Black Hole
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.
I think Charles Burns is one of those Superman readers who never really got over the idea of Bizarro World.
I think, though, that the novel is a mirror of our time and not of its time, as it were–that while it retains a 70s teen movie aesthetic, it is most definitely about not just lost innocence—that happens early on—it’s about learning to live with despair. As has been noted in other posts, you only behave like this if you feel like your life is empty, and the black hole of the title is not about a generation as much as it is about the loneliness that drives all of these bad decisions in here. Think of Eliza, standing half-naked at the sink and forgetting she had clothes on, or Dave, who imagines he can kill his way into Chris’ heart and life, or Chris, who suffers as the object of desire, with her fantasy of floating away until all of her problems just stop.
Despair, and it’s parents, loneliness and the inevitability of aging and death, are all here. And the AIDS metaphor is very of the early 90s/late 80s. If this were a mirror to the 70s, it wouldn’t be about disease and sex. It would just be about sex.
Think of Orwell, in other words. You are always writing about your times even when you are not writing about your times, he said. I think of it often.