Nerdspan Graphic Novel Roundtable: BLACK HOLE

 

Welcome back to Nerdspan’s second edition of our Graphic Novel Roundtable. This month’s selection was Black Hole by Charles Burns. Have you read it? Tell us your thoughts in the comments! Either way, read on for our (spoiler-filled) thoughts on Burns’s provocative and eerie book!

MMorse:

There’s something manifestly disconcerting about Black Hole. Whatever that is, it starts with the cover image, where the text obscuring the eyes lends the cover a somehow-unnerving aura. There’s a moment in the story where one of its characters finds himself weirdly drawn to the shape of a tail beneath a woman’s towel and that feeling of eerie fascination is one that really permeated this graphic novel as a whole for me as a reader. It reminded me, pretty strongly, of the films of David Cronenberg. Burns’s tale of sex and hormones and disease and mutation and his striking black and white art meld into something really bizarre and weirdly compelling in these pages.

 

Mara Whiteside:

I’ll be the first to admit that I get freaked out easily. I mean, The Mummy still creeps me out. Black Hole is definitely one of the creepiest books I’ve read, surpassing the Evil Ernie crossover with Hack/Slash.

…But it’s hard for me to pinpoint what makes it so unsettling. These appear to be nice kids (note: I haven’t finished the whole novel yet), and their intentions aren’t evil. The only thing I can see that deters me from sympathizing with them is their grotesque image. That realization makes me feel like an awful person, adding to why this book is so frightening.

The image that has stuck out to my the most thus far is when Chris starts to make out with Rob’s tiny, faceless mouth. It was just too close to The Corinthian for me.

 

Leo Johnson:

Black Hole is easily one of the most unique comics I’ve ever read. There is a lot going on within these pages, some of which I surely missed, and it all comes together to make something that’s truly unsettling. Like Mara, I can’t help but not like the characters simply because they look so disgusting. And I think that’s sort of the point.

The one thing that sticks with me the most is that first time you see Chris’ shed skin. Though you don’t know at first whose skin it is, there is something extremely strange about seeing a person’s skin draped over tree branches. When we think of a person, we think of their skin. It’s what we present to the world, it’s “us”. Casting it aside as you would a piece of clothing is something that is unthinkable to most people. Having a person’s shell casually hung on a branch is just an extremely odd prospect. Even beyond its obvious metaphorical connotations, it’s just a striking image.

 

Mara:

The moment where I saw the empty skin made my heart beat a little faster. I went into this month’s selection without any background research; I didn’t even read the synopsis on the back of the book. I didn’t know what to make of it. My first guess as to what it was included a deranged, mutated serial killer, far from what the skin actually represents. That initial judgment has stuck with me the whole novel and colors my perception of the teenagers with the plague.

 

Leo:

The idea of a serial killer mutant flaying his victims and leaving their skins laying around is so terrifying. I almost wish that’s how the book turned out.

 

Keith Hendricks:

I admire Charles Burns’s storytelling skills.  The illustrations are somehow otherworldly and mundane at the same time, and the concept is unique:  he has taken a coming of age tale and infused it with Sartre’s notion that “hell is other people,” so that the children become poisoned by their independence, their relationships, their growing consciousness, and their vices.  It’s a nihilistic morality tale, almost a Pilgrim’s Progress of perversion, with the mutants being the allegorical guides and signposts on Rob, Keith, and Chris’s descent into The Black Hole.  In terms of tone, the most comparable stories could be found in the work of David Lynch, particularly Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.  I can’t say that I love it, because my leanings are towards the optimistic and the light hearted, but I am greatly impressed by it and think it will be on a lot of college syllabuses before the mid century mark.

 

MMorse:

Keith, the Lynch comparison is apt, not so much for the body horror (that aspect is very Cronenbergian to me), but for the sense of unease that we all seem to have felt. There were reports awhile back that David Fincher wanted to adapt Black Hole, and I’d love to see Fincher’s take on the material. He’s no Lynch, but he does have the ability to summon unease, and isn’t afraid of upsetting folks with beautifully composed images.

Leo, I like what you said about how our skin is “us.” What do you make of the fact that Chris tears off who she is, only to look the same underneath?

 

Leo:

Chris shedding her skin, only to look the same was something I expected. It’s the act of shedding her skin that is the real event. With a snake, simply shedding skin doesn’t change their appearance greatly. It’s more about the growth associated with the shedding. In Chris’ case, though she physically looked the same, she definitely changed. I don’t really see Chris doing many of the things she did later in the story if she had not have become involved with the mutated kids and became mutated herself.

I was a little let down by the ending. Though it seemed appropriate, I wanted something a bit more. Maybe something isn’t clicking that will really make it payoff, but I just felt a little let down by it.

 

Joshua Flynn:

I’ve been struggling to find something to say about Black Hole. I was excited to read it–thought it would be right up my alley. But I was never interested in the story.

The plague as a metaphor for teenage alienation is an interesting device. But I can’t help think Joss Whedon nailed the feeling a hundred times on Buffy or Freaks and Geeks did it without a driving metaphor.

I know several people have mentioned not caring for the characters, and one of my big problems was I had difficulty remembering who was who and often confused some of the male characters with other characters. I think everyone’s feelings on the characters offers a great opportunity to ask a question I’ve thought about a lot: can a story succeed with unlikable characters? As readers, do we have to have one character we can cheer for?

