I apologize for the black and white scan, my computer is
on the fritz.
Ten years in the making. One of the most long-awaited masterpieces by a recognized master of the comic book craft. A former RAW creator and an artistic cornerstone of both Kitchen Sink Press and Fantagraphics. One of the few artists to have his work published through the highly tauted Pantheon line at Random House. The reputation that preceeds Black Hole and its creator, Charles Burns, is a formidable one. So, now that the book has finally been released into the stores with a marketing campaign that includes reviews in Entertainment Weekly and Time, the question must be raised: Is it any good?
The answer, unfortunately, is "no."
Let's get a few things out of the way first. Burns is an amazing illustrator. Man draws like a motherfucker. His immaculate, thick, inky, tapered line is something to behold. His compositions, his use of chiaroscuro and his panel work is gorgeous. One look at his drawings and you can see that you're looking at the work of a man with great talent. He's an amazing designer, the yearbook endpapers are a lovely and effective touch in a brick of a book that sports a striking cover with images evocative of questions of identity politics.
But that's where most of the appeal of this book lies. As a story, as comics, Black Hole falls woefully short of the immediate visual experience.
The story centers around a group of teenagers growing up in suburban Portland in the middle of the seventies. After engaging in sex, the teenagers are afflicted with a venereal disease that causes a number of physical mutations, from tails to skin-shedding to body spines to blisters. Many of the transformations suggest a amphibian de-evolution, and connection can easily be made between the sexual urges of these youths and a physical manifestestion of their more primitive reptilian brain. Right there the metaphors find themselves on shaky ground. Why would the reptilian brain that controls sexual urges manifest itself in amphibian mutations? The answer is never addressed, let alone reolved.
When Black Hole began in 1994, it was part of a zeitgeist of recontextualized horror stories that spread like wildfire through popular culture. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Twin Peaks, American Gothic and the X-Files on tv; movie series like Scream, Gingersnaps, Gamera and the films of Takashi Miikeand Shinya Tsukamoto; and even the comics work of Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore were breaking horror conventions everywhere you turned around. Many of these works dealt with the horrors of adolescence, using the familiar tools of the horror story in much the same way Black Hole does. Many of them did it better.
The obvious precursor to Burn's book is the film work of David Cronenberg. Cronenberg, a progenitor to those remaking the horror story into something more personal, more phycho-sexual, more disturbing, more relevant and cabable of addressing more than just the spooky or the gruesome, has his unknowing thumbprint pressed firmly between these covers. The gaping wounds that plague the characters' thoughts, the extra mouths, the phalic tails, the shapes of the characters' faces; all suggest a phycho-sexual underpinning. What does it tell us that a girl finds kissing the vaginal slit of a mouth split from beneath a boy's esophogas? What does it mean that a boy finds his soulmate in a woman with a frisky, muscular tail? What does it mean when the mouth speaks? What does it mean when the tail falls off? Cronenberg would have had a field day. Freud would have too. Hell, Whedon may have even plowed into that full-steam. Burns isn't particularly interested in the answers or the questions. He doesn't want us to be either, as his characters simply dismiss these things that get in the way of their ideas of romantic love.
It's not even the primal act of sex that so blinds these characters to the transformations taking place in their bodies. This over-romanticized idea of love is what does. It is also what keeps these characters from ever becoming more that the lovely two-dimensional illustrations Burns has painstakingly rendered. I'll be the first to admit that this romantic ideal is prevelant among the young. I remember it being an obsession as well, and it that regard, Burns hits his mark cleanly. But I also remember a horniness divorced from romance. I remember humor and a desire for an incitefulness I wasn't ready for. I remember inquisitiveness. I remember creativity from artists as well as bullies. I remember seeing the emperor without his clothes for the first time and I knew when an adult was treating me and mine as someone who could be an equal.
Burns doesn't seem to remember any of these things. His characters don't confuse horniness with love and never have sex without romance. Every act is perfect. They exhibit little humor, they stab at philosophy without asking the relevant questions. His artists make bad art and no one seems capable of a creative action. When they see the emperor standing before them naked, the lesson they learn is that sometimes friendships don't survive adolescence. That's about it.
Again, I apologize for the scan. In this case, I blame my
reluctance to tear the book apart physically to get a flat image. This is a
key sequence in the relationship between two characters, if there's something
the images are communicating that isn't in the more informative text, I'm at
a loss to find it.
As comics, Black Hole fails even worse. it wears its EC comics influence like an ill-fitting, out-of-date pair of trousers. it's 2005—hell, it WAS 1994. When I start reading the comics of someone dragged through the aesthetics of RAW, someone held up by his peers as having little equal, someone producing his long-awaited masterpiece, I excpect to find a creator working at the top of his game, armed with all the tools available to him. I expect to find a comics creator, someone who blends word and image, who employs the full language of comics at his disposal. Instead I find a book of illustrated prose. As beautiful as Burns' images are, they rarely do little more than show us what his captions have already told us. The captions are written from a rotating first person, and the images help keep the narrators somewhat distinct (until one cuts his hair and becomes almost indistinct from the main girl), but these peeks into the minds of his characters reveal minds interested in describing their surroundings, of explicating emotions easily read on their faces or replacing what would have undoubtedly been another panel to draw.
It's not so much the fact that words and images are pulling double duty and rarely complement or contradict one another that's the problem, but the fact that words and pictures do very little to tell us anything interesting. An attractive boy is shown. A character thinks that he is attractive. A pretty girl is shown. A character tells us that she is pretty. A character rolls a joint. He also tells us that he's rolling a joint. A girl laughs. Guess what, we knew she was laughing before we saw it because we were already told that she was laughing.
It would be one thing if Burns used language (either written or visual) to tell us something that maybe his characters are missing. There's nothing wrong with naive characters so long as the author doesn't assume his readers to be naive as well. In fact, it's the author's duty to give more to a reader if his characters a re so unwilling (or able) to do so themselves. At the very least, it is the author's reponsibility to suggest that there is more to what's going on than meets the eye, assuming the author has that capacity.
I don't know if Burns has that capacity. I have enjoyed his past work, Big Baby, El Borbah, Dog Boy, his illustrations, et al. Nothing ever struck me as amazing, but there was always that beautiful linework and the promise—the potential— of something more. If only he could expand upon that work in a long-form piece. I'm also not sure that he's done that long-form piece yet. Black Hole is a slight work. As a prose short story, it would appear very thin. As a novel, it would be viewed as a joke. I'm afraid, and a little bit ashamed, of a medium that has produced so few great works that this is held in such esteem.
When disposable, and easily dismissed, pieces of pop-culture are out-smarting you and out-exploring the same territory you've staked as your own, it's time to step up your game. It's time to mutate and evolve, to ask the questions the mainstream is afraid to ask, to find answers under rocks the rest of us are too timid to turn. Hopefully, it won't take another ten years for Burns to step up to the challenge.
—Justin J. Fox