"Nothing To Hold Onto." COMICS!!! Sometimes They Swarm With Awesome!

I know, I know, it’s the worst kind of week of all! It’s Skip Week! No Graeme McMillion$! No Gentle Jeff! No podcast! While our very own Donny and Marie are off removing shopping trolleys from canals (or whatever it is they are up to) it’s left to us poor schmucks to wonder how things can possibly get worse. Well, things just got worse and it happened like this: I've put some words down about a book by Charles Burns. Look at me! Can you see that? It’s my serious face! I have my serious face on because I am a serious man about a serious business! I’m on about a serious comic, seriously! You can stop looking at me now it’s freaking me out. Anyway, this… Photobucket

THE HIVE by Charles Burns Jonathan Cape, £12.99 (2012)

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THE HIVE is the (curiously neglected by the comics buzz world) second volume in Charles Burns’ enormously satisfying reconfiguring of comics genres to his own unsettling narrative ends. In Vol.1 (X-ED OUT) it was Tin-Tin’s sterile milieu which got a grubby makeover while here Burns’ dark adapted eye falls on romance comics. As ever the friction created by the innocent originals and Burns’ grimy concerns rubbing feverishly up against each other results in all kinds of frisky fun. While weirdness abounds on every page (even the normal stuff looks weird) the real oddity is how Burns’ clean and precise delineations manage to so successfully convey the soiled sense of having licked an ashtray with your mind.

Turns out if you draw a pickled pig foetus in a jar the unsettling material trumps the distanced style. Heck, the distanced style might even amplify the nastiness. I just read the book I didn't do any research or any of that professional shit so I don’t really know where Burns is coming from, but for me his work is evocative of that whole Immaculate Consumptive thang from the ‘80s. That fantastically fiery yet slyly funny Thirwell/Lunch/Almond/Cave aesthetic where you take the fight right to the darkness armed only with the straight razor of your intelligence and a scream that might actually be a laugh cranked too high. I realise from the haircuts and checked shirts that it’s probably more evocative of that whole Sub Pop scene but that wasn't my scene so I guess since this old man gets to play too the work’s concerns are quite supple (universal might be pushing it, though).

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Could be David Lynch needs mentioning as well. Not with the aim of suggesting any cheap imitation on Burns’ part, no, rather to indicate just how good Burns is at harmonising the humdrum and the horrific as his multiple narratives blur and cross pollinate in a fashion which obfuscates meaning without obliterating it. If that sounds a bit dry and dull be assured it’s anything but. Reading this book (which I forgot to mention is a book about young love gone bad, sour and black with rot, oh, and memory too and other stuff. It's a busy little book.) I experienced a kind of carbonated tingle in my brain much like that occasioned in my fingertips every time they brushed the volume's almost subliminally tactile spine.

Look, I don’t really like to bang on about the aesthetic experience of physical comics because it quite quickly starts sounding creepy; like I’m the kind of guy who loves his comics so much that not only is my cock scarred by paper cuts but I can tell you which comics put them there (oh, the one just near the hem of the prepuce? POLICE ACTION FEATURING LOMAX #2. ) but…there’s just no denying this is a really nice volume in physical terms. Ayup, THE HIVE is a physically appealing package containing cerebral, sophisticated and very funny comics. That'd make it VERY GOOD!

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There you go! It was short too! Because I love you, that’s why and that means I don’t need reasons. Except when I kill. I do, however, still need COMICS!!!

Ta-ta for the nonce!

Two things that have nothing to do with one another!

What could they be? Find out under the jump!

CHARLES BURNS X ED OUT GN: Well, there's an apostrophe or two in that title, but Diamond's database doesn't play well with those (not that I bought it from Diamond, but there you are)

Charles Burns is, I think, one of our best working cartoonists -- his line is as distinct as it is accomplished, and he knows how to weave suspense and tension in really amazing way. There's nothing else that FEELS like a Charles Burns comic, in a way that exceedingly few of his contemporaries are able to achieve. Disturbing, off-kilter, askew -- and I find that tremendously appealing.

I think that his previous major work, BLACK HOLE, was one of the seminal works of the late 20th century, and much of its strength came from the mining of teenage angst and alienation where I imagine that much of the vibe of that work would translate even if you were culturally distinct from the late 20c North American setting.

This new work tries, I think, to be more "international" in tone -- the Tintin homages couldn't be more clearer, and about a third of the work takes place in an unsettling alien (?) landscape that makes me think of Tunisia or something (or, at least, my perception of Tunisia filtered through Western movies, which I bet is NOTHING like the real Tunisia!). But either way, Burns remains a master of tone, and reading his comics always makes me feel like an unseen spider is scuttling up and down my spine.

