Barbelith Underground > Comic Books > Charles Burns' Black Hole

I haven't seen Society, but yes, I think it's safe to conclude that Black Hole has more to say than any film from the director of Faust. Ye gods, man.

I'm a little appalled by the facile dismissal here...Burns is clearly more than a just-kinda-sorta competent artist, and I'm afraid you lost me right there, Sleaze. Even so, I still managed to be shocked when you implied that the narrative was slapdash and meandering when a reading -- not a close reading or anything, just a reading -- makes it pretty plain that Burns had plot points in place from the first issue that didn't pay off until the last, published nearly a decade later. (Including the "thrown in serial killer stuff" that is foreshadowed beginning somewhere around the tenth page of the first issue. You may not like it, but it's obviously not a last minute addition to the story.) This, to me, is not an indicator that one has made one's story up as one goes along.

And a book's not being plot-driven is not the same as a book having no plot, or no point. Here's where I'm gonna sound all snobbish/elitist/whatever, but plot-heavy writing is an expectation that (some) readers of genre fiction apply to everything they read, and frankly its presence or absence is not a litmus for whether a book is well-written. Burns seems more interested in character, and a suspensier plot of the type one might expect from what is ostensibly a horror comic would, in my view, cheapen the work. Genre tropes have a way of doing that when they're inserted into works of a slightly more sui generis variety, as their familiar (even cliche) nature tends to stick out like a sore thumb and remind us that we're reading a story...as they remind us, not of anything in our actual experience, but of shit we saw in movies. I think Burns was going for something a bit more original.

That said,
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I do think the killer kids are the weakest aspect of the story, for the very reasons I outlined above. The creepy porn-and-bones-and-baby-doll-parts effigies they leave in the woods are, I think, so much eerier and more disturbing than the notion of a pair of sexually frustrated deviants that the revelation of the killers is a bit of a letdown (and their demise anticlimactic, although I suspect that's a deliberate attempt to defuse the "serial killer plot"). It's also a little too close to standard horror movie fare to be entirely convincing, and I think it almost (but not quite) jolts the reader out of the story -- similar to the way in which Strangers in Paradise kinda lost me for a while there when it was suddenly a crime comic. Thankfully, Black Hole only becomes a straight-up genre piece for those few pages, but I do wish that aspect of the book had been handled with the same flair as the rest. The killers never really come to life the same way the main players do; their one-dimensionality (okay, maybe TWO-dimensionality in Dave's case), unfortunately, makes this subplot ultimately feel like something shoehorned in from a much less interesting story. Oh, well.

And yeah, Burns is the Altoids guy.