A Black Hole

“The Best Graphic Novel of the Year…One of the Most Stunning Graphic Novels Yet Published.” TIME (again)

“Black Hole is Burns’ masterwork.” The New York Times Book Review

“Surreal and Unnerving…A Remarkable Work” Chicago Sun-Times 

I could go on listing the accolades. This book won the Eisner Award, the Harvey Award, and the Ignatz Award—all awards for Best Graphic Novel. Indeed, Black Hole regularly shows up on lists of Best Graphic Novels (aka comic books, more about that anon). It even showed up in the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

I finally read it.

It is…Terrible. Awful. Puerile. Pathetic. Boring. Silly. Pretentious. Nonsense.

I didn’t like it very much.

Black Hole shows that we can nicely divide the reading world. On the one side, there are people who read comic books (sorry, Graphic Novels) who are very embarrassed that their friends look down on them for reading Comic Books and so are desperately looking for something they can point to and exclaim, “See it is as Great as Shakespeare…or at least Dickens…or as good as whatever recent book is getting hailed by the literati!” Alas, there are not many comic books that fit that bill. (Not many is not the same thing as none.) So, if there is something that feels more literary than the normal fare, it instantly gets overhyped. Renaming “comic books” as “graphic novels” happens for exactly this reason. “It’s not a comic book! It is a graphic novel! Novels are intellectually respectable! Graphic Novels are just a type of novel!” (Insert foot stamping.)

On the other side there are people who actually read books without pictures and can tell the difference between Jane Austen and Stephanie Meyers. Black Hole is the Twilight of comic books. An incredibly bad book that the people who read this sort of thing desperately want to pretend is an amazing work of literature.

Don’t get me wrong. The problem with Black Hole is not that it is a comic book. Much to the chagrin of many of the readers of this here blog, I actually like comic books. Art and words can indeed go together nicely. You can tell some interesting stories that way. You can also tell some fun, lightweight tales that way. Superhero comic books, even the schlocky kind, are an amusing manner of whiling away a few minutes.

So why is Black Hole so incredibly bad? It is a pure adolescent sex romp. Ooh look! Teenagers having sex in the woods! Oh, but if they have sex with an infected person they get…The Bug. (Deep metaphorical insight: The Bug is like AIDS! Insert sophisticated knowing nod.) What is The Bug? It is a sexually transmitted disease that causes you to…well, it depends. One person grows a tail. Another gets a second mouth at the bottom of his neck. Another starts shedding her skin like a snake. Some start getting bumps on their bodies. One gets finger webbing. One guy just looks ugly.

Yep, there is your dramatic tension. If you sleep with the girl with the tail, then you will start getting crazy growths on your abdomen. If you sleep with the guy who has two mouths, you’ll end up shedding your skin.  Big Moral Dilemma here—what should you do?  One might think the lesson is: “Don’t sleep with the girl with tail or the guy with two mouths.” But, no. Teenagers apparently can’t control themselves.

So, all these weird things happen to teenagers and what is anybody doing about it? Well, nothing. Because you see, the teenagers just run off to the woods and hide so no adults know about this problem. Even when one of the diseased guys starts murdering other people, nobody seems to, you know, alert an adult. Even when this happens at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yeah…

How did this book become popular? Well, imagine you are an awkward teenage boy who reads comic books. Suddenly along comes this comic book and it is (insert hushed tones) an alternative comic. “Alternative” is the comic book code word for “There are drawings of naked people in it.” Hehehe. Edgy. Now let’s call it a “graphic novel” and then it is OK if I read this book with drawings of naked people!

Don’t believe me that this is the draw? Here is the start of one of those overwhelming positive reviews (at SyFy):

OK, I’ll admit it: Sometimes, I like my comics sexy. I mean, if you can look at beautiful illustrated naked forms drawn by the most talented of illustrators, why wouldn’t you enrich your eyes? Which is probably why I originally picked up Charles Burns’ semi-sordid-yet-seemingly-seminal Eisner- and Harvey Award-winning graphic novel Black Hole in the first place. The pictures say a thousand sexy words. Albeit strangely, and at times, horrifically. 
Or maybe I was drawn to Black Hole … because I never quite grew out of that adolescent stage, as the prior paragraph likely attests….I’m sorry, I grew up watching unmonitored HBO in the ‘80s and that has forever skewed my worldview toward the inappropriate. Not to say Black Hole is inappropriate, per se, but it’s most certainly edgy, and filled with bored teens acting with reckless abandon in the face of a pitiless world. 

Now imagine these comic book obsessed teenage boys ten years later reading a comic book that is complete wish fulfillment for their teenage self. Edgy teenage sex with gorgeous girls. And lots of marijuana. Imagine that the nerdy high school boys have grown up and are in their late 20s or early 30s; now they write reviews of comic books and give out awards for Best Graphic Novel. After all, who else would review a comic book? I mean, what self-respecting person would condescend to review these things?

And suddenly it all makes sense. This trashy faux-philosophical story gets rave reviews and wins awards despite the fact that there is not a moment in it that rises above the inane. The best that can be said for the thing is that the story is not told in a linear fashion, so you have to spend at least 10 seconds every now and then realizing that Event A happened after Event B. Then again, in the ten years (yes that is right 10 years!) Burns spent writing this book, he didn’t spend any time on the people (all the characters look and act almost identically) or the writing (yawn), so he had some time to think, “Hey I’ll put these two events in non-chronological order! Sophisticated of me, isn’t it?”

This is the sort of comic book that gives comic books a bad name. People assume that lame superhero comic books are the problem, but they are not. Everyone knows that an unremarkable issue of The Flash will involve nothing more than a guy in a red suit running really fast and punching bad guys. No harm, no foul. The real problem with comic books is that tripe like Black Hole gets praised as a major literary achievement.