Polymorphous Imagery

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.