Imagine you’re a teenager. Imagine you’ve finally got the hottest guy/girl in school in the backseat of your car. And imagine that you have some of the best sex of your life.
But then imagine, if you will, that a few weeks later, your partner tell you they have “the bug.” The “teen plague.” The new sexually transmitted disease. Only instead of painful urination or strange warts, you grow tentacles on your face. Or a new mouth on your chest. Or even something as simple as a regenerating tail.
Now mix this with the typical teen angst and you’ve got BLACK HOLE, the new graphic novel from Charles Burns that inventively mixes MY SO-CALLED LIFE with a David Cronenberg screenplay of your choosing. And they say there are no original ideas left.
Weaving multiple narratives, BLACK HOLE deals not with the disease itself, but how the teenagers deal with it. Most run away from home, living in the woods, creating a small community, while others try to hide it, trying to stay assimilated, fearing being discovered. In between, the kids worry not about how long they’re gonna look like this, but if the girl they’ve loved for years will finally go out with them or dealing with first-time acid trips.
Burns’s highly stylized woodcut-esque art is beautiful, compounding the beauty of youth with the pain of deformity in such a way, it’s like putting a cigarette out on your arm, grinding it down until it’s fully out. Painful as hell, but it leaves a beautifully round scar. Much like real teenagerdom, right?
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