March 23, 2006

Black Hole
by Charles Burns
Pantheon Books, Hardcover, 368 pages, $24.95

By GERRY DONAGHY
Contributing Writer

In her 1990 book Sexual Anarchy, Elaine Showalter writes, “Sexual epidemics are the apocalyptic forms of sexual anarchy.” In her chapter that posits syphilis and AIDS as diseases that bookend the 19th and 20th centuries, she further writes that “The social perception of each disease has been heavily influenced by the possibility of sexual transmission and the attendant notions of responsibility, guilt, and blame. In each case, those suffering from the disease have often been regarded as both the cause and the embodiment of the disease, and have been feared and blamed by others who define themselves as more virtuous.” In former Seattleite Charles Burns’ newest graphic novel, Black Hole, a disease called the “Bug” is the specter haunting the sexual congress of Seattle-area teenagers in the mid-1970s.

This entertaining and provocative book is more than a parade of sexually transmitted mutations. It is a record of how people react, withdraw, and redefine their identities when confronted with the loss of sexual innocence. Black Hole explores the themes of isolation, loneliness, and sexual yearning that are de rigueur in most teen literature but wraps them in an illustrated narrative that is alternately naturalistic and grotesque.

Anonymous and undistinguished Keith has a crush on the attractive and popular Chris, cementing his infatuation by passing out during a prophetic biology class frog dissection that plays on just about every metaphor that a vertical gash can muster. This vagina-dentata-on-DMT scene superbly sets the mood for Black Hole’s narrative trajectory, where flashbacks, flash-forwards, and hallucinations diffuse into each other with the alarming randomness of a nightmare. Keith and Chris have sex with partners infected with the “Bug” and begin to show outward signs of infection, changing their lives forever.

Once it becomes evident that Chris is infected, she withdraws from her friends and her family to live with the other victims of the “Bug” who have created a shantytown in the woods. But even in her exile, Chris is alone, choosing to stay in her tent rather than interact with her fellow infected. For Keith, the disease is a point of attraction between him and an art student who displays her infection by boldly sporting a tail. This begins to get him out of his self-created shell and he seeks solace within the ranks of the infected.

There are many facets of Black Hole that warrant further investigation. One is that the teenagers who populate the story operate in an almost “Peanuts”-like absence of adults. With the exception of a parent here or there, there are no adult authority figures to speak of. When the students become infected, there are no trips to the doctor to find out what has happened, just the immediate withdrawal from teenage society, much the way that melodramatic teenagers run away from home. Is the disease a metaphor for AIDS or teenage sexual politics in general? Why is it that when the teenagers want to get away from adults to have keggers, or get stoned, they go to the woods when that is the same thing that the victims of the “Bug” do? Even though Chris and Keith have fairly unobtrusive signs of infection, why do they react the way that they do? In Black Hole, Charles Burns creates a world that is open to creative interpretation, and it is doubtful that any reader can claim to have the final word.

In Black Hole, Burns creates not just a powerful story but also a book that is physically a work of art. The cover packaging and jacket come across as a Barbara Kruger–designed mash-up of a high school yearbook and sexual pathology case studies. The art inside perfectly captures the characters’ range of experience both benign and phantasmagoric, never once betraying that this was drawn over the course of 12 years. n