteen interlaced sections primarily by the layered, alternating viewpoints of Keith Pearson, Chris Rhodes, and Rob Facincani. A fourth, less vocal yet crucial, perspective emanates from Eliza, an artist whose paintings and sculptures lead viewers in subconscious narrative tendrils, including that of her own rape by dope-dealing college burnouts. While most of the narrative tension is generated by the desires of the major characters, significant additional interest is established through mysterious disappearances and murders of and by key secondary figures.

A dark prologue establishes the disturbed, disconcerting tone of the ensuing narrative. While dissecting a frog during biology class, Keith falls into a swoon and is assaulted by grotesque visions that portend future events. Shortly thereafter, he learns that Rob has contracted “the bug,” a virus that infects young people through sexual contact and manifests itself in a bizarre array of physical maladies, including boils, necrosis, webbed fingers, a regenerative tail, and in Rob’s case, an increasingly sentient mouth.

Keith is obsessed with Chris, who becomes infected as a result of having sex with Rob in a graveyard. Initially unaware of her condition, Chris attends a keg party, where she goes for a swim, the first of her several symbolic immersions into water. Here, the other teens learn that her manifestation of the virus is a gash along the spine, a precursor to the literal shedding of her entire skin. After leaving her parents a good-bye note, she runs away with Rob to live in a tent in a deep, dark part of the woods known as “The Pit,” where growing numbers of the infected gather in a colony of the alienated. Amid hunger and deformity, the adolescents’ needs, jealousies, and lusts still run rampant and eventually culminate in murder and suicide.

Meanwhile, during a marijuana pickup, Keith encounters Eliza, who, frightened by the sinister events occurring in the colony, has been living and making art in the basement of the dealers’ house. Still trying to be Chris’s “knight in shining armor,” Keith finds himself drawn to Eliza, an attraction that culminates in the loss of his virginity during an intense, drug-enhanced encounter, during which Eliza’s tail snaps off and Keith contracts the virus.

Eventually, Keith and Eliza flee the sordid world of their past, seeking hope in the arid desert of the Southwest. The members of the other major dyad do not fare as well: Rob is savagely beaten to death, and Chris hitchhikes to the coast, where she is last seen floating naked in the ocean, staring up at the constellations.

Characters

•Keith Pearson is a typical, long-haired high school student primarily concerned with drugs and sex. For most of the book, his callow infatuation with Chris blinds him to other possibilities and leads him to inadvertently create the arena where the mass murder of the infected occurs. His physical appearance changes partway through the narrative as the virus eventually manifests itself as a series of tadpole-like growths along his ribs.

•Chris Rhodes is a shy, quiet girl who, before the spread of the virus, never skipped a day of class. One of the more complex and developed characters, she reveals her initial attraction to Rob and the consequences of their ensuing relationship through a series of journal entries and conversations with her friends. She seeks to escape the constraints of her life, particularly after becoming infected, and contemplates suicide at several points.

•Rob Facincani is a cigarette-smoking protagonist with long hair and a small goatee. While still involved in a relationship with a secondary character named Lisa, he becomes involved with Chris, and his indiscretion, along with suggestions of his eventual remorse and demise, are revealed by a voice issuing from his deformity, a mouth at the base of his throat. While he is attentive to other members of the colony, his primary concern for Chris eventually leads to his murder.

•Eliza, a pale, dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty with a tail, is slightly older than the other students. She is somehow able to tap into subconscious depths, and her artwork reveals the dark mysteries and dreams that haunt the other characters. After being raped and marked with graffiti by the drug dealers, who label her “the Lizard Queen,” Eliza destroys her artwork, seduces Keith, and eventually flees with him toward the desert.

•Dave Barnes, an antagonist, was a friendly sophomore whom the virus transformed into a dog-faced, bitter stalker. A leader among the infected, he helps Chris and Rob establish their tent at the colony and offers newcomers advice on where to get food and, ostensibly, how to avoid danger. He later murders his old friend Rick as well as the infected who have taken refuge in the temporary comforts of a house. After killing Rick, he commits suicide.

•Rick Holstrum, a.k.a. Rick the Dick, an antagonist, appears in his yearbook photo as a clean-cut, short-haired young man wearing a tie, but the virus has transmogrified him. Always lurking in the woods, he is a shuffling, cadaverous ogre who commits extreme acts of violence. He is killed by his former friend Dave.

Artistic Style

In spite of some familiar adolescent tropes and clichés, Black Hole presents readers with a dark and singular vision. Renouncing the use of color, pagination, and direct verbal cues, Burns skillfully manipulates and layers the passages and collisions of time and shifting points of view through the rhythmic movement of stark black backgrounds, clean lines, various types of white-panel borders, and repetitive imagery. While traditional narrative boxes depict internal monologue and speech balloons present conversation, the absence of thought balloons and the interplay of light and darkness combine to create an overall effect of witnessing a collective, waking dream.

Readers enter the book through the woods, passing by a femur lashed to one tree while another nearby tree sprouts bulbous, pestilential growths. Turning the page, they descend visually into the first of many gashes, ultimately finding themselves ensnared in depictions of archetypal terrors.

