My first experience reading Charles Burns was when I was 11. I had a collection of comics for children – Little Lit, edited by Art Spiegelman, which had graphic retellings of fairy tales arranged like newspaper comics – and Burns contributed a piece to it called “Spookyland”. Spookyland was labeled as a “fun puzzle”, where you were supposed to count how many eggs and snakes you could find in a terrifying, nightmare landscape. It was basically Black Hole compressed into a two-page spread: a black and white, Hieronymus Bosch-esque assortment of twisted twigs, worms, broken glass, frog carcasses and disfigured faces. And I had the same reaction to Spookyland as an 11-year-old as I do now, reading Black Hole; I had the conflicting urges to throw the book away in horror and to keep looking. This is the nature of the grotesque – it is hypnotic, and inspires both revulsion and empathy. Within it, we see a twisted reflection of ourselves.
The idea of the novel as a mirror of its time is very present in Black Hole; I interpreted it as a complicated allegory about the 70s, and a lost generation that gets sucked into the black hole. There is something fatalistic about the book, and a sense of futility that pervades it all, from Keith’s premonition with the dissected frog in the opening pages to Chris’s statement, “It was like we were running…racing towards something”, and dreams where she is always headed towards a mysterious horizon, to the mouth in Rob’s neck that moans; “It won’t work…it can’t last…it’s impossible…never make it out alive”.
But to return to the theme of mirrors and reflections and things not being what they seem, I was intrigued by the illustrations on the inside of the book jacket (this is fair game to discuss, yes? Burns drew and designed it all), which show this duality. The front it is laid out like a page from a yearbook, with the portraits of smiling teenagers, and a larger portrait of the high-school age Burns on the inside flap with a mini-fro and glasses. The back has the same layout and shows the same students in their portraits, but now they all are afflicted by the plague, and are drawn covered in boils and horns. And on the back flap Burns draws himself again, but not as a sufferer of the disease. This version of the artist is wearing the same expression and shirt as the first, but he is an older man now. By placing himself “normally” among the gallery of the grotesque, I thought that Burns created another angle from which to interpret the plague. Is the disease the end of childhood? The advent of sexual awareness and adulthood? It’s an inevitable conclusion, and once you have it there’s no turning back.
Also, sort of relatedly, look what Charles Burns did to Tintin, one of the most famous characters of graphic novels and a cherished figure from my childhood:
I actually think it’s pretty interesting and apt.
Black Hole gave me nightmares. I actually had trouble sleeping after I read it, and after finally falling asleep, I had nightmares. I suppose that is the mark of an effective book; what piece has done a better job dealing with horrifying adolescent experiences? This work captures the anxieties of adolescence, and perhaps better than any other book we have read, it captures those anxieties about sex and death. It stuck with me in the most macabre, horrifying ways.
Charles Burns does a great job of creating a world that is simultaneously both terrifying and utterly familiar. He sets Black Hole in a very specific time and place, and this is impossible to avoid, the hair styles and fashion choices immediately place the reader in the 1970s. The concrete setting of this story in a particular place and time makes it all the more eerie later on. The characters were shocking to look at, but wholly relateable in their fears, their transgressions, and their relationships. Burns is very in tune with the anxieties of teenagers, and deals with them in an incredibly powerful manner. The conversations and narration were so realistic, which me feel a very powerful mixture of revulsion and empathy.
I couldn’t help but wonder how much of the story, while obviously fantastical, is based on Burns’ own experiences growing up in the Seattle area during the 1970s. On the cover leaflet he first shows himself as a young man during the 1970s, on the back leaflet he becomes a balding, sickly old man. Clearly he must have one of the most horrifying imaginations in the world, but it is interesting to wonder what formative experiences he would have had growing up, especially since he chose to position such a terrifying book in a place and time so completely familiar to him.
