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Ten years in the making, Black Hole is the long-awaited collected edition of veteran comix artist Charles Burns' 12 part series. It is a dark and brooding story about teenage alienation and loneliness told with Burn's inimitable style of weirdly deformed characters drawn in weighty black lines and shadows. It takes place in the 1970s in a small town whose teenage population is succumbing to a sexually transmitted disease that manifests itself through physical mutations varying from subtle to severe.

The story may sound like a heavyhanded AIDS metaphor but Burns has said in interviews that he wasn't looking to make that comparison. Instead he is channeling more universal teenage fears like social acceptance, isolation and the unknowns of sexual discovery. There is a sense of doom that lurks in the rich black ink of the artwork and pervades every panel of this story. It reads like a David Lynch film with that same creepily still atmosphere. The plague that spreads is not even the scariest aspect of the story. For some of the kids, whose deformities are minor enough to cover up, it doesn't even seem like a big deal. The kids that have to run away and live together in the woods face the bigger dangers though - living alone and disconnected from the world in these cold and creepy woods that Burns has created. And of course there's the one really fucked up kid who starts killing people.

Posted at November 17, 2005 06:52 PM