Product Description

And, you thought your adolescence was scary. Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness of it, or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high-school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. And, then the murders start. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying (and, believe it or not, autobiographical), "Black Hole" transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it - back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie any more, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. To say nothing of sprouting horns and moulting your skin...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12662 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Review
Black Hole just might be the most perfect book going, if not the sexiest...As startling and evocative a work as the medium has ever produced' Matt Fraction, Art Bomb

From the Publisher
It's here: Charles Burns' epic story of existential horror, over ten years in the making. Yet another Cape graphic novel milestone.

About the Author
Charles Burns lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two daughters. As well as writing comics Burns has designed the set for a New York production of The Nutcracker, illustrated covers for Time magazine and produced an album cover for Iggy Pop.

Customer Reviews

Spellbinding
This has to be one of the greatest graphic novels of the past few years. If David Lynch did teen-drama this would be it. The alienation of teenage life taken to the max. Beautifully drawn, visually like nothing else around. Story of subtlety and eery atmosphere. This is a work of depth and sublime power. Totally recommended.

Once You Are Tagged, You Are "IT" Forever
"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

An intriguing, clever work
Black Hole is a book about adolescents in an American town, who suffer from a strange disease which causes mutations in their appearance. Instead of just making this a trite metaphor for puberty, Burns runs with the concept and makes it an important part of the world he creates where the characters run from home and go to live with hippies and drug dealers or camp out in the woods, afraid of the world they have run from.

I read Black Hole over two Spring evenings at the park. After the first half of the book I felt disappointed because it seemed like nothing especially interesting had happened and what had happened was too slow and unclear (several of the characters look similar). However, beyond the half way point, everything falls into place and the character focus becomes a bit sharper with you caring about the fates of certain people in the book and feeling angry about how they are treated. It may spend a while setting the scene, but when the plot gets going and the character relationships develop, it becomes a fascinating work and impossible to put down. I particularly like the way that violence is for a long time absent from the story then strikes suddenly and shockingly.

I do feel that the book could have been edited down and better presented. Although the art style is nice-looking and Burns is highly skilled at facial expressions and body language, I did feel at times it was generic and inarticulate - there were only very few points in the book where I felt compelled to stop my flow and step back to admire the composition of a scene. The overall atmosphere that the style creates is powerful though, with a concentration of black which makes you feel at times that it's not black ink on a white page, but white struggling to partition the depth of darkness - particularly menacing and effective in the scenes that take place in the woods.

Black Hole is a thrilling and intelligent work which may be a one-shot read but is a great read, nonetheless.