Black Hole

368 pages

French language

Published Feb. 23, 2005 by Pantheon Books.

ISBN:
978-0-375-42380-2
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4 stars (5 reviews)

The setting: suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways — from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) — but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back.

As we inhabit the heads of several key characters — some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it — what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself — the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape.

And then the murders start.

As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, …

2 editions

2025 Review

No rating

And today's pick is Black Hole by Charles Burns. Originally published in twelve issues between 1995 and 2004. Initially by Kitchen Sink and subsequently by Fantagraphic books. This bind up edition that I will be flipping through is a somewhat worse for wear collected version published by Pantheon in 2008.

While not explicitly rated I would start off by flagging that this is by most estimations a fairly mature comic in the rating scale type of way. Content notes for sex, age gap, nudity, dissecting animals, swearing, smoking, body horror, violence and death.

The reason I initially picked this particular volume up was two fold. The first is because it's mentioned literally everywhere, so it's kind of hard to escape. Although I feel like I didn't really note what the book was actually supposed to be about, so I did still manage to go in largely ignorant. The second is …

Review of 'Black hole' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

weird. and sexual. and actually pretty honest.
there's a plague where people are becoming....other. the lucky ones seem to attain animal attributes, the rest of them get disfigured along alien lines. the whole plot occurs inside the confines of a highschool subculture - so the plague (passed through sexual contact) is a way to ostracize the affected students. or maybe. because some plague side effects can be hidden, so then some kids get to pretend they 'belong' when they don't. alot like regular highschool, right?

avatar for ShelfMonkey

rated it

5 stars
avatar for IXI

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4 stars