Customer Reviews

Black Hole

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Charles Burns, Black Hole (Pantheon, 2005)

Really, the only thing I should need to say about Charles Burns' superlative Black Hole is "wow." And I'm not terribly sure I can say anything more; many professional reviewers have tried, and as good as the reviews have uniformly been, all of them have failed to capture what it is that makes Black Hole one of the best books, graphic or no, of the past half-decade (or more). When faced with such glorious failure, why not give it a shot?

Set in suburban Seattle in the mid-seventies, Black Hole centers on two high-school students, Keith and Chris, who know nothing about one another other than the they share a biology class. Keith, like most of the rest of his class, has a major crush on Chris; Chris thinks Keith is a really nice guy. The chapters alternate between the exploits (and points-of-view) of the two.

Surrounding the tale of these two would-be lovers is the Bug, a sexually-transmitted disease (while one couldn't call it akin to pregnancy, given its 100% infection rate, Burns does have a few amusing moments where his characters liken it to same). People infected with the Bug are outcasts who live in a wooded area above Ravenna Park that Keith and his stoner pals call Planet Xeno (for no particular reason they can name). There are also weird goings-on in the woods (that will likely put you in mind of The Blair Witch Project). And then people infected with the Bug start to disappear...

Black Hole is pitch-perfect in tone, pacing, and characterization. There's just a touch of nostalgia, though Burns never allows himself to fall into the trap of romanticizing the mid-seventies. The mystery angle is handled strangely but effectively; the world outside doesn't know about it, and the infected themselves almost seem to accept it as one more way in which they're outcasts. No one's really interested in solving it; it's just there. It's an unexpected way of handling things, and risky. But as everything else in this book, Burns handles it with brilliance.

If there is a weakness to the book, it comes in the final fifty pages. One of the storylines (telling you which would probably be considered a spoiler) has a weak ending. Burns, however, makes up for it with the ending to the other storyline, which is handled with even more eloquence and power than the rest of the story.

I can't say enough about the art, either. Burns cut his teeth in early issues of RAW Magazine, and it shows; his work (this was, according to interviews and other reviews, a conscious decision on Burns' part) never changed during the decade it took him to write this book. From the looks of things, if you compare his work in RAW (what I remember of it, anyway; it's been a while) to the work in Black Hole), it's still strikingly similar. Because it's what I've been reading, I have an urge to compare the art in Black Hole to that of, say, Sandman; the problem is that the Sandman artists and Burns are miles and worlds away from one another artistically. It wouldn't be like apples and oranges, but maybe Golden Delicious apples and d'Anjou pears. Burns does what he does, and while it may look more crude than recent titles, everything has its reason, and by the time you've finished this, there will be no argument that Burns is at the top of his game here.

Fantastic. Will easily find a spot near the top of my Best Reads of the Year list. *****

Outstanding! Absolutely the best graphic horror novel ever written, and brought together in one book that I literally finished in only a few hours. Then I had to go back, and peer once again at the wonderfully twisted graphic cells.

Forget herpes and AIDS, this story is about a $exually transmitted disease that is sweeping through the teen population in Seattle WA during the 70's. Sure, it may be fatal, but when teenagers are so concerned about looks and cliques and fitting in, this little bug reaches into the core of their self esteem and strips it by making them become...freaks. Every reaction is different, from second mouths to boils to skin peels to total disfigurement.

In an era of heavy greenery-smoking, a group of friends, including Keith Pearson, like to make their way to a private spot in the woods to get high. They find strange items, like a campsite of sorts.

Keith is enamored by a girl in his biology class, Chris. But Chris has a crush on Rob Facincanni. At a party, Rob protests but Chris seduces him, only afterward discovering why he protested. Rob is one of "them", the 'diseased'.

While Rob and Chris come to an understanding, Keith meets an affected girl names Eliza. Rob helps Christ to escape to the `encampment', a place where the 'diseased' live in peace, in their makeshift camps. Keith tries to save Chris from the camps, but still feels Eliza pulling him to her.

But really, can anyone be saved from this monstrous evil? Is hiding the best way, or would running away be better? How many of the diseased within the camp are also diseased in the mind? What will happen to Keith, Chris, Rob, and Eliza? Certainly, you will find it to be more than your average teen must deal with.