If you like Burns' previous work, you'll love this, I have no doubt -- I certainly did. Which is why it bugs me that I have to pan this based on price and format.

The first problem is that this isn't a complete story -- there's a clear "to be continued" at the end of the book, and who knows exactly where or how it is going to continue? There's no volume number on the book anywhere, and I can't find anything on the web (including the B&T website, which has books as much as six months before they'll appear in stores) to indicate that there IS going to be more. Even Pantheon's solicitation copy doesn't give a lot of insight:

"From the creator of Black Hole, the first volume of an epic masterpiece of graphic fiction in brilliant color! Doug is having a strange night. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there, across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat, Inky, who died years ago. What's going on? Drawing inspiration from such diverse influences as Hergé and William Burroughs, Charles Burns has given us a dazzling spectral fever-dream - and a comic-book masterpiece."

Heh, they used "masterpiece" twice!

But this makes it mostly sound like the work is self-contained, and it most assuredly is not. And that makes it an extremely frustrating work. I quite imagine that it will continue/complete at some point somewhere, but for someone picking this up "cold", it isn't anything like a satisfying read thanks to that "to be continued" there.

There's another problem, too: it is 52 pages (albeit in oversized and in color) for twenty bucks. I know the creative costs are the largest expense in creating a new work (which is why Pantheon has mostly published comics work that's been serialized elsewhere, I would imagine), but, ugh, nearly 39 cents a page for something that is a work-in-progress (and, more importantly: not self-contained within itself, or even "self contained"...) seems unforgivably expensive.

Don't get me wrong: I loved what I read, I love his line and his tone and the pervasive sense of...oddness that permeates every page, but this is pretty close to double (or maybe more) of what this should really cost, especially for only a fragment of a story. When this comes out in a cheaper and complete SC format, I'll be all over this, but this format and this pricing means that even I aren't going to buy it for my personal bookshelf -- and I pay wholesale!

For craft it's an easy VERY GOOD; for pricing and format, it is pretty AWFUL.

(First week sales have been fairly solid -- actually even a bit better than I initially expected, but I expect a certain amount of "Buyer's Remorse" happening this week)

******

SUPERIOR #1 (of 6): Mark Millar is one weird cat. He wrote a long run of some of the best Superman stories I've ever read in "Superman Adventures" (wouldn't it be nice if there was a full-sized trade of those out there? Just sayin', DC), where he's shown he can write "all ages" with the best of them, and he's also written some of the filthiest comics of all time (a decade or so later, his "Authority" arc with Quitely still kind of creeps me out... and that was, or so I understand it, extremely toned down from the original intention)

So that makes SUPERIOR even that more jarring to me -- here's a story that would have been an excellent all-ages superhero thing (it even has wish-granting space monkeys!), but the impact and the potential audience is entirely gutted by the rampant and wholly uneeded cursing.

I have no real problem with profanity, in its place -- KICK ASS becomes all the more amusing from the over-the-top swearing from its pubescent cast for instance, but the subject matter (and the specific cast) of SUPERIOR doesn't seem to lend itself to the potty mouthing here. I could give you ONE, right there at the last beat, there's an "Oh SHIT!" moment, sure, but the rest of it seems so completely unnecessary and out of tone from the rest of the comic, I really wonder what the fuck he's thinking?

As I have to say to my newly seven-year old son, Ben, a lot these days, "swearing isn't really big nor clever, little man" (he's reached that wonderful age where the ABSOLUTE height of wit is "ballsack" and "dingleberry" and stuff like that)

What's funny about Ben (if you'll permit me to digress) is despite that he's slightly puritanical when cursing appears in something. We've just finished the final Harry Potter book last night, and while I self edited a few times, when the text really supports it (I try hard to "stay in character", as it were, when I read to him), I'll let a "Hell" slip through (instead of "heck, y'know). "Did they REALLY say the "H" word, Daddy?"

Heh, and last night there's the final battle in Hogwarts, and Molly Weasley screams at Belatrix Lestrange, "STAY AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!", and I rendered it as "B-word", and Ben insisted I stop reading right there: "They said 'B-Word'?" "Well, no, son, not exactly" "Let me see the book!" and he wouldn't let me go on until he took the copy from my hand to see "bitch" spelled out (well, he knows how to SPELL it, already), and we had to delay the final battle to have a 10 minute conversation about the acceptability and context of using a word like that, where I think I left him pretty confused, actually, if I'm being honest.