Burns makes great use of stark black and white contrasts – I can’t imagine this piece having the same sort of creepy power or eerie atmosphere in color, and his creativity is manifested brilliantly in the art work, where he invents a number of uniquely horrifying diseases and disfigurements. Some of the images, especially the montage at the end which portrays all of the teenagers after they have caught this terrible bug, were deeply unsettling; the bug reveals itself in a number of ways, each one horrifying in its own sense. The idea that some people’s disfigurements were readily apparent (forcing them to hide away from society) while other people were able to keep theirs well hidden was fascinating. Some of the images were so bizarrely affecting, so disquieting, that the only appropriate response was to laugh at the awful absurdity of it.
The ending, which I found profoundly beautiful, reminded me of Night Fisher in a number of ways; the troubled teenager lies down within the natural world, gazing upwards and finally finding a sense of place. In this book I found it even more discomforting; she’s starving, all alone in the world, freezing cold, but still in the only place where she knows peace. I found this ending to be the most moving one of any of the stories that we have read, and a large part of why this book was so powerful to me. The final sentiment concerns the immense beauty in life despite the most unfathomable hardship; it may be a bit of a cliché , but Burns expresses it better than nearly anyone. The simple last frame showing the starry sky ties in beautifully with all of the other celestial themes in the book (black holes, Planet Xeno). I think it was the loveliest way that Burns could have ended such a horrifying book.
Side note: This isn’t relevant to my post in any way, but I really wish that Burns had a better editor/proof-reader. He spells the name “McCrosky” in two different ways, and has a lot of grammatical/spelling errors throughout this book. Silly things like this shouldn’t be such a distraction for me, but they were.
Every time I see a panel drawn by Charles Burnes I have the urge to project it across the entire wall of a gallery. Any single one could easily stand on its own merits as a stark and stunning painting, and I have no idea how long it took him to fill an entire book with these tiny wonders. His dynamic lighting and composition generate a heady sense of dread in each image that builds exquisitely when read together as a narrative. Burnes generates a particular series of iconography through his artwork that elaborates and expands on the themes Black Hole expresses only briefly in its text.
Keith’s inner monologue in the issue “A Dream Girl” shows how Burnes uses interdependent words and text to suggest thoughts that Keith can’t yet accept. Here Keith, stoned and melancholy, stands in his “place by the window where nobody’s going to mess with me,” struggles to understand how his feelings for both Chris and Eliza and sex in general have changed over the past few months, while still managing to avoid directly facing why they have changed. When the teenager is unable to “stay focused on [his] buzz” in order to “shut out all of the bad stuff,” his thoughts turn first to his growing revulsion for his former “dream girl,” Chris. On this page, Burnes uses the image of Keith’s face in white profile against total blackness four separate times, two large, and two small, each on top of their twin, while he watches memories of the young woman in loopy-framed panels. “But there it is,” he thinks in the center panel, “like a movie playing in my head…an endless flood of images I can’t control.” His impassive profile frames his inner image of Chris (framed itself in a rectangle like a movie screen) both on the left (watching the movie) and on the right (staring off the boundaries of the panel). This relentless repetition hammers home Keith’s immobility – both physically in the scene and symbolically in his development as a character.
During this sequence, Keith struggles with his disillusionment over his crush, Chris, who has managed to rebuke him without him expressing his feelings for her, and who has been steadily spiraling into depression and alcoholism after the disappearance of her boyfriend, Rob. While Keith concludes in this page’s final panel “I thought she was the one. I really did. How stupid can you get?” the text alone can be taken to imply that he has now gotten over his feelings. Burnes’ art tells another, more troubling story, however, that suggests that this change is not as clean a break as the teenager would like to think. Even while the character claims that Chris’ image forcefully floods his thoughts, Burnes fills the page with images Keith’s own face instead. That repetition of Keith’s impassive profile, coupled with his stance in the final panel – Keith stands facing left now instead of right but he still stares, his hands at his side, at sleeping Chris – suggests that he holds some amount of power over these images that he either can’t or won’t let go of yet. The way his narration presents these series of images of his former “dream girl” sliding into despair reflects more on his relationship to his idealization of her, and less with Chris herself as her own person.