'Black Hole' is heavy gauge graphic-novel-horror at the best its ever going to get. Subtle in places, horrific in others. The setting of the 70's really touched me also, concert tickets to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, David Bowie's "new" album 'Diamond Dogs', the parties, the smoking, the haircuts. Its all realistic and stupendously great. 'Black Hole' makes my teen years in the Seattle area not look so bad after all.

The only thing I could find wrong with 'Black Hole' is that there wasn't enough of it. I want more. More disfigurement, more violence, more squinginess. If you read only one book in 2006, make sure it's 'Black Hole'. A MUST for any aficionado of the horror genre, and the graphic novel nuts. Definitely worth the price. Enjoy!

"I don't think I've ever read anything that better captures the details, feelings, anxieties, smells, and cringing horror of my own teenage years better than Black Hole. By the book's end, one ends up feeling so deeply for the main character it's all one can do not to turn the book over and start reading again."
Chris Ware

I had heard about this book, but I really didn't know what it was about. Me, the adult, who loves to read, and Amazon sent me this book I ordered. Why, it is a comic book! I started to read, and I was captivated. This was meant for the teenager in all of us. The teenage years, we can't quite forget. For some of us, the best years of our life, for others, the alienating, lonely, isolating years of our teenage existence.

Charles Burns started writing a comic book ten years ago that became a large three hundred and eighty plus paged book of teenage life. Done in back and white drawings with a story in first person, it tells us of "The Bug", a strange plague transmitted by sexual contact that affects and infects teenagers in Seattle in the 1970's. The teenagers are affected in different ways, for some it is a rash; for others it is the grotesque body parts that grow upon their bodies. But, for all, it is an isolating, alienating experience. No one who has "The Bug" will ever be accepted by society or ever be the same again. The anxiety of our high school years, the torment, the torture of words, by our peers. How can we forget? Well, we can't and "The Back Hole' brings this world home to us.

Keith has a crush on Chris. He and Chris have sex with other people, and they both develop the plague, "The Bug". There is no education about this new "thing", there is no publicity to help make everyone aware of this new "thing". It just is, and those who have it are isolated. They either live in the woods or come out at night, or they live in a tent like Chris. Chris and Keith find each other and find a little solace in their loves. There are no adults in this book; there are no adults in the teenager's lives. Because after all, what would they say "I told you so?" This is a world of a black hole, isolating, alienating, and miserable. An existence that many of us have seen. And, then the murders begin.

Charles Black is a genius. He must be. How else someone could write a book for teenagers, but meant for everyone to read. But at the same time, meant only for teenagers, for them to know, for us to realize, we are not alone, this existence is real but there are people who care. Highly Recommended. prisrob

I'm never disappointed with Burns' artwork, and "The Bug" was a great vehicle for it, but I found little else with which to be impressed. The characters don't have that much personality, and what personality is there is stale and sort of cliche, especially the grown-ups. But it's the plot that really is rather lame. It goes nowhere in particular, and ends nowhere in particular.

(Spoiler warning)

The Bug takes a back seat to the whole of what little plot there is. Even what turns out to be the plot, the murder, seems to be incidental. It's mostly a Beach Blanket Bingo gone horribly wrong. Burns seems to be using a lot of teen sex and drug use to sell this, and it's probably a good idea, if you imagine how utterly dull this graphic novel would be without it. Startlingly so, considering there's an epidemic and a murder involved.

It does have the creepy, unsettling imagery that we've come to love about his comics, tho', and if you want to buy it for that, you've come to the right place. But if you're in the market for a sci-fi thriller, or a whodunit, you're sure to be disappointed. Certainly not his best work.

I picked up Black Hole completely on a whim last week, enticed by the intriguing cover but having never heard of it or author Charles Burns. Now, having read it through (in a period of about two hours), I can see where all the acclaim comes from, as I've never encountered a novel, graphic or otherwise, quite like this one. Rendered in stark, shadowy, black-and-white, it's a roller coaster of emotions that, sadly, stay frequently buried beneath the surface, but they're certainly no less compelling for it. It's laden with symbolism and subtleties, but at the same time the narrative moves forward with lightning speed and economy as its tale of fear and loathing in 1970's suburbia unfolds. Even though it's set in a particular time and place among a particular age group, there's so much of the universal in Black Hole and its characters that pretty much anyone should see something of themselves in it.

