(Pantheon Books; 352 pgs B&W; $24.95)
(W/A: Charles Burns)

I wasn’t sure what to make of Charles Burns’ Black Hole until after I’d read nearly all of it. It’s been touted in the comics press as a masterpiece of horror, but I found myself at odds with its reputation as I paged my way through the book. Once I finally felt comfortable enough with the work to reject its built-in classification, I realized that I was enjoying it rather a lot. It’s disquieting, to be sure, but there’s nothing truly horrifying about it.

The first half of the book crawls by at a snail’s pace; it is filled with disjointed, superficially similar stories about teen drug use and casual infatuation (a young person’s impression of love), and the second half is not a drastic departure, although it offers a semblance of closure and a vague promise of Happily Ever After for some of its cast of characters. The story is set in the 1970s, pre-AIDS, and offers a sexually transmitted disease-as-confused youth allegory that results in unnatural mutations: tails, facial boils, a girl who sheds her skin the way snakes do. These freakish mutations serve to alienate their victims from the rest of the people in their community, and some of them take up residence in the woods on the outskirts of the anonymous American everytown where much of Black Hole takes place—as the story unfolds, the woods become more and more representative of the ostracized counterculture. In the dark quiet of the woods, there is no mocking laughter to endure, no reprimanding authority figures to contend with, no rules or regulations to follow—imagine Golding’s castaways if they slept all day and smoked pot by the light of the campfire at night.

The suburban kids of Black Hole are tough. Their actions are fueled by nothing so much as ennui, and they either don’t see themselves as having a future, or else it simply hasn’t occurred to them to begin contemplating one. Their parents may as well not exist but for the food, shelter, and transportation they provide, and the kids all seem to walk through the story in a haze of alcohol-tinged pot smoke that follows them around like Pig-Pen’s ever-present cloud of dirt. They aren’t partiers by any means; “This just gets me to normal, man,” they all seem to groan. Their indulgences are the result of boredom and restlessness, not excitement and recklessness. There’s a lot of sex and sexuality in Black Hole (I would classify the story as erotica well before proclaiming it a horror story, but maybe that’s just me), and most of the racy elements are handled tastefully and appropriately, with fleeting glimpses, plenty of confused close-ups, and lots of eagerness without regard for consequences. In a lot of respects, Burns’ sex scenes are not greatly different from many of the ones I suspect we’ve all experienced.

That the mutations of Black Hole, which stand largely for the awkwardness of adolescence, stem primarily from sexual intercourse is fascinating. Burns has effectively rolled up every clichéd teenage growing pain into a neat little ball of frustration and drama and made it as foreign, uncomfortable, and unavoidable to a mature audience as things like sex and acne and altered states are to an adolescent one. That isn’t easy to do in this day and age, now that our society has become so precocious, so above-it-all with regard to sex and shock that almost nothing makes us feel ill at ease anymore. By making something like a girl with a tail sexy and alluring to one of his characters, Burns almost seems to be daring us to get off on this sort of thing, too. “Come on, you know you like it.” Likewise, during a scene that involves a girl making out with a mouth that her boyfriend has grown on his clavicle, Burns plays it straight. It’s fucking bizarre, yes, and he knows it, but the scene reads like slash, not slasher. Black Hole reminds us of old sexual taboos by creating and exploring strange new ones, and reminds us of how devastating pimples and stretch marks used to seem by twisting and exaggerating them into unnatural appendages and facial deformities.

As satisfying as Black Hole ultimately proves to be, I can’t escape the conclusion that something feels missing from the work—or perhaps the opposite is true. Burns’ saga is loaded with precise linework and rich imagery, all tied together with a masterful eye for design; meanwhile, the story’s individual chapters feel complete unto themselves and are relatively easy to follow. I wonder, however, if Burns maybe hasn’t given us too much of a good thing. Black Hole is light on characterization—and that’s fine, because it helps with the universality, which is key to the story—and it often feels padded as a result. I kept asking myself if we really needed 12 issues of this stuff when Burns could have made his point just as well with half as many, or perhaps even as few as four, issues. Black Hole was a full decade in the making (the first issue was published by Fantagraphics in March of ’95; the last in December of ’04), and I wonder if Burns’ audience might not have been better served by a more generous and varied platter during that period. Then again, maybe I’m just a little disappointed by the feast because I waited so many years to finally taste it. | Paul John Little

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