This sequence is in visual stark contrast to one following only a few pages after, where Eliza surprises Keith at the supermarket. Where Keith’s thoughts on his feelings for Chris before were drenched in black and dominated by his own face, his exchange with Eliza glows with the white grid of the supermarket ceiling. Eliza now instead of Keith enters almost every panel, and her own face (missing those distorting, toothed shadows he used before on Keith’s profile and on nearly every other page) fills almost the entire panel. We don’t even need the text here (“There was more color in her skin,” “dark, clear eyes”) to tell us that Keith’s thoughts are fully occupied with Eliza’s immediate presence — these panels lean towards duo-specific combinations. In a book full of hopelessness it’s here that Burnes lets a little hope sneak in – hope that his characters can evolve past obsession and idealism to reach some sort of honest adult relationship.
On page 20 of Night Fisher, Loren turns in an essay entitled “Steinbeck and Fitzgerald: The Grapes of Gatsby”, networking two authors of the Lost Generation, a circle of literary individuals after World War I, to amplify the feeling of disillusionment found throughout the graphic novel. It is also important to note that Fitzgerald and Steinbeck wrote on different topics for The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath: Fitzgerald’s novels addressed opulence, materialism, masculinity, and the unattainable American dream, while Steinbeck wrote on the civilians’ decrepit states after the American dream collapsed and left many destitute. The key thing here is that both novels are about searching for the meaning of existence without a clear answer in sight. Loren, too, seems to find himself obsessed with sex, the glamor of drugs, and chasing a goal that is unattainable. At the same time, Loren finds himself distanced from his hometown of Maui evidenced by its peculiar formation, its foreign flora, and Lacey.
The story describes Loren and Shane’s disillusionments on different terms which are never fully realized at the end of the novel. Loren’s goal, to match Shane’s level of prowess as an intellectual alpha-male, is continuously rejected and rebuffed, preventing Loren from progressing as a character. Shane, a straight-A student, is able to acquire what seems valuable or material, but never desires the next plateau of life: “I love it here” (76). Both of the students live “lavish” lifestyles, complete with drugs, adventure, and sex, which speaks to vanity and materialism present in Fitzgerald and Steinbeck’s novels. This is offset by the aimless and complicated direction that the boys choose to follow, perhaps symbolized by the unruly nature of Loren’s knots (58). The images and diction on pages 24-25 reveal Loren’s disillusioned state: A picture of an American action hero is torn off of the wall to reveal a large empty wall that is accentuated by the mess that surrounds it. The American hero, an icon of America’s strength, prestige, and glory is violently removed and is substituted by a vast emptiness that symbolizes Loren’s inability to relate to the country he belongs to. The material possessions also are cast aside by Johnson, since they are drawn to cramp up open spaces. He continues in the same panel: “ It’s always been this way with him [Shane] — I’m always playing catch up” explicitly stating that he is chasing after Shane’s embodiment (25). As the story progresses, it is clear that Loren will never catch up, exhibited by how quickly Shane runs away from Loren who staggers forward in shock during a track race (135). To top it off, even Loren’s reflection in the troubled water suggests an air of disillusionment as Loren’s identity and self perceptions become blurrier and messier (24).
The reader also gets a sense of Loren’s distant relationship with Maui through the story’s mechanics. The preface of the novel shows the formation of Maui, a process that is slow, alien, and somewhat capricious (2-4). The reader accepts Maui’s conception as a foreign and unknown facet of the graphic novel which suggests that Loren views Maui on the same terms. He is incapable of connecting with the state’s flora as a teacher gives a lecture on the movement of seeds from the Asiatic mainland many years before Hawaii was settled by Westerners (83). The flowers’ origins remain shifty to Loren until the end of the novel when he notices the fruits and plants that make Maui a unique environment for growth (127). One can further assess Loren’s detachment from Maui through Lacey, Loren’s unrequited love interest: “I can’t wait to get off this rock” (87). As the story progresses, Loren becomes more distant to his homeland, a disembodiment that Steinbeck procures within The Grapes of Wrath.