As the book opens, a town just outside Seattle has been stricken with an STD known only as "The Bug," a plague that manifests itself in all sorts of bizarre symptoms ranging from molting skin to webbed fingers to much nastier and less concealable deformities, with two interesting qualifications: it never goes away, and it only affects teenagers. We quickly learn that The Bug is spreading through the local high school, and apparently it's gotten far enough that the students are no longer even trying to stop it but instead carrying on with their usual activities and old social order. The popular kids are still self-medicating with booze, drugs, and casual sex, while the chess-club geeks are cast out even more explicitly than before, with their conditions driving them to a lonely, near-feral existence in the woods outside of town. At the same time, though, all sorts of weird apparitions (baby dolls tied to trees and the like) are showing up in the woods, presaging a string of murders that leave pretty much everybody a little on edge.

Much of the story is conveyed through narration by the two main characters (more on them later), and while I'm normally not a fan of the device the narration here is so frequently poetic and affecting I was willing to give Burns a pass. Black Hole is also laden with fevered dream sequences like something you might find in the Sopranos, allowing Burns to indulge his (apparent) penchant for freakish, foreboding visions that further add to the book's general feelings of horror and alienation. As one might expect, discomfort, whether social, sexual, or some combination of the two, is a prevailing theme of the book. Granted, that's nothing out of the ordinary for high school, but in this case everything's magnified by the presence of The Bug, adding a whole new element to Black Hole's examination of inner turmoil and interpersonal dynamics among teenagers. What's afflicting the characters on the outside reflects back what they're going through on the inside as they struggle with the feelings of longing, existential angst, and plain old teen boredom.

There were some shots sprinkled throughout the book that I found rather unpleasant (both concerning the bug's symptoms and otherwise), but given that the characters are a stage in their lives when they're just discovering themselves and their bodies the occasionally unsettling imagery isn't at all inappropriate. More to the point, though, Burns tells his story with so much empathy and humanity that the depictions of sex and violence only serve to heighten its tensions rather than distract from them. The book centers mainly around two characters, Keith and Chris, who are brought into contact early on and who form an ambiguous relationship amidst the insanity brought on by The Bug. They're both sort of stuck in the wrong crowds, and you can tell they're looking for some sort of release from the constraints of their high-school environment, but at the same time their different social circles prevent them from really connecting the way Burns makes you feel they should. Both are extremely well-drawn and complex characters, though, whose feelings are way more sophisticated than what you'll find in pretty much any depiction of teenagers in popular media. There's Keith, the thoughtful guy who's a little too sensitive for the stoners he hangs out with, and Chris, that rare hot and popular chick who's also actually nice and intelligent, and whom Keith (along with lots of other guys) has a deep-seated thing for. For most of the book they just sort of circle each other as Burns tells their stories in alternating chapters, with Chris never seeming to realize just how Keith feels about her, which gives all of their interactions a sort of tragic quality as they each pursue happiness with someone else.

So, to review: Black Hole is a great book, and if you don't read it you're missing out. And, yeah, that's pretty much it.

As everyone's said, amazing artwork. The inkiness, the surreal motion of the illustration are haunting. I read Black Hole in a few nights and felt like I had the heeby-jeebies before bedtime.

But I had gripes with the basic storyline/plot. The idea of "the bug" is SO rich. Burns is clearly aware of his symbols. Everywhere there are phallic and vaginal images that emphasize the difficulties of sexuality. The bug is more than an AIDS allegory (which I don't believe it is), or the difficulty of sexuality or maturation. The bug complex in the way it manifests differently in different people, complex in that some of the manifestations have agency--like Rob's "talking mouth" on his neck. Not only can the bug have agency, it can be prophetic. And it can even have a tongue that can kiss! (We don't even know if the disease has stages. Do the bums we see eating from the garbage with disfigured faces represent an advanced stage of the bug? --OK, maybe an unfair question if "the bug" is simply allegorical.)

But since it is so interesting and has so much potential, why does Burns ruin it with a "murder mystery"? It cheapens the whole experience. The bug alienates teenagers, and to boot, someone's running around killing people. --OK, maybe Burns is telling us that a situation can always get worse.

(SPOILER WARNING) That's my first problem. My second is that the essential story goes: Keith, sensitive, arty, nerd-boy struggles to court the Chris, girl of his dreams, fails, and somehow winds up with a sexy artist woman.

Chris, beautiful, smart girl finds the love of her life, only to lose him because yet *another* nerd-boy who has a crush on her. She is punished for being nice and good-looking because boys don't know how to behave around her. In short, boys are rewarded for being a nice, (since Keith winds up with the sexy one) and girls rewarded for being nice (since... she winds up alone/dead).

