Northwest Passage
In Charles Burns' Black Hole, horny teenagers become sexual mutants. I can relate.
by Ryan Boudinot
November 7, 2005
In the early 1980s, STDs supplanted pregnancy as the primary boogeyman in sex-ed classes, when we were taught that fucking could kill you. But more frightening than dying in that misinformed, homophobic era was the prospect that AIDS could visibly mark one as diseased, as an outcast.
The early eighties were also years in which most Seattlites could walk to a forest from their homes. Western Washington's population has grown at twenty percent
per decade since the 1960s, and as the IT economy took root, Seattle grew from a mossy outpost of Boeing engineers and Scandinavian sailors into a city with ingratiatingly cosmopolitan aspirations. Costco's corporate headquarters and a Microsoft satellite campus appeared in the wooded foothills of the Cascades, in a town called Issaquah, while a local band called Modest Mouse bore unsettled witness. Should have insured that planet before it crashed / Working real hard to make Internet cash, Isaac Brock sang on an album titled Lonesome Crowded West. A few miles east, perched on an outcropping beside a waterfall, is Salish Lodge, the hotel David Lynch transformed into the Great Northern for his TV series, Twin Peaks, the characters of which orbited the sexual nucleus of Laura Palmer, whose mysteries were concealed and revealed deep in the forest at night. In Lynch's vision, the forest was a black box through which secrets passed, both the source and passage to sexual experience. But eventually, Puget Sound became a place defined less by nature than by culture and technology.
Graphic novelist Charles Burns, whose collection of comics, Black Hole, was released in October, is a Northwest native. He spent the past decade crafting the black and white comics, which appeared periodically alongside the work of Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, and Chris Ware in the maturing graphic novel sections of bookstores. It's the story of a community of teenagers in 1970s suburban Seattle who fall prey to a mysterious sexually transmitted disease that essentially transforms them into mutants. Rob, one of two principal male characters in the series, develops a second mouth filled with tiny teeth and a pus-like substance on his neck. Chris, the girl he falls in love with, finds that her skin splits down her spine in a sort of seam, allowing her to shed her entire dermis like a snake. Other kids, all wearing the feathered hair and hip-huggers of the era, grow fur or hideous facial deformities, accompanied by terrifyingly precise nightmares penned in Burns' neo-woodcut style. What Burns sacrifices in color (barring the glorious covers of the original comics, which, sadly, are not reproduced in the book), he makes up for in the exactitude of his textures: the frayed end of a bone, a patch of pubic hair. All are rendered exquisitely, making this surrealism less about shadowy, half-glimpsed figures than glaring grotesqueries. That the kids who populate Black Hole are frequently stoned or tripping provides the artist with opportunities for visual distortion that he admirably does not abuse. With restraint and drawing from what has to be personal experience, he gets the sensation just right. And it isn't a pleasant sensation at all.
Simultaneously outcast and rife with the exhilaration we all feel when we first taste real freedom from our parents, the diseased teenagers congregate in the woodland parks of Seattle, sheltering themselves from the adult world. Black Hole is at its most poignant when teenage lovers take off for the coast or head down the highway, finding the level of intimacy they desire only when they are deep in nature, with no evidence of adults. And when they're alone together, their mutations quickly take on sexual significance. Chris kisses Rob's second mouth, in which she finds, "...further inside, a tiny tongue. I could feel it trembling and fluttering up against mine." Later a character named Eliza appears with a tail, which she employs as part of her seduction routine. "Your tail," says the guy, "It's like...poking me." She tells him to grab it: "It was strong and alive in my hand...something to hold on to." When it breaks off painlessly during sex, she muses, "It doesn't hurt... It just kind of tingles, like when your foot falls asleep." Rather than allowing themselves to be defeated by their mutations, which are treated as mildly curious or a bit inconvenient, the teenagers quickly reconfigure their sex lives around them, endowing what could have been handicaps with tenderness and eroticism. What Burns manages to convey here through wildly exaggerated means is something universal about sex — that it can feel incredibly weird, alien even, especially to those new to exploring it.
Instead of seeking help from the mechanisms of society, Burns's teenagers turn inward, hiding out in their forest encampment and later an abandoned house, drinking and getting stoned until the inevitable outbreak of violence disrupts this loose community of outsiders. There is no rational, medical explanation for the outbreak of mutations, and those affected seek none. Neither adult wisdom nor obfuscation about sex encroaches this hermetic world of fervid morbidity, and civilization is sparse and signified by high school biology labs and suburban ramblers. This is a world in which the primary force engendering relationships is loneliness.
The remarkable, lasting achievement of Burns's masterpiece is this: as bizarre as things get in his monochromatic world of disembodied arms, porn mags, and oozing flesh, Burns maintains an atmosphere of simultaneous revulsion and liberation of one's sexuality, a conflict universal to the teenage experience. Perhaps we didn't grow tails or shed our skin, but we've all felt like this before. n° n°
© Ryan Boudinot and hooksexup.com.