As long as I'm digressing here, let's go with one longer one: I like reading multi-book series with Ben. Like a whole lot. One of my favorite things to do in the whole wide world. We started with the Lemony Snicket "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books when I had a wild hair as he's-an-older-four-year-old, and we've ventured into Oz [staggeringly archaic in a few of those books; and I totally lost the thread in the one where the Wizard returns to Oz. BOTH of us got completely bored about halfway through that one], and now Harry Potter. We're going to take a break from multi-book series for the next week or two -- I'm going to start "Harriet the Spy" tomorrow night, which I recall from my own childhood as being pretty awesome -- and I might descend into Narnia after that, but I'm not so sure that those have the "acting and readability" I'm looking for. (for example: "The Hobbit"? Completely unreadable outloud -- not enough dialogue driving the narrative, we never even got to a second night of reading it -- which kind of surprised me)

So: anyone have any recommendations for multi-book YA or younger series that has a gripping story, and out-loud-readability and -acting opportunities for us to dive into? Ben likes stuff that's scary, for sure [he does a better and creepier "Voldemort voice" than I do!], and he's totally not into like kissing and stuff (making Harry Potter v6 a hard read for us), and I want something that uses good (and smart!) vocabulary, and trips off the tongue when you read it. You can say what you want about Potter, but JK Rowling writes good reading-out-loud prose.

(I just wish Ron and Hermione had had really ANYthing to do in the last half of the last book, whatsoever)

Anyway, digression done: I liked SUPERIOR pretty well, but I think the blue language cut off 3/4 of the audience that would really REALLY like it, while being too simplistic and silly for the cats who like KICK-ASS and NEMESIS. I'll give it an OKAY, but I would have happily given it a GOOD or better with a little more self-editing on the swearing front. I don't think it needed the @#$% school or the Milestone-Squiggle either; the swearing was just entirely out of place for this reader, in this story.

As always: What did YOU think?

-B

Best of the 00s/Favorites: Black Hole - A Discussion

Dick Hyacinth here. In case you've forgotten, Sean and I both reviewed Black Hole for our first posts here at the Savage Critics (Sean's post, my post). It seemed kind of silly to have two reviews of a four year old (or twelve year old, depending on how you look at it) comic on the site without something or another to tie to the two together. So over the course of a week of emailing, Sean and I discussed Black Hole and each other's reviews. We examine gender, genre, eroticism, the horrors of adolescence, and a host of other issues after the break.

DICK: One thing I didn't really get to talk a lot about in my review was the character of Eliza. I think she's interesting in that she isn't really like any of the other characters; she seems to occupy liminal space in several respects. While Keith, Chris, Rob, Dave, and almost all the other characters are still in high school, Eliza apparently is not. But her infection places her at least partly in the world of teenagers. Sexually, her tail is something of a phallic object. When she and Keith have sex, it writhes around in his hand as he grips it tightly. She has a great deal more freedom than the characters who still live with their parents or are confined to the woods, but as you mention in your review, she's very much haunted by her past.

It's also interesting that Eliza seems to be the most distinctive looking of Black Hole's characters. I'm a great admirer of Burns' art, but I think it's safe to say most of his characters look like they come from his repertory company (to borrow a concept from Eddie Campbell). Eliza is different; there's something oddly specific about her. Other characters' expressions are reminiscent of those one would see in horror or romance comics (the latter being particularly true for Chris), but Eliza's facial expressions are much more naturalistic; they look photo referenced. Especially that first panel she appears in--she looks so different from all the other characters, it just pops off the page.

Chris and Eliza

The other thing I can't quite figure out about Eliza--and this might speak to my own ignorance--is what we're to make of that drawing which seems to depict Keith, gagged and bound to a tree in the woods. On one level, we can take it as a purely symbolic thing. At the end of the book, she draws a picture of Keith soaring above the other bug victims, suggesting escape from his problems (and adolescence, maybe). The value of that symbol is increased if you consider the woods as a symbol of stagnation. In this interpretation, the forest is essentially imprisoning Keith by preventing him from escaping his adolescence; the later picture correlates freedom with movement beyond the woods. In this sense, the pictures reflect the events going on in the book rather unambiguously.

But Burns blunts this positive interpretation in a couple of ways. First, Eliza seems somewhat embarrassed by the drawing of Escaping Keith. It's much more optimistic than her other work; she calls it "corny." One almost gets the sense that she's telling Keith what he wants to hear, rather than expressing her true thoughts about their new situation. The other, more troubling thing is the nature of the Bound Keith picture. First of all, it's something she drew before she knew him--making it oddly prescient. Secondly, her flashback to sleeping in the woods as a runaway indicates that she actually saw this scene in reality (in which case it's not actually supposed to be Keith in the drawing after all). There's no indication of who the bound figure is or who is responsible for his condition. You might suppose that Eliza was camping in the outcast colony, and that Dave and Rick were responsible for the incident, but Burns leaves it open enough that this is interpretation is more speculative than definitive.

