Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
What makes all these Cronenbergian grotesqueries work is that Burns doesn't play them for gross-out value -- everything looks subdued and formal, and the story's tenor very rarely departs from what you'd see in a monster-free coming-of-age story. In one scene, a group of rough-living kids have trashed the house their acquaintance is taking care of for the summer; in another, a girl stands in the dark, outside a party thrown by a friend she's fallen out with, realizing she'll never see her again. These characters are mutated creatures, but their mutations stand in for the physical and emotional changes of adolescence. The horrors of "Black Hole" are the horrors of high school, just made more vivid.
Burns' name isn't yet widely known outside the comics world, but his style will be instantly recognizable to people who read more than a few magazines. His sweating, beady-eyed characters have appeared in a bunch of Altoids ads, and he's drawn the cover of most issues of the Believer. His ink brushwork is so clean and assured it almost seems like plastic, frozen into place (even when he draws smoke or falling detritus, nothing in these images ever seems to be moving), and the panel and page compositions in "Black Hole" are direct and unfussy, with fringes of light glinting out of the blackness that dominates almost every page.
The story strikes a few sour notes near the end with a violent wrap-up of one of its subplots, but the last chapter is magnificent: two visions of what can happen after the turbulence of a sexual awakening. In the first, a pair of Burns' bug-mutated characters run away together, talking about how they're going to start a new, idyllic life in a new place. It's the kind of fantasy that tends to get cut down by fate, and even earlier in "Black Hole" it would have been. This time, though, it's accompanied by a dream sequence that reprises the structure of one of the book's first scenes, transformed from a vision of hellish squalor into an apparition of serenity and stark beauty; the implication is that maybe things will work out, that their grotesque fumblings have become something meaningful.
It's followed by an overwhelming final scene, in which we see what Chris has shed her skin -- metaphorically, as well as literally -- to become. What sex has made of her isn't a monster but a whole being. She can never have her childhood back, as much as she's longing for it; she has to work out a new way to relate to the rest of the world. But on the last few pages, we see another recapitulation of an earlier dream, an image that Chris once thought would be "my end ... a sparkling ceiling ... some cheap, glittery shit," under which she was naked, stumbling over ground littered with mangled corpses and bones, broken glass and snakes, things concave and -vex decayed into garbage. As she actually experiences it, it's the beginning of her new life: a million stars in the sky above the icy water, beyond a soft beach where she's buried the symbol of the change she'll remember forever.
Douglas Wolk's graphic novels column runs at the beginning of each month in Salon Books.
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