There are no words to sufficiently describe how disturbed I was after reading Charles Burns’ Black Hole. Even while taking into account the fact that the images are merely illustrations, I found it difficult to look at them for too long. Every panel in the novel is sketched with such detail that the story seemed to be playing out like a movie in front of my eyes. Because of this, each illustration resonated in my mind that much more vividly. Even as I tried to convince myself that the black-and-white illustrations weren’t real, I couldn’t help shuddering each time I saw a picture of Chris in the process of shedding her skin or Rob with his second mouth exposed on his chest. The novel’s unusual plot only adds to its overall creepiness, so there’s never really a respite from the feeling of unease that settles in from the first page.
There is one sequence in the novel which I remembered long after reading it, where Chris and Rob are sitting in the woods, kissing. By this point, Chris is already experiencing the effects of the virus and, as a result, isn’t as freaked out by Rob’s deformity. The first four panels of the section progress from aspect-to-aspect as Chris asks a reluctant Rob to show her his second mouth. Chris brushes aside Rob’s protest that his side effect of the bug is gross before the panels switch to moment-to-moment transgressions. In the fifth and sixth panels, Chris kisses Rob’s second mouth, intrigued rather than disgusted by it. Having her own genetic mutation, I can understand why Chris isn’t bothered by Rob’s second mouth, but that doesn’t mean I find it any less creepy. The following five panels return to aspect-to-aspect transgressions of Chris and Rob as they decide to stay in the forest, where they can be together in private. In the last panel, Chris says, “I’d stay here forever if I could,” which is ironic because, at this moment, she could never imagine that the forest would become her home once she’s forced to leave her family. The novelty of the situation seems to romanticize everything for Chris, which is why she truly believes that things will work out between her and Rob.
The ease with which Burns depicts situations involving the plague-stricken teens, such as the previously mentioned sequence, is unnerving to say the least. Because the novel never ceases with its barrage of gruesome images, there was never a point where I was comfortable enough to linger on an illustration for more than a few seconds. Another example of Burns’ nonchalant attitude towards the disease is when Keith first notices that he’s developed its side effect. A week after his first sexual encounter with Eliza, Keith discovered “tiny dark bumps” that appeared around his ribs. The next two panels progress from aspect-to-aspect progressions as Keith realizes the bumps are a part of his body. The bumps soon morphed into “little tails” that resembled tadpoles. To show the similarities between the two, the next panel illustrates five tadpoles, each with wavy tails that look like the pieces of flesh hanging from Keith’s body. Burns pushes forward with his comparison by relating a story from Keith’s childhood in which he and his cousins caught tadpoles in a river, kept and forgot about them, until they eventually died and started to rot. Although I’m not quite sure why, the last panel showing a pile of decomposing tadpoles humanized the story for me in a way that no other images could. Maybe this is because I kept picturing the same fate for Keith, although I sincerely hoped this wouldn’t be the case.
Charles Burns’s twisted take on the idea of a “plague” (perhaps not the best definition for the disease, but that aside) mirrors the real-life circumstances of STDs while also (clearly) extrapolating on this idea, also using the disease as a tool for exploring the challenges of teenaged life. The disease is passed like any real-world STD – through sexual contact (although there is indication near the end of the book that it may also be passed through saliva; this is never completely confirmed) – but has the quality of manifesting differently in each person. Additionally, this disease makes public and unavoidable that which can typically be hidden or lived with. Interestingly, however, the characters with the disease tend to be stigmatized more for the disease itself, rather than the behaviors that caused them to get the disease, even though the grotesque results are in some ways a physical “punishment” for the “immoral” behavior of the teenagers in the story.