For Keith, I think Eliza represents the allure and danger of adulthood and the future in general. Eliza's mystery and experience make her more attractive than the girls his own age. At the same time, he hardly knows her; there's no particular reason to think that they will have a happy future together. She seems more aware of this than Keith.

What's your take on Eliza?

SEAN: Eliza is an interesting case to me, because to be honest, when I think of her I think of sex. I think that Tom Spurgeon did a Five for Friday one time about comics characters you find attractive, and she was at the top of my list; to be honest, after her there really didn't need to be a list. I know that admitting that sort of thing is seen as creepy, especially if you're a dude, especially if you're a dude who also reads and likes superhero comics, but I've sort of been making an effort lately to talk about arousing art in the context of being aroused by it, reclaiming that space as valid, and that's where I'm at with Eliza--something about her triggers my lizard brain (no pun intended). Like I mentioned in my review, this is probably in part due to her resemblance to a girl I knew IRL, but that's not all of it by a long shot. For starters, you're right, she's much more realistically drawn than the rest of the gang, including (for the most apples-to-apples comparison) Chris. She pops against the other characters. And Burns takes advantage of how the added level of detail and nuance to milk very specific facial expressions and body language: being really fucking high, being surprised, being dazed, being lonely, being happy about something simple like an ice pop or sandwich or bumping into a friend in the grocery store.

She's also older and freer, as you note, at least in the sense that would register with Keith, i.e. she lives outside the sphere of parents and school. As we learn, she's actually less free than Keith, Chris, and the other kids, since she's sort of in thrall to these college-kid drug dealers and her own history of abuse. But there's a glamour to her ability to walk around a house half-naked, spending all her time getting baked and making art. "It's all right there," as Keith says--she's created a life out of articulating, however inarticulately, the feelings he has to keep bottled inside. What I like about this is that her sophistication, her devotion to her work, and her talent are all part of what makes her sexually attractive to Keith. I feel like that's the sort of thing you see more when the shoe's on the other foot, and you're telling a story about a male artist and his female admirer/muse. I don't go in for playing spot the phallus all that often, but it seems fair to point out as you do that she's the character with the vestigial dick--yet she's never less than breathtakingly (literally!) feminine. Here, it's the guy who's blown away by the girl's artistic gifts and commitment to them. (Creative void my ass, Dave Sim!) And it's not just some intellectualized admiration, it's a turn-on.

Indeed, Keith actually becomes Eliza's muse there at the end. I believe her earlier drawings of a boy tied to a tree were meant to represent a real-life incident she witnessed in the woods involving not Keith, but some other victim of Dave and Rick the Dick's depredations, but there's obviously no question who her drawing at the end is of. Because I'm a cockeyed optimist (LOL), I like to believe this represents some kind of maturation for Eliza. Her past subject matter was uniformly sinister; perhaps this liberating image represents a turned corner in terms of what she expects from life and herself. Moreover, I also like to believe that Keith and Eliza have a better than even shot at making a go of things. Surely there's a reason their situation is so sharply contrasted with Chris's at the end, seeming so much more comforting and hopeful. Again, this is personal experience talking, but I really did meet my future wife in high school and begin dating her back then. We had our ups and downs, but we made it work, knowing each other barely at all at first, connected by physical attraction and mutual admiration and intrigue. So to Keith and Eliza, I say, Yes we can!

But that raises a question perhaps you can take a crack at for me: Why do you think Chris's story ends on such a down note? She seems to have a lot more going for her than Rob, in several departments: Brains, looks, social proficiency. What are we to make about the magnitude of the personal tragedy that befalls her, her inability to process it (contrast it with Eliza shaking off her sexual assault, which maybe isn't a whole lot better a way to process trauma but she at least has picked herself up and moved on), and her ultimate near-suicidal state?

DICK: Chris' fate is something that I've struggled with as well, partly because of a knee-jerk reaction to a story that ends with the male protagonist moving forward and the femal protagonist regressing. At first glance, it doesn't speak well to the book's gender politics, but that's a rather shallow reading (and thankfully one I haven't heard come up very often--maybe those likely to offer this response aren't reading books like Black Hole?).

To understand what happens to Chris, we obviously have to go back to her relationship with Rob. As I said in my review, Rob's death leaves Chris feeling like she has nothing to live for. The death of someone so close is, of course, a tragic thing, but the severity of her response speaks to what you said about the teenage characters' overreactions to everything, good or bad. Part of being an adult is accepting the idea that people are going to die; we never really get over the deaths of those closest to us, but we (hopefully) eventually figure out how to go on living. When she buries that picture of Chris, you do kind of get the sense that Chris has accepted that she has to move on with her life. That's the silver lining to her ending; I guess you could interpret her retreat to the womb as temporary, a safe shelter in which she can heal her wounds then move on.

