BEYOND THE BLACK HOLE

by Jessica Pressler

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA GRYPHON

"There's the puddle that never dries," says Charles Burns, pointing to a murky pool carved into the sidewalk near his Northern Liberties home. "My daughter first noticed it," he says, clearly delighted at fathering progeny capable of recognizing the weird.

Burns is on the way to his studio, where he'll show off the toys, books and other inspirations a comic book artist uses to court the muse of strange and sick things. But the puddle speaks louder than the plastic figurines and Mexican masks that adorn Burns' home.

It's a gray spring day, and in the dull light the puddle looks cloudy green and deep. In fact, it might well be an image extracted from Burns' teen-horror serial Black Hole. Spread out like a like an open wound on the pavement, the wet, murky depths look as though they're reaching up to swallow onlookers whole.

It's hard not to feel melodramatic after spending time with Burns' work. In Burns country, every sinuous tree is hiding something ... or someone. Woodchips take on a sinister significance, and a dented beer can nestled among needlelike blades of grass speaks of someone's good time ... gone horribly wrong.

Charles Burns is tall and thin, with wire-rim glasses and a balding head. He's doesn't have any of the stooped nerdiness you might expect from a comic book artist, or any of the weird perviness his work suggests.

Far from it: Burns' studio is full of Nirvana and Girls Against Boys CDs, carefully arranged toys and comic books. And you just know when he waxes faux-nostalgic about passing down the Led Zepplin box set to daughters Ava, 15 and Rae, 12, that he's a cool dad. Heck, he looks like a kid himself--his face, even at 47, is strikingly similar to the faces of his teenage characters. That's not surprising, not just because artists are most likely to render characters in their own image, but because if you set the Wayback machine to 1971, you might find Burns as a character in the same kind of story he tells in Black Hole. Charles Burns grew up in the '60s a hairsbreadth away from the flower-power antics that defined the era. While the Summer of Love raged 800 miles away in San Francisco, he was holed up in his parents' Seattle house with stacks of grinning Alfred E. Neumans and piles of Marvel comics, doodling skeletons and Godzilla-esque monster men.

But as soon as puberty and awareness of the more illicit pleasures of the '70s kicked in, Burns and his friends found themselves spending more time hanging out in the park, smoking kind bud grown by the older hippies and cashing in on that generation's sexual revolution.

Pot and free love weren't the only things Burns' generation picked up from their predecessors. Gradually the superheroes he'd loved as a child were supplanted by the cruder visions of R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson the kids found in head shops.

"You'd buy your pipe or whatever and your comics," says Burns. "Robert Crumb's Zap! comics were really the thing. They weren't like anything we'd ever seen. They were over the top, with real hardcore raunchy sex and drugs. My friends would be like ..." He puts on a stoner voice: "'Burns man, did you see that new one, man, the guy like cuts his dick in half.' They were really kind of horrifying."

After high school Burns says he had no idea what to do or what he was interested in. "But I was a good artist," he recalls, "and I kept up with these kinds of comics and stayed with them." It wasn't until later, after an MFA in Fine Arts (at the University of California Davis), a marriage (to painter Susan Moore) and a move to Philadelphia (where Moore took a teaching post at Tyler), that Burns would return to the medium he pored over as a youth.

In art school, "I didn't want to make something you could put on the wall," he says. "All of my work had an implied narrative, and I liked the idea of having cheap multiples. I wanted to tell stories."

Burns got his chance in 1981, when he first submitted work to RAW, the influential literary magazine helmed by Art Spiegelman and his wife Françoise Mouly. A busboy living in Philly, Burns didn't immediately impress the magazine's founders.

"At first we sent him away," Spiegelman remembers. "Of course we didn't realize he would be one of the most important and talented contributors we would work with."

"It was an exciting time," Burns says. The seemingly moribund underground comics scene of the '60s was given new life, with artists from Europe and the U.S. coming together to produce bright literary-minded work.

The noirish sci-fi-tinged series Burns created for RAW--Teen Plague, Big Baby and El Borbah--established him in the world of illustration and graphic design. Seeing Burns' work for the first time, says Pantheon editor and top graphic designer Chip Kidd, "was as if someone had made the best New Wave music into comics."