The group of individuals with the disease in some ways mirrors the social hierarchy of teenaged life: there are those relegated to the “bottom of the barrel” whose mutations show up unavoidably and grotesquely on their faces (Dave), those whose mutations are not as readily obvious but who still take a place among the “outcasts” while remaining removed or “above” the larger group (Chris), and those who have a mutation but are able to hide it enough to continue on with a “normal” life (Rob, Keith). While the story is told from the perspective of three individuals who begin as “normal” and become a mutant over the course of the story – Rob initially seems to be normal but it is revealed that he has the disease; the reader sees Chris and Keith become infected – all three have mutations that can be “dealt with” (Chris chooses to live among the mutants, although her mutation is such that she may have been able to maintain her normal life, as she indicated at the end of the story when she considers going back home to her parents). The reader is never allowed inside the head of a character like Dave whose mutation is all over his face. How do these characters feel as compared to Chris, Keith, and Rob? Why does Chris decide to isolate herself, both from “normal” society but also from the other mutants that she lives with? After what happened at the party when everyone saw Chris’s back, was there a way that she could have rejoined “normal” society? Finally, how are we to understand the way that Keith finds Eliza’s mutation sexy as opposed to grotesque as most other mutations appear? Why does he associate so freely with mutants even when he is healthy?
Another unexplained element is why the disease manifests differently in different people. There do not appear to be any duplicate manifestations of the disease, and it is unclear why people react the ways they do. Is it possible that the ways the diseases manifest say something about the person? Does Chris’s shedding of her skin say something about her hiding within her own skin? Or perhaps feeling uncomfortable in it? Does Rob’s independently-minded mouth indicate that he represses? Or perhaps does not speak much to begin with?
Burns’s Black Hole leaves me with more questions than independent thoughts; it would probably require multiple readings to start to understand the complex issues of young adulthood, social hierarchy, and difference that he grapples with.
Charles Burns must have an exceptionally dark mind. His imagery certainly is dark, with its grotesque and morphing style that continually forms connections throughout the book. The very first example of this occurs on the first three pages. A wavy tear appears amidst the blackness. Turning the page, we see the tear coming into focus as the light increases. Now it looks like rather vaginal, a gash on the page. A frog in the middle of dissection is the final installment in this morphing imagery. These pages set the mood for the rest of the book, a hint about what readers should be looking for. Gore and sex… if only drugs could somehow have been communicated, these three pages could be a visual synopsis of style and content!
(This is not to mock Black Hole in any way. It is certainly a work to be respected, for its fantastic and concurrently believable plot as well as the creative, suggestive imagery.)
This is just the beginning of these teasers; before every chapter Burns includes one. These images are always relevant to what goes on in the chapter, just like the first three pages of the book. Sometimes they are reminiscent of the first evocative slashes. At other times they take on that suggestive vaginal shape, like the page before The Woods. Occasionally they are simply pertinent to the chapter with no other reason, like the chicken leg before Dave tries to buy a bucket of fried chicken or the image of windowpane before the chapter where Keith and his friends get high on that form of acid. A few of these teasers are visual rhymes with the next page: the tied-together bones before Planet Xeno mimicking the position of the celestial disembodied arm holding the joint and the broken bottle that takes the same shape as the sleeping Chris before Sssssssss. There are a few that simply rhyme with themselves, such as the moon, the orange, the ovum, and the half-eaten sandwich. These have some relevance to the plot chapter but their effect is more of a connection between chapters rather than visual exposition. Almost all of these teaser pages are included in the four page teaser for the final chapter, “The End,” circling down into a black hole.
This morphing effect also reflects the changing nature of the infected characters, who are slowly becoming more and more unlike their previous forms as “the bug” eats them up. The most obvious example of this connection are the teaser panels that remind us of Chris’s back, an irregular pattern of slight gashes with tapered ends. Black Hole is a novel about the perversion of form, relationship and self as well as the connectivity between these kinds of perversion. By taking on that same idea in his imagery, Burns creates a gruesome yet compelling world of normal life morphed into something unusual.
Finally, the most poignant of these polymorphous connections is that of the night sky. Before Chris and Rob’s first night on the beach we see a completely black panel with small white dots, reminiscent of a starry sky. Later, after Rob’s death and the fruition of his little mouth’s prophecy in that chapter, Chris goes back to their beach and swims naked again, alone, grieving and lost without even a community of infected people to support her. “I go through times when I just want to end it all. Be done with this life… but then I look around and think, how could I give all of this up?” This scene is one of personal change for Chris, newly homeless and completely alone. At first I thought that the final panel, the same starry night sky with her narration, “I’d stay out here forever if I could,” was meant to evoke a suicide, Chris fading quietly into the water and never coming out. Given the first quote I gave here I’m not so sure. Perhaps Chris is just remembering an earlier scene, when in a romantic moment with Rob she said the same thing. Interpretation could go both ways, but this final connection and peaceful exit is an excellent ending for this strange novel.
