The teens who populate Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole may not be quite as hot as Archie, Betty and Veronica, but they sure get a lot more action. Keggers, trips to the local pot dealer and explicit graveyard couplings—nope, we're definitely not in Riverdale anymore. Indeed, if Archie Comics presents an improbably chaste and sunny version of eternal adolescence, Black Hole, which is set in mid-1970s Seattle, exists as its shadowy inverse. Adults are scarce, comic high jinks nonexistent, and while the sex and drugs are plentiful, there's little sense of fun or pleasure here—instead, it's adolescence as endless bummer, a time of sudden, monstrous metamorphosis and chronic melancholy.
In the same way that Buffy the Vampire Slayer literalized the notion that high school is hell, Black Hole turns the typical teenage transition into adulthood into the stuff of sci fi and horror.
Originally published in serial form from 1994 to 2004, the 12 comic books that comprise the series had color covers. For the novel, however, Burns, an illustrator who first gained attention in the '80s with Raw magazine and whose work now often appears in The New Yorker and Time, limits his palette to black and white (and given Black Hole's title, you can guess which one predominates). There aren't even any shades of gray—just page after page of high-contrast, woodcut-like line-work. Burns' style is so meticulous and so consistently rendered from panel to panel it almost seems machined, but it's remarkably visceral, too. There are few straight lines in Black Hole—this is a world made of undulating curves and ripples.
The plot unfolds in similarly nonlinear fashion, in a whorl of flashbacks and flash-forwards, but essentially it's a simple story. Keith aches for a girl in his biology class, Chris, but Chris pines for another guy, named Rob; eventually, Keith finds consolation via a girl named Eliza. As their relationships work themselves out in the overwrought fashion of '50s-era romance comics, these four teens, along with various others, fall prey to "the bug," a sexually transmitted disease that disfigures its victims in unpredictably grotesque ways. A tiny, chatty, vaginal mouth appears on Rob's neck. Deep fissures rend Chris's back; at one point, she moults. Eliza sports a phallic tail.
"The bug" is a curious disease. The geekiest kids suffer the worst deformities, but the bug isn't terminal, and the teens who don't have it treat it more like a social faux pas than a medical condition: If you get it, you're definitely no longer part of the in-crowd. Thus, the kids who contract it generally try to hide their afflictions, and when those afflictions get too noticeable, they exile themselves to the woods.
Given the sexual nature of the way "the bug" is spread, and the sexual imagery that informs Black Hole in general—in Burns' hands, a broken popsicle is never just a broken popsicle—it would be easy to conclude that the "teen plague" infecting these kids is a metaphor for AIDS or some other STD. Ultimately, though, Burns is going for something more encompassing than that—the bug is adolescence itself, a time of physical transformation, sexual maturation, impending mortality, and perhaps most importantly, in Burns' cosmos at least, the blossoming of romantic desire.
Indeed, there's one couple in Black Hole who approach sex like a sport and never develop any symptoms of the bug; what distinguishes them from the other characters, besides their disease-free status, is the lack of a romantic component to their relationship. The ones who do get it, though, they're full of heartache and epic yearning and promises to love each other forever, no matter what.
Burns portrays desire as a kind of wound: It exposes you, makes you vulnerable, a little monstrous, in fact. Or to put it another way: While sex can make you look desperate or foolish, only love can make you truly hideous.
But desire doesn't just disfigure in Black Hole; it redeems, too. And on those rare occasions when the book's characters are most in sync, when their love harmonizes, Burns' palette shifts. The overwhelming darkness that informs the novel disappears, and the visual imagery becomes downright Edenic. Young, naked lovers unite in lush, radiant, almost alien landscapes.
And in these paradises, fleeting though they may be, the protagonists aren't doomed, like Adam and Eve, by their new knowledge. Instead, they're uplifted, made fuller, more human, whole. Adulthood may be the beginning of the end, Burns suggests, but at least it's better than being trapped forever in the cartoonish limbo of eternally sunny Riverdale.