Aegis 2010
62
A Plagued Nation: A Psychoanalytic and Thematic Exploration of Charles Burns’ Black Hole >>> Ashley Butler “It was like being in a cocoon…A soft insulated green world….until all of the weird shit started coming down….If we were smart we would have turned around and come back…but we were dumb…young and dumb” (Burns 12-14). So captures the overall feeling of Charles Burns’ graphic novel, Black Hole, in which the audience encounters a series of alternating adolescent narrators as they slowly distance themselves from the comfortable world with which they were once familiar through sex and drugs. In their blind and naïve experimentation, they find themselves spiraling toward a disillusioned, confusing world of disease and murder among their peers. Burns quickly exposes the reader to a ‘bug’ that is being passed through sexual intercourse among the adolescents, which is, according to Abby West, a “reinterpretation of the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic” (2005). For anyone who is sexually active with another who has it, the ‘bug’ is contracted and passed along, spreading so quickly that the plagued teenagers begin to form their own community out in the woods. The bug manifests differently in everyone, making it uglier and more noticeable on some than others. Some can hide it from their peers, while it is so apparently disgusting on others that everyone knows instantly. For example, Rob, one of the narrators, can hide his mutation to a certain extent, which manifested on his neck as a second mouth.1 Chris, another narrator, knows that she slept with an infected person (Rob), yet she does not know in what way it has manifested until she strips down to go swimming and all of her friends see the long gaping hole that goes down the length of her back.2 Throughout the book, the audience sees common adolescent experiences from the 1970s. The groups of people that hang out with one another, the experiments with drugs and alcohol, the parties, the ease and carelessness that accompanied sexual relations—all of these things make up the plot of the book. What sets the teens in this book apart from those in other adolescent stories is that there are visual repercussions that come as a result of their actions. Their own personal actions literally become a part of them that is visual to the outsider—casting them out instantly as plagued. Black Hole serves as a text that is both uncomfortable and uncanny. It is a text that, through its grotesque artwork and eerie storyline, invokes an emotional response from almost any reader—despite the fact that we have not personally encountered a severe, sexually-transmitted, physical mutation in the middle of adolescence. Readers tend to be drawn to the text on a level that is not completely known or understood, which is interesting since the text is so dark and disgustingly drawn. The 1970s held much controversy and confusion in itself because, as Margaret Mead explains, it was “a period, new in history, in which the young [were] taking on new authority in their prefigurative apprehension of the still unknown future” (13). Clearly, adolescents during this time were not ready to take on
