Word: horror
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...arrival of Halloween always brings with it a plethora of horror-related media, including comix. This season's standout graphic novel focuses on one of the scariest of all horrors: high school. The title of Charles Burns' long-awaited book, Black Hole (Pantheon; 368 pages; $25), says it all. For many people-including myself, naturally-high school felt like an endless, inescapable vacuum without air or light. Unlike more conventional horror stories set among high school kids, where each one gets "offed" by a masked killer, Black Hole uses the worst parts of emerging adulthood, like changing bodies, alienation...
...suburbs of Washington State during the mid-1970s, Black Hole evokes that era's great teenage exploitation movies with its attention to atmospheric detail. It even begins in typical teen horror gross-out fashion, with the two protagonists in biology class, hunched over the slit belly of a supine frog. Shaggy-haired Keith digs the fact that he has been partnered with the "total fox" Chris Rhodes. But as he stares into the spilled amphibian guts he becomes overwhelmed by a dark premonition: "I felt like I was looking into the future?and the future looked pretty messed up." Overwhelmed...
Black Hole has as much fun defying the teen horror conventions as working within them. Keith and Chris do not fall in love, as you might expect, while battling hordes of monsters. In fact, the first two thirds of the book follows each in parallel but separate stories. A stoned philosopher, Keith goes through his days working hard at doing nothing and just getting a good buzz on. After stumbling upon a colony of infected teens near his favorite woodsy spot for getting stoned, he starts to become aware of their isolated but darkly appealing world. While everyone else spends...
...journal “McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern” (with Dave Eggers as editor) published an “all-comics issue” featuring graphic novel artists. The contents included contributors as diverse as bawdy comic legend R. Crumb, the understated Canadian Seth, and existentialist horror artists Charles Burns and Adrian Tomine. Chris Ware, fresh from the impressive critical success with “Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth,” served as editor...
Burns does, however, understand the campiness of the ’50s-horror atmosphere. The front cover of the book has yearbook photos of healthy teenagers, and the back cover shows them unimaginably deformed: sores, horns, goiter-like growths and molting skin. Burns also includes his own transformation, but by something far worse than...