Black Hole is a really thick graphic novel. Every time I carried it in my bag, I thought a whole would bust through. A book as heavy as Black Hole, I was expecting a lot of detail and concepts to be explained fully,but, I was left with many unanswered questions. A lot of the stuff that happened in the book, I had to either make an educated guess as to why something occurred or just leave it open ended and deal with it. I felt that this novel was more mysterious than creepy but perhaps its because I read it trying to understand the characters motives than looking at the overall scariness of the book.
One of the first mysteries that I really wanted to understand but there was no answer was, how did this disease get started? Who was patient zero and why would some people willing get themselves infected if they saw people like that thrown from society? Rob and his other band of high school misfits lived in the woods because they were infected with this strange disease but it doesn’t tell the readers how they were infected. We know that it is something like an STD because it spreads during sex or transmission of body fluids, but did some of these kids know what would happen to them if they agreed? It was common knowledge that sex would lead to infection by the time Chris was, but was it before? I would think no one would willingly have sex with someone with that disease unless they were fully committed to that person. Having sex with a person who is infected changes your life forever and I do not understand why some people would make that choice, unless they felt their lives were worthless already. This whole patient zero idea is something that really bugged me and I wish they had answered.
Another mystery that I am unsure of is the death of Rob. I made an educated guess that the death of Rob was Dave’s fault, but the way it happened made these infected teens appear like savage beasts. At the end of the story if the readers haven’t realized already, Dave had a huge crush on Chris and didn’t want anyone to get in the way of it. He then starts shooting everyone in sight and says that if he can’t have her, no one will. This to me made me think that Dave told Roy to kill Rob. Roy beats Rob to death but says that he made me do it or something to that affect. It is beacuse of Dave’s love for Chris that he has Rob murdered, but I still don’t fully understand Dave’s meltdown and his reasons for killing all of the other infected kids.
Chris’s knowing of something about Rob is also a mystery. At the party she claims to know something about Rob which he assumes it to be his infection, but it isn’t. They sleep together and then Chris discovers his extra mouth and is a little shocked. He says he thought she knew but apparently she didn’t. I really wish the book had explained what it was she thought she knew about him if it wasn’t that he was infected.
There were other instances of mystery like Keith and his attraction to that girl with a tail, his shock when he found little tails on his chest, etc… I guess the book serves its title well. While reading it I felt I was in an extremely weird and mysterious world and that is what a black hole is. It is sort of a weird and mysterious place that just sucks you in and it is easy to get lost.
“Black Hole” is one of the most depressing and harrowing graphic novels we have read yet. Charles Burns’ work wholly lives up to its title, as every element throughout this piece is dark,dismal, and strange.
The work is aptly named, as a black hole represents an object that man knows very little about. Subsequently, this Seattle high school is a metaphoric “black hole” as this disease consumes the student’s lives, creating a situation that no one really knows how to handle. The concept of a sexual transmitted disease that turns its carriers into creatures shunned by the public is a disconcerting idea indeed. Burns utilizes this fact to further unnerve his readers as he takes the usual conceptions concerning an STD and takes them to an extreme. The students who are infected with it become something more along the lines of lepers as opposed to infected teenage kids.
Burns explores themes that we have seen in many other novels that we have read, including sex, love, struggling with one’s identity, etc. Yet what is striking is the fact that so many of these novels are about High School years. Perhaps this period in one’s life offers the easiest segway into exploring these difficult topics; but Burns finds a way to twist these topics in such a manner that it is wholly discomforting for his reader. When comparing this work to “Night Fisher”, which depicts teenager life in a realistic fashion, it just seems Burns went to the greatest lengths imaginable to ensure that his work was not something easily forgotten. Yes, the common themes from teenage life are explored, such as Keith’s love for Chris, his inability to find himself as he is always desiring to be someplace different from where is his, and overall disillusionment with one’s place in the world. But Burns is able to use this disease as a means to take all of these themes, and explore them in such a striking manner as it grants him unlimited maneuverability in his story. Simultaneously, this disease allows for grotesque images to fill the pages, enhancing the author’s striking exploration of these common teenage year themes.