The Chris-Rob dynamic also sheds a little light on Keith's relationship to Eliza. There's a little bit of a counterfactual in Chris' reaction to Rob's death: what would have happened to Keith without Eliza in his life? Would he have survived, or would he have met a fate similar to Rob or Dave? I don't think Burns is saying anything as facile as "surviving adolescence requires good friends (platonic or otherwise)," though I do think that anyone who's made it through to adulthood will agree that good friends make the teenage years a lot easier.

On the other hand, we're all aware that those who are popular have an easier time of adolescence. If we think of the bug as the supreme determinant of who's popular and who's not, I think it sheds some light on Chris' situation. She's popular, studious, and attractive, but all that evaporates in the span of about a week. It's the sort of sudden reversal of fortune that teenagers undergo all the time. The bug isn't that different from other adolescent traumas like pregnancy, substance abuse, parents' divorce, or the realization that one is gay. Those are all legitmate problems, and teenagers haven't developed the emotional mechanisms to deal with them. Which is why it's so important to have some external support, be it from friends, SOs, family, teachers, or whatever.

Again, I think Chris' burial of the photo and explicit rejection of suicide point to an ending which, while not as hopeful as Keith's, at least suggests that she will try to deal with the traumas she's encountered. I think the difference between her and Eliza may well be time; she hasn't had as long to process what happened, and seems to be in the middle of her potential recovery as the book ends. But, to again cite your review, recovery is a process, not an event. There will be setbacks along the way, but there are plenty of things worth living for. Eliza is fortunate to have Keith (who, in turn, is fortunate to have Eliza). Maybe Chris really does need her parents.

And that brings me to another point about Black Hole: the startling absence of adults. You mentioned before that most of the characters dismiss adults as incapable of understanding their problems. Is there anything more to it than that?

SEAN: Before I tackle the parent angle, I feel I should add that as a horror enthusiast, I have no problem with serving up extremely bleak endings for your protagonists. It satisfies some nihilistic part of myself to see a fundamentally together person get broken down in a story like this, so even if there were no more "reason" for Chris to end up in a darker place than Rob than "because it's disturbing," I'd be fine with that. I think this is even reflected in Burns's visual treatment of Chris, who occasionally looks ripped straight from a romance comic--I'm thinking in particular of the shot after she and Rob first have sex and she realizes he has the bug; by the end of the story you've seen her all dirty and hairy and practically passed out naked in a stranger's bathtub. And this in turn reflects Keith's realization that he's been in love with a figment of his imagination, with an idealized girl who in no way resembles the very real girl with very real problems that actually exists. Of course, you could argue that he then goes and does the exact same thing with Eliza, but I think you can see his enthusiasm for her art, and his willingness to talk her through the traumas she's faced, as signs that he loves Eliza as she is, not as he imagines her to be.

Meanwhile, I'm glad to see you reject the gender-politics read of the book, which as you say would be a pretty shallow way to approach it. My favorite definition of feminism, and certainly the way I try to live it, is that it's the radical proposition that women are human beings. No more, no less! The reason that strikes me in the context of Black Hole is because I feel that this is what Burns is trying to say regarding sex: It's not the be-all and end-all serving of awesomesauce that teens (particularly teen guys) think of it as, nor is it necessarily a sqaulid and dangerous recipe for disaster. It's a powerful, ideally pleasurable, physical mode of interaction between two people, no more, no less. It can be dangerous for you, physically and emotionally--obviously that's the whole point of the teen plague idea, and you see it manifested in less fanciful ways with Rob and his ex, Keith's friends, even Eliza's rape. But when you look at the sex scenes Burns actually chooses to depict, they seem to be a lot of fun for the participants, and to bring them closer together emotionally. I've always found Black Hole's even-handed, if warts-and-all, approach to teen sex refreshing.

Back to Chris and adults: I think you're right to point out that there are hints toward the end there that she may be preparing to truly process her grief and loss and move on, and to me one of the biggest signs in that regard is her acknowledgement (even if it leads to a rejection, at least for now) of the potential for adults--the kindly woman on the beach, her parents--to help her solve her problems. Prior to that, adults throughout the book are uniformly thought of as sources of embarrassment, conflict, and oppression, when they're thought of at all; most of the time they don't even register. Now, I think that's a slight exaggeration of how kids live--I know I thought of my parents and their reactions to things I did pretty constantly, even if in certain cases it didn't affect how I behaved--but it's emotionally true in the sense that kids, particularly troubled kids like the ones in the book, tend not to feel that grown-ups can offer any succor or insight into the problems that afflict them emotionally and psychologically. But even more importantly to the book--here, perhaps, is the "more to it than that" you asked about--the absence of parents just makes everything feel that much more insular and claustrophobic, really a must to pull off a convincingly frightening horror story. It's the plot-mechanic equivalent of going so heavy on the blacks in the visual department, as you pointed out. The presence of grown-ups would not only create opportunities for the characters to escape the worst aspects of their situation, it would also serve to remind them on some level that you can grow up and get out, that things do get better as I've said. For the story to work, for the story to be the story it is, those options can't exist.

