Body Fear and Sexuality: Charles Burns’ Black Hole
Working within the tropes of teenage horror genre, Burns renders a vivid tale burning with the intensity of questions which never fade away from puberty- “Who am I? What is my true nature? How do I seem to other people?”
These are questions which might make their appearance as one undergoes the transition into adulthood, but renders one speechless throughout life in their rhetoric. This is most well brought out in the character of ‘foxy” Chris, one of the central characters and the plot’s “heroine”.Horrifying and yet beautiful, Black Hole is a tale of kids whose cultural location in 70’s America doesn’t matter- it speaks to the all-too human fear of abandonment, and change. A graveyard encounter with the handsome Rob Facincanni turns her into one of the ‘freaks’, with the skin on her back splitting open, embarrassingly enough, in front of her friends as she goes for a swim in a lake. Soon enough, the girl whom every boy lusted after is an outcast, unable to face up to her own parents as she runs off to the woods to join her new ‘family” of sexual pariahs. Chris’ is only one of the sub-plots running through the entire narrative, but as she sheds her skin towards the end, literally and metaphorically, she becomes the embodiment of the narrative concern with human inability to deal with change. Her very first experience with sex has necessitated in her a new way to relate and negotiate the world at large, which she joins again.
The story is powerful enough in itself, but what adds momentum to the plot is the imagery. Andrew D. Arnold has called Black Hole “the most Freudian graphic novel you will ever read’, and truer words have never been spoken. Dreams and motifs populate the tale so thickly, you’d wonder if Burns was doing a crash course in psychoanalysis simultaneously. In individual panels as well as entire page layouts, rigorous illustrations clearly evoke the fears that inhabit the lives of these characters- fears which feed on the fact that not only do the characters grapple with an unknown entity, but the fact that parental authority is really at the periphery of their lives.
This is not just therefore, any other coming-of-age story. Unlike most narratives in the horror genre, this is not gratuitous- there is no waste in the rigid drawings or the haunting dialogue. If anything, the tone is subdued, the more so to better pan out the body horror which lies at the centre- a horror which grabs its fuel from the underlying bewilderment of the changing bodies of puberty.