If I had to compare this book to something I’d go with Grace Krilanovich’s debut novel The Orange Eats Creeps. It’s about a band of Slutty Teenage Hobo Vampire Junkies in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve seen it compared to Burns’ Black Hole. Krilanovich’s writing is rich and her main character has a mission–finding her lost sister. And I felt that was what was really missing in Black Hole, the characters just seemed to meander. I get meandering is an aspect of the teenage black hole, but without interesting characters who aspire for something more than sex and drugs the indirection just doesn’t make for an interesting tale.

 

MMorse:

I had trouble locking into the story at first also, although I found myself getting involved with the story as I kept reading. Your Freaks & Geeks/Buffy comparison is interesting – you’re right that those shows dealt with teen alienation, but I felt that Black Hole was gunning for a different take on the topic, and in the process I found that the central driving metaphor became more than a metaphor for me as a reader.

In answer to your question, I don’t know that we need someone to “root for” so much as we need to be invested in the characters as characters. To take another television example (which feels apt, since Black Hole has the kind of episodic, cinematic quality found on AMC, HBO and FX these days), The Americans is an excellent show without any one character that the audience can truly root for. All of them are flawed, damaged people without traditionally heroic qualities, but many of them are nonetheless sympathetic in some way. Is it fair to say that your comment about not connecting with the characters reflects the absence of sympathy necessary to hook in to a story?

 

Keith:

I actually found Chris and Rob likable, if narcissistic.  They have the typical teenage hubris of being self centered to a fault.  I found it only too believable that Chris would choose to stay in the woods after Rob’s disappearance, knowing that common sense is not a very cool commodity at that age. As a parent, I agonized over her decision though.  All she would have to do to get clean sheets and square meals is swallow her pride and walk home.

Keith is a moron though.  He will choose any bad company at all without preference.  It’s a miracle he didn’t get killed instead of Rob.

 

Robert Mackenzie:

Fully acknowledging that I’m chiming in late, I wanted to post some brief thoughts about Black Hole, which I luckily enough got my hands on a copy of a few days ago. This was the large, collected edition, which is an issue I’ll come to later.

I liked very much the depiction of unique deformities as a badge of isolation, so as to depict the teenage experience. The sense of strange thoughts and physical changes rendering you unrecognizable to yourself and others is an effective metaphor. I think the issue that some have raised that the characters, before they mutate, look alike in several places is a deliberate and useful choice, presenting a kind of safe, homogenized background against which a person can become aberrant. Ultimately, even though the disease is shown to be sexually transmitted, it’s clear, I think that it’s not only sexually transmitted – although Rick is ultimately depicted as a rapist, I got the impression both he and his buddy from the chess club were most likely virgins, and contracted the disease before any kind of sexual contact. I think, rather, that the sex anxiety needs to be understood in the broader context of deciding a life path for yourself. A lot of the characters are aimless until such time as they are “infected.”

I haven’t fully digested, though have given some consideration to the motif of reptiles and amphibians in the text – Chris shedding her skin, Keith spawning tadpoles, Eliza’s tail snapping off like a gecko or other lizard, snakes and lizards being repeated dream motifs. Amphibians work nicely as a metaphor for something that is “of two worlds”, between the world of childhood and adulthood, whereas reptiles can be seen generally as creatures adapted for and shaped by their particular environment. Given that Eliza seems more fully aware of who she is in her surroundings and Keith is constantly depicted in a state of flux, I think that might be telling.

The issue with the collected edition, as I understand it, is that it completely excises a critical piece of text. The single issues have text pieces that open and close them which the collected edition omits, the most critical of which is that it’s shown that a few months after contracting the disease, it cleared up for everyone. This means, of  course, that none of the characters were permanently marked or scarred, the hellish existence they were enduring did not need to last forever as they thought it would do. It was never all over.

A deliberate choice was made not to include this for the collected edition, and a quick Google search suggests most critics think that’s out of a goal to more accurately depict how the situation would feel to an adolescent. I don’t know if I agree. I think the book goes further than that, and has made an alternative choice by excising that piece of text. It’s deliberately taken out the element of irony to focus on a more essential truth – that even though teenage life is a transitory period, the choices that we make there can be, even if they aren’t always, life determining. Most narratives of the teen years, effectively use them as flashpoints – Wonder Years style recollections of things that you saw as important at the time. I think Black Hole says that this isn’t the case, that the choices you make in that period can mean everything. Rob dies. Rick becomes a murderer. Keith becomes (or is extremely likely to become) a husband and a father, even if that isn’t a choice he’ll ever entirely be settled with.

Chris’ decision to stay out in the water at the end isn’t a desire to regress to childhood (some people equate the symbolism to returning to the womb) – I think that offer’s on the table with weenie roasts and the chance to return to her parents house. It’s an unwillingness and an unreadiness to make a decision, because the narrative shows that the decisions of the teenage years are sometimes choices you can’t escape, even when you make them with bad information. There’s an innate gravity in life choices that sometimes you can’t pull away from. Like a Black Hole.

 

MMorse:

Robert, that’s fascinating to know (regarding the missing text pieces). I read the “collected edition” also, and now I’m very glad that I did. On the one hand, the notion that the Bug ends up being non-permanent is a nice and useful extension of the disfiguring-disease-as-metaphor-for-being-a-teen thing (is that a thing? It is now!). On the other hand, that sense of stomach-churning inevitability – of roads once open, now closed seemingly forever – that lends Black Hole much of its force and (pun partially intended) gravity. I’m glad that we read and chatted about Burns’s book. I don’t know that I’d have been motivated to seek it out otherwise, and I’m happy to have done so. This isn’t “light, fun” reading, but it is curiously powerful.