![]() ![]() There are whole groups of freak kids camping out in Ravenna Park, with faces turned feline, or skeletal with tufts of hair. ![]() No one seems to die from it, but its effects are sometimes so horrible that they drive the afflicted out of society. The story is simple: Teens are starting to catch a new disease, known as "the bug," from having sex. His earlier series, Big Baby, tended toward caricatures and easy gags, but Black Hole was from its very first pages up to something more subtle and expansive. Burns' dominant color is a deep, flawless black, out of which images shine like faces at a fireside, wrapped on all sides by the spiky edges of an inky shadow. ![]() You have to have some kind of ritual when something so lovely appears so seldom: 12 times, to be exact, in the 10 years since the series began.Įven if you haven't read Black Hole, you're likely to recognize Burns' signature style from covers he's done for the Rocket, The Stranger, the New Yorker, and, most recently, the Believer, where they're so happy to have him as a house artist of sorts that they put an exclamation point next to his name on the masthead. I bring it home from the comic store, find wherever in the house I've left the stack of previous issues, put the new one on the bottom of the pile, and start reading again from the beginning. Here's what I've done for the last decade every time I've gotten a new issue of Black Hole, Charles Burns' gorgeous comic-book series about 1970s Seattle teens driven into shameful isolation by a grotesque sex disease. ![]()
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