Almost nobody starts at the beginning. You stumble upon it inadvertently or are drawn to it half-knowingly, whereupon—as the title portends—you get sucked in. Like the characters, who rarely perceive their respective situations with anything that approaches clarity and often seem both horrified and fascinated by their experiences, you enter an off-kilter and foreboding world that remains somehow familiar. Struggling to make sense of it all, you buy up back issues and discover a suspense-filled storyline, but you never lose the cognitive dissonance stirred up on the first encounter, and that feeling that this dark world is real. You've been here before. The plot is just the plot. You don't so much read Black Hole as remember it.
I came to Charles Burns' comics series late, at book ten. On the front cover, red curtains draw back to reveal an anthropomorphic frog lying belly up and dissected on the ground. A blue sky peaks out of the slit in his stomach, though he is surrounded by darkness. On the back, Burns switches the perspective, and a young man's face is framed, aghast, by the now vaguely vaginal opening. Burns positions the reader as participant and observer, a technique that is echoed in the narrative, where it heightens that sick feeling of déjà vu, that reentry into psychic territory long forgotten or repressed. Inside the front cover, tadpoles float in a dark organic circle both ovum and earth. Inside the back cover, they are oxidized and deformed. The first page features a yearbook photo, a pretty girl with stiff features and a forced smile. Essentially the same portrait mirrors it, only now the girl's neck is swollen with three large cysts. The first picture is as unnatural as the second, which doesn't come across as a chronicle or development, but a revelation. The first is the way the world sees her, the second the way she sees herself. It's an illustration of a disconnect that informs the rest of the work: the difference between how one looks and how one feels.
Similar visual cues recur in each issue, providing Black Hole with a coherence all its own, a “sense” without the necessity of direction, a method of regarding events that belies ignorance of their cause or order.Before I had even approached the enclosed narrative, the images conjured its major themes :the first tentative examinations of life, the explosion of biological imperatives, birth and decay, alienation, sexual anxiety, and disease (or dis-ease). Which is not to say we can do away with the obligatory plot summary, or carve the whole into 12 neat parts—only that we are dealing with a work that so effectively recalls a state of mind and a moment in life that we can process it with a glance. We can enter into it by simply looking.
Burns released the twelve books that make up the Black Hole series over the course of ten years. It is the story of a plague, an STD that sweeps through the teen population of a small town. Those infected exhibit varying degrees of monstrosity, from the downright repugnant to the merely curious. The worst affected are treated as society treats all monsters: They are set apart. Confined to squalid camps in the woods and poverty-stricken, they are forced to thieve their food and huddle together around protective campfires at night. Some resort to atavistic club-wielding—a development that gives engine to the plot—but most simply resign themselves to squalor, drinking to excess and wallowing in their condition. Perhaps less lucky are those whose deformities are minor enough that they may be hidden, who live between societies but are divorced from both.
Although Burns works from various perspectives, giving nuance and dimension to the work as a whole, he focuses on two characters who display relatively mildphysical deformities and are distinguished more by their experiences than their appearance. Chris is infected by accident, a miscommunication , when she engages in fully conscious but drunken, hurried sex with a partner who reveals, mid-coitus, a little snaggle-toothed mouth on his neck, a mouth that gives voice to his anxieties. Some time later, she starts periodically shedding her skin. Not all of the monstrous bodies in Black Hole are so transparently symbolic, but Chris's affliction viscerally dramatizes the instability of adolescence—theconstant, disorienting flux and rebirth crammed into those few short years. At first, Chris seems to adjust to her condition. But nature, both biological and sociological, conspires against her, and by the end she is quite literally at sea. Keith, on the other hand, seems to seek out the disease. His journey into the woods is almost messianic. He feels an affinity to the afflicted even before he himself becomes consciously infected, but that affinity springs from an awkwardness that separates him from them all, that bridges the gap between the overt difference of the diseased and the alienation Burns ultimately addresses.
All images are allegorical, are hieroglyphic, tell a story of their own. It is the peculiar strength of sequential art, and Burns' art in particular, that images and story can invoke the seamless disquietof Black Hole : the hallucinatory, expressionistic dream sequences and the bad trips and drugged-out diffidence of Keith and his friends. The look of the skies, like the tumultuous seas of bleak 19 th century paintings, and the way Chris and her lover sense they are doomed from the start. The accrued filth of the society in the woods and the absence or indifference of any identifiable authority. The grotesque (deformed) bone-and-baby-doll “artwork” that hangs from seemingly every other tree and Burns' ability to present all characters as victims, as tortured souls struggling to express themselves. All images are presented in the deepest black and starkest white. The story provides the shades.
It seems fitting that the supposed sanctuary of perpetual adolescence should produce one of its most evocative explorations. But the art form itself doesn't account for the violent effect such stories can have on us. When children first learn that the world is not made for them, they throw tantrums, fall to the  ground and literally beat the obstinate earth with feet and fists, as if force of will can supply their wants. Their unfledged responses eventually become more refined, but they never leave behind that urge. The extremes of adolescence result in a similar sort of resignation. Biology provides us the realization that our bodies can be hostile prisons. Sex is graceless and, thanks to the AIDS epidemic, menacing, failing its promise of connection and relief. The only thing that unites us with our peers is our loneliness, our isolation. Then we relent, grow up, get over it. The truths we confront fade into the background. Reliving the experience is no less traumatic for our having made it out alive. |
