Black Hole
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- ISBN13: 9780375714726
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Winner of the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Awards
The setting: suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a weird plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways — from the hideously grotesque to the devious (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 to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to as a replacement for is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the scenery 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 gorgeous as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a point American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a small too weird.
To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin…Amazon.com Review
The first issues of Charles Burns’s comics series Black Hole started appearing in 1995, and long before it was concluded a decade later, readers and fellow artists were language of it in tones of awe and comparing it to recent classics of the form like Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan and Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World. Burns is the sort of meticulous, uncompromising artist whom additional artists speak of with envy and reverence, and we questioned Ware and Clowes to comment on their admiration for Black Hole:
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| “I reflect I probably learned the most about clarity, composition, and efficiency from looking at Charles’s pages spread out on my drawing table than from anyone’s; his was permanently at the level of lucidity of Nancy, but with this odd, metallic tinge to it that left you feeling very unsettled, especially if you were an aspiring cartoonist, because it was clear you’d never be half as excellent as he was. There’s an nearly metaphysical intensity to his pinprick-like inkline that catches you somewhere in the back of the throat, a paper-thin blade of a fine jeweler’s saw tracing the outline of these thick, clay-like human facts that somehow seem to “go,” but are also inevitably oddly frozen in eternal, awkward poses … it’s an unlikely combination of feelings, and it all adds up to something certainly his own.
“I must have been one of the first customers to arrive at the comic shop when I heard the first issue of Black Hole was out 10 years ago, and my excitement didn’t change over the years as he concluded it. I don’t reflect 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, and I’m 15 years younger than Charles is. Black Hole is so redolently distressing one nearly has to place the book down for air every once in a while. 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 |
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| “Charles Burns is one of the greats of modern comics. His comics are gorgeous on so many levels. Somehow he has managed to capture the essential electricity of comic-book pop-art iconography, dragging it from the clutches of Fine Art back to the service of his perfect, precise-but-elusive narratives in a way that is both universal in its instant appeal and deeply personal.” –Dan Clowes |
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Questions for Charles Burns
Amazon.com: Cartoonists are about the only people today who are effective like Dickens did: writing serials that appear piece-by-piece in public before the whole work is done. What’s it like to work in public like that, and for as long as a project like this takes?
Charles Burns: There were a number of reasons for serializing Black Hole. First of all, I wanted to place out a traditional comic book– I’d never really worked in that comic pamphlet format before and liked the thought of developing a long tale in installments. There’s something very satisfying to me about a comic book as an object and I loved using that format to slowly erect my tale. Serializing the tale also allowed me to focus on shorter, more manageable parts; if I had to face making a 368-page book all in one huge lump, I don’t know if I’d have the perseverance and energy to pull it off.
Amazon.com: One thing that stuns me about this book is how consistent it is from start to end. From the first frames to the last ones that you drew 10 years later, you held the same tone and style. It feels as though you had a perfect vision for the book from the very beginning. Is that so? Or did things renovate unexpectedly as you worked on it?
Burns: I guess there’s a consistency in Black Hole because of the way I work. I write and draw very slowly, permanently carefully examining every small detail to make sure it all fits together the way I want it to. When I ongoing the tale, I had it all charted out as far as the basic structure goes, but what made effective on it appealing was finding new ways of telling the tale that hadn’t occurred to me.
Amazon.com: Some of the very best of the recent graphic novels (I’m thinking of Ghost World and Blankets, along with Black Hole) have been about the lives of teenagers. Do you reflect there’s something about the form that helps to tell persons tales so well?
Burns: That’s an appealing question, but I don’t know the answer. Perhaps it has more to do with the authors–the kind of people who stay indoors for hours on end in total solitude effective away on their heartfelt tales… maybe that kind of reflection lends itself to being able to capture the intensity of adolescence.
Amazon.com: In the time you’ve been effective on Black Hole, graphic novels have leapt into the mainstream. (I reflect–I hope–we’re finally seeing the last of persons “They’re not just for kids anymore!” reviews.) What did you imagine for this project when you ongoing it? What’s it been like to see your confront of the world enter the glare of the spotlight?
Burns: When I ongoing Black Hole I really just wanted to tell a long, well-written tale. The themes and thoughts that run throughout the book had been turning around in my head for years and I wanted to finally get them all out–place them down on paper once and for all. I’ve published a few additional books and while they sold reasonably well, they didn’t set the publishing world on fire. I was pretty sure I’d have some kind of an audience for Black Hole, but that was never a motivating factor in writing the book. And my confront of the world is still pretty dark. I guess I’ll be stepping into the spotlight for a small while when the book comes out, but I imagine I’ll slip back into my dark small studio when it all settles down again so I can settle back into work.
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In all-purpose, I like graphic novels (as opposed to a republished comic book series) when they’re done right. The combination of well-written tale and well-drawn art can be vastly entertaining on multiple levels. This one is huge — it’s unpaged but it’s got to be 350-400 pages — but it makes small or no sense. About one-third of the way through, I started skimming, hoping to catch on to the storyline, but it never happened. The plot, which rumor has it that has to do with a bunch of high school students, who engage in all the regularly risky behavior teenagers engage in, contracting some sort of weird disease (or something) that leads to peculiar facial growths, skin-shedding, appearance of tiny mouths on the throat, and additional weirdness. Moreover, the drawing style is a heavy black-and-white that (usually) doesn’t allow sufficient detail.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
fantastic stuff, especially for when you’re home under the covers running a fever.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Aw. Burns makes a temperamental world that’s as gorgeous as it’s eerie. Very moving, makes you don’t wan’t to be a teenager again.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
A lot of reviewers have gushed over this GN, but I just didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I will say that the art is fantastic, really very disturbing at times. I did not grow up in the seventies, but the experiences of these teenagers were very familiar and it is obvious that Mr. Burns’ teenage years are very fresh in his mind. With all that said, the tale really doesn’t go anywhere and there is never a satisfying, “wow” type moment. Maybe it was supposed to just be a nihilistic journey through a surreal group of high school kids who want to get high and laid. It acheived that for sure, but the effect was quickly forgotten after closing the book.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I had read a couple of reviews of Charles Burnes’ Black Hole and chose I had to read it. I am growing an appreciation of graphic novels/comics, and am very particular about what I read. It had read that this is about an unidentified sexually transmitted disease called “the bug.” “The bug has a different affect on everyone who becomes affected. Some grow tails, extra mouths, molt their skin, etc. It takes place in the early seventies outside of Seattle. But the all-purpose affect that the narrative and drawing style reaches for is honestly timeless. It is about the dread of changing while you know there is nothing that can stop it.
The narrative is engrossing. It is at it best when playing the horror aspects of the tale with out going for the shock. Kids are so disgusted with their bodies and worried of reactions that they have run into the woods and formed their own tent community. The most directed parts of the narrative take place in this section. Outside of the woods it is mostly about the atmosphere of changing into… something. It is moving and a page-turner. There are some violent sections with the murders of several people with “the bug.” This is where the tale looses some of its might. But the closing scenes are gorgeous and restore the dreamlike intensity.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5