The author creates a dark work through not only the story and themes, but through the imagery as well. Using the grotesque throughout, Burns is able to create a sickening feeling which permeates the pages. When reading, I was thoroughly uncomfortable as Burns seems to take each strange and dark image, and find a way to manipulate it to an extent I didn’t think was possible. That being said, I thought Burns was effective in his use of black and white color which only accentuated the dark and strange vibes which filled the novel.
There is no relief for the reader upon finishing the novel; rather, Burns has presented one of the bleakest outlooks on teenage life I have ever encountered. However, the ending did remind me of “Night Fisher”, as Burns leaves us with the image of Chris floating in a dark sea which has consumed the page; this is similar to Johnson’s depiction of Loren being consumed by the weeds which he is lying in. The final frame is indeed unnerving as Burns leaves us with an image of a starry sky, which usually holds a peaceful/tranquil connotation, yet he has completely warped it with this tale, accurately represent “Black Hole” in full.
Although R. Kikuo Johnson’s artwork in Night Fisher was sometimes a little difficult to perceive, in terms of who was who or what was going on, and understand, in terms of how an image fit into the scene or onto the page, there were many moments where, upon closer inspection, I was completely blown away. Take, for example, pages 66-67, where Loren walks into the classroom a few minutes before the Calc test is about to begin. The diagrams at the top of page 66 transition us from the previous scene—a nighttime scene from Loren’s secret life in which he and his accomplices steal tires—into daytime at Winthrope, into an academic environment. The following four frames, which show Loren dunking his head into the water of an outdoor fountain, albeit without actually directly showing his face, show that he’s trying to wake himself up from coming off the meth in addition to showing his ‘baptism’ into someone a little different. But we don’t find out what that something different is until almost the end of page 67; Johnson brings us to that point through a suspenseful sequence.
The frame at the bottom of page 67 is a crowded long shot of the classroom, filled with students and abuzz with speech bubbles. That the students’ last-minute worries about the exam (“That’s only true when the radical is in the denominator.” “He said we didn’t have to know that.”), as expressed in the speech bubbles, overlay each other demonstrates that what they’re saying is interchangeable and inconsequential. Normally, my instinct is to read every word on the page, so it’s frustrating that I simply can’t decipher everything on the page, but the point is that what they’re saying doesn’t matter—it doesn’t matter in actuality, and it’s also starting to not matter to Loren.
Loren enters in the frame at the top left of the next page; we see his back as he stands at the entrance to the classroom, his head still dripping wet. This perspective, with Loren standing far from his sitting classmates, creates a distance between him and everyone else, reinforcing the social distance that Loren now feels from them. This distance continues because Johnson persists in not showing us Loren’s face as Loren walks through the classroom. Instead, we only see his body, with his classmates and their meaningless speech bubbles in the background. Interestingly, Loren’s body—first from the side, then from the front (and further up his torso)—is positioned in the center of two frames. With his body in the center and some of his classmates looking up at him with quizzical glances, he appears powerful and dominant.
Then, finally, we see Loren’s face. He is sans glasses, but with a black eye, still-wet hair, collar askew, and, most importantly, a confident and satisfied—possibly even smug—smirk on his face. His face is the focal point of this frame, and the perspective is angled upward, so that it looks like we’re looking up at Loren and/or he’s looming over us. The transformation that was hinted at with a face dunked in the fountain a page ago has finally been revealed, all without real dialogue, through Johnson’s artwork. Loren may not actually be that much of a badass; after all, he got his black eye accidentally. But he feels like a badass, and that’s what matters. The artwork, through the use of perspective and framing, gets inside his head and shows us his changed attitude.