This is only reiterated in the character of Eliza, Keith's sexy reward. She, like Chris, is surrounded by sexually-frustrated boys, and since she doesn't BELONG to any of them, she is brutally punished. You would think that her strong personality and artistry might be an exception. But no, of course, she's rescued by the niceness of Keith. Blegh. It almost makes you wonder if the author is still suffering adolescent anger at the girls who rejected him in high school.

I don't know if this is what Burns would want to convey; I hope not. But the story pivots around these "punished girls." Without Chris and these agonized adolescent male crushes on her, there would be no story.

So why not just tell the story of the bug, which is SO much more interesting and SO much less cliched/ problematic?

Black Hole is head and shoulders the best graphic novel I have ever read.

The story is based around a group of teens in suburban Seattle who are ravaged with a disfiguring STD. It drives most of them from their homes into hiding, and no one in the book ever reemerges into the "normal" world. I heard good reviews of the book but was skeptical when I picked it up, fearing that I wouldn't be able to identify with such a fantastic storyline. I was absolutely wrong: what struck me first about Black Hole is that the disease's physical effects are not at all the focus. They merely serve as a backdrop for a gripping portrayal of teenage life. Anyone who reads the book will be able to identify with the desperate need for belonging that causes us to make the most irrational decisions.

One of the interesting aspects of the book is the vast differences in symptoms from one individual to another. Some merely grow bumps on their chests, while others develop exoskeletons. Equally absorbing is the fact that the infected teenagers who fare the best in the story are those whose particular symptoms are not as visible. Whether Burns intends it or not, there is a tacit hierarchy among the diseased that I found fascinating. Just like in any other form of prejudice, the closer kids appear to the "ideal" - in this case being non-diseased - the better they fare and the more they are accepted.

Finally, the novel's graphics are simply amazing. Burns' artwork is almost overwhelming in its intensity and frequently in its detail. Despite the plot of the novel pushing me to read faster, I couldn't help but slow down and take my time looking at each page. Every pane is dark and often horrific, but each is tremendously beautiful.

Just like the story.

The art is stark and beautiful, more like wood cut block prints than pen and ink. The story is intruiging, propelling, and sensitive. I love how Burns uses swirling recombinations of visual motifs and symbols to biuld a sense of mounting chaos and intesnity. I love how the plot centers on an extremely bizarre and outlandish premise (the "bug") but the narrative barely seems to notice; we're not subjected to any off point explanations about what it is, how it works, the philosphical or political implications. Like everything else in a teenage world, the bug is just one more f-ed up situation interfering with everyone's attempt to find meaning and love and fun. This book is all about the characters, who are unravelled masterfully from beginning to end. I didn't give it a 5 because I need to save something for Chris Ware's work.

This was really enjoyable to read. At first I was weary of the surrealistic content, but I really grew into it.
One thing though, I was kind of perturbed that it is very easy to get two characters, Keith and Rob mixed up. They are drawn almost identical, and I thought Rob was Keith at times and Keith was rob. Therefore, I was confused for half the story. Just remember, Rob has a small beard and Keith does not.

Ending was what I expected, but I was a little disappointed, it kind of seemed to trickle out. Doesn't explain why or how certain things happened. However, this seems to be quite characteristic of this style of storytelling so I wasn't too surprised.
I love the cleanline drawing style.

Charles Burns has done something really special and unique in the comic book world. Having taken over a decade to complete in single issue form, Burns' Black Hole is a sight to behold. Taking place in the teenage drug culture of Seattle in the early 70's, Black Hole revolves around a group of teenagers all effected in some way or another by a sexually transmitted disease called "the bug". Unlike other STD's, the effects of "the bug" can be noticeable to the ungodly hideous and deforming, or can be subtle and easily hidden, like a small mouth on your neck or a tail growing on your backside. And once you get it, that's it, there's no coming back. The AIDS metaphor is used to full effect here, but it's Burns' stark black and white artwork that is the main attraction of Black Hole, as it is both horrifying and understated at the same time. The tragic storyline and bleak conclusion won't put a smile on anyone's face, that's for sure, but this is a must read nevertheless. All in all, if Black Hole doesn't prove to you that there is more to comics than spandex, muscles, and busty babes; than nothing ever will.