Burns juxtaposes familiar objects to achieve an increasingly eerie and disturbing mood, creating effects similar to those achieved in the “exquisite corpse” games of the Surrealists. Renditions of memory and dream soon begin overpowering those of the fictional reality. Talismans abound (decapitated dolls, splintered bones, human-faced worms, half-eaten food, broken beer bottles, tadpoles) with meanings that invert the rationality of the verbal text. Appearances are deceptive and fluid.

Double splash pages that precede each section offer carefully designed pairings that further emphasize a world of shifting desires and colliding fears. A marijuana bud becomes a hand cupped against pudenda; a broken Popsicle duplicates the angle of a bound and naked Keith; a microscopic close-up of a germinating seed appears beside Eliza’s taut breast; and an orange becomes a mountain that promises hope.

Burns depicts his characters in an exaggerated, realistic style that allows for distortion and emphasizes the face as the visual component most essential for transmitting emotion. Grimaces suggest variants of pain, smiles are toothy and forced, and glances speak of longing and remorse. Burns captures the adolescent fascination with the body through careful layouts, some of which include bisected panels that paradoxically separate two characters while fusing them into one being.

Themes

Considered in reductive, purely verbal terms, Black Hole sometimes reads like a deranged teenage soap opera, and any traditional literary analysis falls short of capturing how the visual elements alter and distort potential meanings. Because of its psychological complexities and ambiguities, the work has been interpreted through several critical lenses.

Given its gradual appearance over a decade, and although set during the 1970’s, it has been seen as a reflective, metaphorical exploration regarding the increasing spread of AIDS and its attendant fears of invisible penetration into mainstream American society during the 1980’s. However, Black Hole reminds readers that the physical symptoms of older sexually transmitted diseases, such as gonorrhea, herpes, and syphilis, often appeared in the mucous membranes, and became blatant, physical markers upon the bodies of those who transgressed against the prevailing cultural narrative.

Since teachers, parents, and other adult authority figures are nearly absent—appearing, at most, as minimal presences in any of the novel’s intertwining worlds—Black Hole can also be read as an exploration of the intensely subjective, often narcissistic world of late adolescence, and how social pairings and larger groupings develop and often hinder and distort liminal identities.

The book’s intense portrayals of sexuality invite a variety of gender analyses. Some critics see Burns’s portrayals, both verbal and visual, of the female characters as furthering the medium’s long-running objectification of women. Others have explored the book’s images of bondage, sadomasochism, and castration.

Links between the fictional acts of violence and real-life mass shootings such as those that occurred at Columbine, Colorado, in 1999, have also been suggested. Nonetheless, like any worthwhile literary work, Black Hole defies any singular, comprehensive thematic summation.

Impact

Like a lot of sequential art that began appearing in the late twentieth century, particularly in the pages of RAW, Black Hole demonstrates the medium’s capacity to tell intelligent, complex stories. What sets Burns’s masterpiece apart is its creator’s relentlessness in forging the medium into forms that might better express primordial levels of human consciousness.

Black Hole strikes a resounding, resonating chord with readers who are just learning or still willing to admit that sexual awakening is fun, sometimes dirty, and often dangerous; that drugs and alcohol can transport human consciousness; and that the struggle to render images of those ancient impulses in any medium takes hours of concentrated work, craft, and courage to sustain. The book sets a high benchmark for any creators working within the medium.

Black Hole inevitably influenced subsequent alternative graphic novels; however, the primary impact of its completion and ensuing popular and critical reception was to allow Burns to create his next major work: The first volume of X’ed Out appeared in October, 2010. The new series promises to be a further disturbing expression of Burns’s essential truth: There are aspects to humanity that the rationality of words alone will never be able to express.

Film rights to Black Hole were optioned by Plan B, MTV Films, and producer Kevin Messick in 2005. Further interest was generated when Neil Gaiman and Richard Avery signed on in 2006 to write the screenplay adaptation. After the original director, Alexandre Aja, was replaced by David Fincher in 2008, the writers abandoned the project. Independent filmmaker Rupert Sanders created a short adaptation that circulated for a brief time in 2010 before it was pulled from most Web sites for nudity or sexual-content violations.

Further Reading

Burns, Charles. Big Baby (1999).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. El Borrah (1984-2005).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. X’ed Out (2010).

Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman (1989-1996).

Bibliography

Burns, Charles. “Charles Burns, Chip Kidd, Seth, and Chris Ware Panel.” Interview by Jeet Heer. Comics Journal, March 31, 2010. http://classic.tcj.com/alternative/charles-burns-chip-kidd-seth-and-chris-ware-panel-part-one-of-three/.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Charles Burns is X’ed Out.” Interview by Alex Dueben. Comic Book Resources, October 18, 2010. http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=28938.

Raney, Vanessa. “Review of Charles Burns’ Black Hole.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 2, no. 1 (2005).

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2008.

Zeigler, James. “Too Cruel: The Diseased Teens and Mean Bodies of Charles Burns’s Black Hole.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 5, no. 2 (September, 2008).