Charles Burns: Black Hole

Can't normally be arsed with straight reviews but I've just finished the collected Black Hole by Charles Burns. The gist: a sexually transmitted teen-plague with symptoms causing physical mutations (cue whipcrack sex-tails, extra mouths, vaguely vaginal slits appearing on girls backs...few stones unturned...) sweeps through a mid-1970s Seattle. The kids get together, pull each other apart, hang around campfires, take shed loads of drugs and eventually start freaking out and killing one another. It's full of teenage fucks (the act and the participators) and drawn in a cold, hard, though oddly slimy (the way people think snakes feel) manner which seems to suit Winter rather than Summer and reminds us of why Kurt Cobain removed his face with a shotgun.

Reviewers tend to take the view that the Teen-Plague/STD serves as a metonym for AIDS and it kind of works in that way (though the moral message is a little ambiguous - is he liking all this teen action or hating it?) but I think it's more likely that it serves as a metonym for facially reconstructive puberty - the way that teen faces can get grotesquely pulled out of whack for a few years, resulting in odd distortions of form (and often a mangled content as well if they're going through the mumbles)...

...ears that never quite match up with the eyes, noses that appear to be hanging around waiting for the rest of the face to catch up, hair that starts developing it's own sense of inarticulated rage...


Charles Burns characters are blandly beautiful (apart from Dave, who looks like an inbred product of a Stillwater and Kings of Leon gangbang) and you can see the temptation he has to defile them in some way, as if he understands that, though these kids are supposedly over most of the physical distortions of puberty, the mental ones are still slapping them full in the face: hence the crystal-clarity of the more psychedelic moments, all of which seem to indicate that most of the kids are on some level embracing the plague as a signifier of sexdom and individuality (cf Nic Cage's snakeskin jacket in Wild at Heart) and as a way of cleaving yourself free of this world and peeling back the skin of another...



This is a beautiful book and, while it's hardly as epic as it thinks it is, it is certainly worthy of your contemplation...