Hmm, one thing I'm noticing as I discuss the book is that I'm sort of splitting my time between talking about it in genre terms, as horror or as erotica, and in your basic non-genre human-drama terms. Do you feel it functions effectively in both worlds?

DICK: I've never really viewed Black Hole as a type of erotica, mostly because it doesn't work that way for me at all. So I don't really have much to say about that. As horror: I think that's an interesting question, and kind of relates to something Jeff mentioned in the comments to my review. Jeff wondered if the gorgeous art in Black Hole might make it a little more accessible; I would say the horror aspects to the book might function similarly. I haven't read everything Burns ever did, and it's been a while since I've read anything by him other than Black Hole. But my memory is that Burns tends to use horror trappings as a way to enhance larger themes in his other work. The Big Baby work, of course, deals with a character on the cusp of puberty, but I remember it being pretty similar thematically (though not nearly as rich as Black Hole).

Mostly, though, I've always thought of Burns as an excellent horror artist, but not really a horror cartoonist, so to speak. I might have a narrow view of horror, but his comics don't work on that level for me. The mouth in Rob's throat is an unsettling image (actually, that kind of makes Rob another liminal character--he possesses both vagina and penis), as are the tadpole growths on Keith's side, but they're not the kind of images that really stick in my brain like that underwater scene at the begining of Inferno (to use a horror film I really like as an example). And I was never scared by anything in Black Hole, at least not in a horror genre kind of sense. For me, Black Hole inspires dread rather than fear.

It would be interesting to consider his work in the context of other cartoonists of a similar stripe: Mat Brinkman, Josh Simmons, Tom Neely, early Chester Brown, Richard Sala, maybe even Rory Hayes, and certainly a bunch of other people I'm surely forgetting. I think Neely, who works in a very attractive EC Segar-influenced style, probably comes the closest to doing what Burns does. I'd go on, but we've already reached epic proportions. And you're the horror expert, so it's only fair to give you the final word on this. Does it work as horror for you, and how does it stack up to other horror comix (for lack of a better term)?

SEAN: So, nothing sexy in Black Hole for Dick Hyacinth, huh? Well now I feel like a bit of a freak myself. Aw, who am I kidding: Own it, Collins! I can't help but feel that sex scenes involving attractive people drawn attractively enjoying themselves having sex are intended to be erotic, regardless of those scenes' surroundings or their ultimate outcome in the narrative. Indeed I think that's part of Black Hole's power: Its ability to titillate and repulse in rapid succession, or even simultaneously. When people liken the book to the work of David Lynch, I'm pretty sure they don't just mean that both Black Hole and Twin Peaks take place in the Pacific Northwest, you know?

Now for the horror. You've actually got a leg up on me in terms of placing Black Hole within Burns's oeuvre, because this is literally the only book of his (other than that little photography collection D&Q put out a couple years ago) that I've read. Why? Because his past work fails my "is it visually appealing on a cursory flip-through surface level?" While he's always been almost ridiculously talented as a craftsman, his '50s and '60s trash-culture/Famous Monsters of Filmland aesthetic previous to Black Hole just doesn't speak to me much. Call it the narcissism of small differences if you will, but that whole tradition of combining horror iconography with outsider/alternative music and culture--you can also see it in psychobilly, John Waters, even Lynch's Wild at Heart--is just a few steps removed from my own similar aesthetic journey, but they're big steps, I guess.

So in the sense that Black Hole's brand of horror is more straightforward, darker, more sexual, less comical, more "realistic," then yes, that gives me more of an in. And I'd imagine that's true for other horror-interested readers as well. I've certainly tried to sell Black Hole to other people as The Greatest Horror Comic Ever Made, the same way people sell Watchmen as The Greatest Superhero Comic Ever Made, even though in both cases these books have myriad other concerns beyond just being a good horror comic or a good superhero comic. Granted, I have a pretty catholic definition of horror (Barton Fink, Eyes Wide Shut, Heavenly Creatures), one that definitely weighs dread pretty evenly alongside fright. But the list of horror-ish comics creators you cite--I'd throw Junji Ito in there quite comfortably, by the way--sort of makes this point for me. You're not including, say, Steve Niles, or even Robert Kirkman, whose The Walking Dead I actually quite like; you're talking about alternative cartoonists whose work doesn't "look scary" the way all the "horror comics" that clog up Previews do, and who in some cases never considered their work to be horror (Tom Neely has told me that until he saw me describe The Blot as a horror comic, the thought had never occurred to him), but whose work has the power to discomfit, disgust, disturb, and unnerve us. Jump-scares may be few and far between, but reading those comics has a sort of darkening effect on me, like turning some sort of psychological dimmer-switch way down low. Everything's a little creepier and more uncomfortable after I'm finished reading. Black Hole does that better than any other comic I've read, even as its lovely art and sympathetically messed-up characters keep inviting me back to start the process over again.

