62 BLACK HOLE
shadow other characters as they try to fi t in somewhere in this network of high school
acquaintances.
Th e unaff ected teens seem carefree; they party at each other’s houses and venture
into the woods for bigger parties. Deeper in the woods, some diseased teens who cannot
hide their symptoms live in a tent village. Some who are aff ected can pass for normal;
they attend school and parties, and mingle with the uninfected. With its hierarchies
of deformity, the novel off ers a fascinating study of the Other, the ostracized, the out-
sider, and it certainly encapsulates the importance of looks and appearances within teen
culture.
Whether in the woods or inside houses, the novel’s settings are littered with waste:
splinters, bits of beer bottles, sandwich and candy wrappers, molted skins, torn photos,
cigarette butts, bone fragments, doll heads, broken tails, and eventually bodies and body
parts. Similarly, characters cannot escape the lingering residue of their dreams of snakes
with human faces, of tendril tongues, of zombies. In one of Chris’s dreams, she pulls a
tiny scroll from a cut on the sole of her foot; these infected bodies thus hold secrets and
signs. Some of these visions seem to be a symptom of the disease, some are fueled by
characters’ consumption of alcohol, pot, or harder drugs, and some are induced merely
by sleep or puberty.
Winner of the Eisner , Harvey , and Ignatz Awards, Black Hole is a virtuoso perfor-
mance. Burns’s use of heavily inked panels and precise, stylized feathering provides a
slick, uniquely ominous look to the novel. Something dark lurks within these characters,
in the woods, inside the suburban 1970s homes; readers are simultaneously repulsed by
what is depicted and drawn toward the clear mastery with which it is depicted. While
the plot is presented in a nonlinear manner, wavy panel borders indicate fl ashbacks and
dream sequences and provide readers with navigational clues.
On the surface, Black Hole ’s most obvious theme is sexually transmitted disease—
perhaps AIDS. Characters acquire deformities as a result of sexual activity, yet the
teens do not take steps to prevent the spread of disease. Th ematically, Black Hole leaves
readers with questions rather than answers. Is the sex drive so powerful that even muta-
tion serves as a poor deterrent? While characters’ mutations are a by-product of sexual
activity, might they signify sexuality itself? Does sexual activity change the ways that
these characters think and dream? To what extent is puberty a process of mutation? Do
characters grow out of their deformities? Rows of yearbook portraits grace the inside
front fl ap; the back fl ap features rows of portraits of the same students, now disfi gured
with giant boils, enlarged teeth, goiters, antler-like protrusions, and polyps. Instead of
constructing mutations as science fi ctional superpowers (e.g., Spider-Man, X-Men ),
Burns’s mutations are more exaggerations of actual conditions—dermatological con-
ditions, dental problems, unwanted hair, absence of hair—along with assorted odd
growths and duplications. It might happen to any one of us, whatever “it” is.
With its strange, frightening, but non-fatal disease, and with a killer or two on the
loose, the book contains elements of a horror novel. However, it’s also a story of fi rst
love. Chris’s complete acceptance of her boyfriend’s mutation—a second mouth on
