Black Hole | Charles Burns | a feast of freaks

Black Hole | Charles Burns | Another fantastic graphic novel

books:

Black Hole

	Black Hole Charles Burns Pantheon, 2008 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 49 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

a feast of freaks

a real masterpiece, this comic book by charles burns; a gallery of freakish characters, running through the chilling atmosphere of the black and white pages, sharp and aggressive as only the unparalleled style of burns can be; a love story also, as sad as the existence the mysteryous spreading plague obliges those young people to live... really great!

Another fantastic graphic novel

Like Chester Brown's Yummy Fur before it, Black hole creates a special kind of eerie spell that is impossible to forget. I was reminded of my own teen years more than once, and felt that the emotional resonance juxtaposed with the elements of outright horror created a perfect tension. Both of the lead characters, a teenage girl and the boy that love her share a believable teenage angst that never becomes maudline, but reflects my own experiences growing up. Amazing work from Charles Burns.

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Incredible, perplexing, disturbing

Black Hole itself is amazing, but once I finished it in less than half a day the most incredible thing about it all is that it took Charles Burns a decade to write this and a mere handful of hours for me to read it. He has "condensed" so much into these pages that the frantic pace I first read the book at is forgivable in light of the pretty much insurmountable urge to re-read it, savoring each panel one at a time. And these panels are almost bursting with imagery, iconography, symbolism and sheer stark beauty.

It's sad, it's creepy, it's haunting, it's hot and it just won't go away. And, even more amazing, Burns actually throws a decent amount of curve balls in addition to creating an astoundingly evocative picture of a teenage experience. Let's just say that the narrative arc involving Eliza did not turn out the way I expected, and I am extremely glad Burns did not explain specifically the cause of the bug, and that these two things are related very heavily in my mind.

The category of "If you can own only one comic book/graphic novel, buy this one" is getting more and more packed but Charles Burns' Black Hole deserves to be mentioned.

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Read This!

I don't even read comics, and I hardly know anything about the genre, but this epic is so engrossing, so uncannily consuming, that I cannot put it down for the life of me.

Shockingly Emotive.

Okay. I expected this book to be strange and artistic, but no way did I expect it to be like this! I had read a brief review/ spotlight on this book in wizard magazine and I thought the concept of a Venereal Disease that mutates the infected was an intriguing idea. There was NO WAY I expected this book to have any sort of emotional pull to it, but it does.

It has an emotional pull alright, just not in the way that you would normally perceive that sort of thing. This book was written and drawn with such raw emotion that you could feel the atmosphere in which these character were immersed. If they were depressed, you not only knew it from the words, but you also sympathized with them on a visceral level. When they lusted, you understood why, even though their situations were often outrageously grotesque.

Another thing I appreciated about the book was its non-sequitor style of storytelling. You have to be careful reading this book, as I could see it being easy to lose track of the main characters by the nature of the storytelling.

I knew that this book would not be a normal book, and it wasn't. I wanted to feel more comfortable with the material, hoping that eventually, the edge would come off - but it didn't. I didn't want to feel for some of the characters in the book, but I did. I just wanted to read a book that required no thought processing, but I was engrossed from the beginning.

This book was extremely disturbing. I loved it.

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