Favorites: Black Hole

Hi folks! I've decided I'll use my slot as a Savage Critic to talk about my favorite comics of all time. I'm kicking things off with Charles Burns's Black Hole--which, coincidentally, Dick Hyacinth had also chosen to use as the inaugural book for his series on the best comics of the decade. So Dick and I will be tag-teaming on this one: I'm going first, then he'll post his thoughts without reading mine, then we'll check out what the other guy has to say and post responses. Should be a pip. Meanwhile, I've also dug a review of the book I wrote for the geek-culture iteration of Giant magazine out of the archives and posted it on my blog--check it out. And now, without further ado... PhotobucketBlack Hole Charles Burns, writer/artist Pantheon, 2005 368 pages $18.95, softcover EXCELLENT

You lose a lot of extremely impressive supplemental material if you purchase or read only the collected edition of Black Hole rather than the individual issues from Fantagraphics (and, earlier, Kitchen Sink). The full-color front and back covers for each issue are probably what stand out in most people's minds, followed perhaps by the almost masochistically detailed endpage spreads, and last but not least those terrific ripped-from-the-hotbox dialogue snippets that accompany Burns's yearbook-portrait openers. I think everyone is probably partial to the one where a guy asks to be cremated if he dies so that his friends can smoke his ashes, but the one from the first issue isn't some nugget of stoner wisdom, it's the premise of the entire book:

It was like a horrible game of tag...It took a while, but they finally figured out it was some kind of new disease that only affected teenagers. They called it the "teen plague" or "the bug" and there were all kinds of unpredictable symptoms...For some it wasn't too bad - a few bumps, maybe an ugly rash...Others turned into monsters or grew new body parts...But the symptoms didn't matter...Once you were tagged, you were "it" forever. 

That quote made it into the collected edition as the back-cover blurb. This one, from the twelfth and final issue, didn't:

It's like tryin' to explain sex to a nun - there's no way you'd ever understand it unless you lived it. I was there, okay? Half my fuckin' friends died out there, man. I never dreamed I'd get out of that shit-hole...but one day I notice the stuff on my face is starting to heal and a couple of months later, I'm totally fuckin' clean...out walking around with all the normal assholes. 

This directly contradicts the quote from the first issue and upends the premise it establishes. Turns out the horror of the teen plague is finite. Turns out everything that happened in the book didn't need to happen, not the way it did, not based on the assumption that nothing was going to change and they'd never get better. Turns out, in other words, that the teen plague was ultimately like being a teenager itself: It sucks, but you grow out of it.

Rereading Black Hole for the fourth time or so, it's easy to see the set-up for this punchline. Keith in the woods during the kegger where he finds out Chris has the bug, peeing on a tree and grumbling to himself, "This is it...this is all it's ever gonna be. It'll never get better...I'll always be like this..." Chris's similarly themed rebuke of her parents: "You don't understand! You'll never understand! Never!" The constant hyperbole the kids use to describe virtually everything even potentially enjoyable: "It was going to be the best day of my life"; "Rob had brought along all kinds of incredible things to eat...black olives, an avocado, french bred, salami, cheese..."; "All right! That's gonna blow your fuckin' mind!"; "It's called Monument Valley--you won't believe how amazing it is!"; and my favorite, "I want to show you how to make the best sandwich in the world." Chris telling Rob "I'll love you forever, no matter what," and Keith and Eliza telling each other the same thing. Chris's repeated refrain "I'd stay here forever if I could"--in Rob's arms, in the icy water looking up at the night sky. Everything is either the best it can possibly be or the worst it can possibly be, and it will never change.

Needless to say that's just about the most accurate depiction of the emotional life of teenagers I've ever seen. It's how I remember high school. It's not terribly far removed from how I remember college. (And to be perfectly honest, when I think of how I look at the world even now, it's within spitting distance of how I live today, which is probably a big part of why this is one of my favorite comics.) But of course, things do change. Bad things usually get better, which is why it's such a goddamn tragedy any time a teenager commits suicide because of a bad grade or a breakup--or when a group of sick kids feels it necessary to drop out of school, run away from home, and in the case of some characters literally throw their lives away. And unfortunately, good things often get worse; parents do understand, at least some of the time, and it's damn hard to tell someone "I'll love you forever, no matter what" and mean it, and two stoners driving across country probably won't be able to find a cozy apartment where he can make an honest living and she can work on her art and they both live happily ever after. That's a tragedy too.

