Relationships with obsessions in “Black Hole”

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.