HORROR MONTH #6: Black Hole, by Charles Burns (1995)

Type of Media: Graphic Novel

Whenever a list of 'the best horror comics' comes up, you can bet Black Hole will be on it. Released over a period of ten years, this twelve-issue series seems to touch a nerve with a lot of people who tend to read comics. I think it's because Black Hole so vividly shows how frightening being a teenager can be. There can be immense pressure from your peers and youth culture to have sex and experiment with drugs when you aren't ready, even without the danger of those things turning you into a disfigured mutant who hallucinates fields of old syringes and skeleton centipedes.

In Black Hole, set in mid-70's Seattle, there's a plague spreading. A sexually transmitted disease called "The Bug" is making its way around the teenaged population, causing everyone who gets it to develop a physical deformity of some kind. While some kids are lucky enough to get traits they can hide, like a babbling mouth in their chest they can cover up with a thick sweater, others are so scarred by The Bug they flee from society, becoming outcasts living in the woods. Regardless, if people find out you have The Bug, you're socially poisoned.

The story follows two characters, nerdy Keith and popular girl Chris. Both catch The Bug from other people and find themselves forced into a social group of fellow afflicted teens, pushed away to the edges of society. While most of their new companions are nice, some take advantage of the vulnerability of the other outcasts, trying to fulfill their base desires among the wreckage. There's also someone or something lurking in the forest, capturing lone teens and leaving strange totems made of sticks, doll parts, and discarded pornography.

Charles Burns' artwork is consistently great. Making heavy use of ink, Burns turns every scene into a high-contrast interplay of light and shadow. Even mundane suburbia takes on an air of menace, and character designs can change from fairly normal to grotesque at a moment's notice. 

The pages that really capture attention, though, are the extended dream sequences and drug trips that incorporate layers upon layers of psychedelic, horrific imagery. It can be difficult to figure out everything that's going on in these sequences, as they seem to be dense with metaphor, but it's perfectly possible to just enjoy the hallucinations as visual spectacles.

If you're looking for something that intermingles horror with the complexities of being a teen, particularly discovering sex, you'd be hard-pressed to find a story that handles it better than Black Hole. For fans of indie comics, consider this mandatory reading.