So why remove the quote that points this out, the quote that completes the metaphor? Maybe--and I'm just guessing here; I've interviewed Charles Burns about this book a couple of times but I don't recall asking him about this--he didn't want to give us that escape valve. Maybe he doesn't want us to read this and think, "Silly kids, if only they knew." Maybe he wants to eliminate anything that lessens the number-one effect of the story and the art here: claustrophobia.

Honestly, the claustrophobia of Black Hole is what struck me the most in this reread. Take the panel gutters, for example. Burns employs a traditional method of delineating between real-time action and dreams or flashbacks--straight gutters for the real stuff, wavy gutters for the reveries. But those wavy gutters still create as uniform a grid as ones drawn with a ruler would. Instead of dreaminess, they evoke haziness, like heat waves radiating up from a road or the room spinning when you're cataclysmically wasted. Indeed, the few times the grids do deviate from the norm is when the characters are completely blotto, or completely panicked--even there, panels remain locked in tiers, and the effect is like careening from one side to another when you're too drunk to stand up straight and really, really wish you were suddenly sober again but you're stuck drunk. There's no way out.

Then there's the look of the art itself. Elsewhere I've described it as like immersing yourself in a blacklight poster, which is apt not just because of the subject matter (look and you'll see a few such posters on a few walls, in fact) but because looking at this book can practically give you a contact high. While I read the book this time around, I thought it might be neat to listen to a couple of playlists I recently made of the kind of electronic music I listened to in college, a time when presence of the kind of emotions you find in Black Hole still feels fresh to me, a time when I got stoned pretty frequently listening to that very music. Even though I did this on the commuter train out of New York, I'll be damned if I didn't feel the pressure on my eyeballs, the weight in my limbs, a slight throbbing of the vision when staring at Burns's flawless blacks and the trademark shine effect of his characters' hair. For the first time in his career, I think, style and substance lined up perfectly. It's not for nothing, though, that the use of drugs and alcohol in the book almost always reduces the options available to the characters--most of the time they prevent people from doing what needs to be done or saying what needs to be said, and even during the story's few positive depictions of inebriation, intoxicants are used to push things toward a preordained conclusion rather than open up other possibilities. No minds are expanded.

Maybe the most powerful aspect of the book's claustrophobic effect is its eroticism. True to adolescent love and lust, the desire these characters have to fuck one another is irresistible and all-consuming--it has to be, or else the story couldn't have happened, and virtually every major plot development wouldn't have taken place either. Frequently the very environments where the sex takes place contribute to this feeling. Rob and Chris's fateful liaison takes place in a graveyard. Keith first sees Eliza, nude from the waist down, under the harsh and unforgiving glare of florescent kitchen lights. He first becomes aroused by her when her tail struggles against the restraint of her towel. Their romance is kindled in her bedroom, surrounded by hundreds of her bizarre (and very blacklight) drawings. They first have sex while stoned as fuck, a red scarf draped over the lamp and bathing everything in crimson. The atmosphere is oppressive, but so can be the feeling of being very, very turned on. "That's all it took to get me totally sexed up and crazy," says Keith of his first kiss with Eliza. "I could hardly catch my breath." (Is it worth noting I knew a girl who looked a bit like Eliza back in college? Probably.)

One final motif comes to mind when I think of how Black Hole works to confine and oppress: repetition. I've already mentioned some of the repeated dialogue, and there are any number of repeated visual cues--shattered glass, snakes, holes--and even repeated scenes--Chris floating in the water, those dream sequences. But there are two instances of repetition that stand out to me the most. The first is when Keith angrily leaves his parents' house to avoid watching some lame TV movie with them, only to end up tripping on acid and watching the very same movie at his friend's girlfriend's place. The second, and the most chilling, is Eliza's sexual assault, which is an implied echo of never-directly-described abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather--and, as her nightmare at the end of the book indicates, will likely continue to haunt her dreaming and waking life. Even her and Keith's blissful roadtrip escape is just a tour of places she's already been, trying to recapture the happiness she knew long ago. And maybe this more than anything else is why cutting that final reveal that the bug was temporary was the right move: Bad things usually get better, but that doesn't mean they never come back--different, perhaps, but the same in all the ways that count. Sometimes you can break free of something only to spin right back around to it, spiraling inward into that gravitational maw until that bad thing might as well be constant, for all you can truly escape from it.

I mean, the book is called Black Hole.

Black Hole #11 by Charles Burns