After RAW ran its course, Burns went on to become a sought-after commercial illustrator. His work began appearing in the pages of Time and the New Yorker and on record jackets for Iggy Pop and Sub Pop. And his strip Dog Boy, about a man implanted with the heart of a dog, was made into a series for MTV's short-lived avant-program Liquid Television, a project, Burns says, he wasn't entirely pleased with. Which is perhaps why he's hesitant now about handing over Black Hole to French filmmaker Léos Carax for live-action treatment.

But at this point Burns is so respected in his field he has the luxury of hesitation. Early this year Fantagraphics--Burns' publisher since his last, Massachusetts-based Kitchen Sink, tanked--reissued a four-volume retrospective of his work, and he's working with a Japanese company to develop a line of vending machine toys. He's also up for two Harvey Awards ("the comics equivalent of the Oscars," he laughs) in Pittsburgh this weekend.

Of course Oscar-worthy respect doesn't always translate into an Oscar-size salary. Comics is a niche industry with a tiny readership, so although Black Hole is one of Fantagraphics' best sellers, only about 10,000 copies are initially printed. After the comic sells out, a second printing might yield another 10,000.

Burns nets only about 10 percent of the cover price--Black Hole's cover price is $2.50--which means he gets a mere five grand per issue. He'll have to wait for a hardbound collection to come out--which happens about a year after a series is finished--to get a significant return. But since it takes Burns so long to finish a series (he doesn't expect to finish Black Hole until 2004) the final amount is negligible, even for an artist at the top of his field. Basically--as Eric Reynolds, marketing director at Fantagraphics, puts it--"Nobody does comics for the money." So most of Burns' income comes from illustration work.

Characterized by sharp black lines Art Speigelman calls "alien-insect precise," Burns' ink work is extraordinary even at its most tame, as in his frequent celebrity caricatures for Entertainment Weekly, and breathtaking when he's given free reign. And his dark highly stylized draftsmanship serves his content well. His subject matter--what Fantagraphics' Reynolds calls "queasy-paranoid-monster-movie-teen-anxiety"--ranges from the rough trade of a tights-wearing detective (El Borbah) to the creepy observations of an overgrown kid known as Big Baby (Big Baby). Themes of alienation, disturbing sexuality and bodily fears abound: Almost all of his stories contain mutants, severed body parts or venereal disease. If Burns himself seems cool and collected, his work radiates physical dread.

"Charles isn't as strange as his work," says Speigelman, "but there's something very dark there."

Burns has given up a little bit of his psyche for Black Hole, which tells story of a teen community laid to waste by a disfiguring sexually transmitted disease. Laden with metaphor and spectacular visuals, Black Hole is arguably his most personal and compelling series. In a recent review The Stranger called Black Hole "a masterpiece." And indeed it is a chilling paean to teendom in all its glory and misery.

It's also Burns' baby, the magnum opus he's been working up to for his entire career. With Black Hole, Speigelman says, "Charles is finally telling a story that he's been trying to tell for a long time. He's tried working with this before--alienated suburban teens coming of age, which is something I think he's still working at--but this one really has a voice of authority."

"I guess I needed to get this out of my system," Burns says.

And that he does.

Each book begins with two facing portraits of a teenager: one fresh-faced and clean, the other disfigured by "the bug." For some the manifestations of the disease are minimal and easy to disguise--a small horn, a tail or acne-like blisters--but for others the bug takes over, marring their bodies beyond recognition. Kids with the bug are ostracized, forced to leave home and seek others like them, to fend for themselves against the darkness, nightmares, threatening creatures and a sense of impending doom.

It is, come to think of it, not unlike real adolescence.

Which is, of course, the point. "It's a weird time," Burns says of adolescence. "You have that anxiety about who you are, anxiety about sex, your body, your friends. You're in a constant state of heightened emotions. Like, 'My friends didn't pick me up; my life is over.' [The series] takes all of those emotions and pushes them, forces them to the extreme."

It's not the first time Burns has used teen plague as a metaphor. It's been rearing its deformed head throughout his career, appearing in the Big Baby strip and for a while developing into its own series, the appropriately titled Teen Plague. The teenagers in Plague, he told Comics Journal in 1992, are faced with what Burns refers to as the "ultimate nightmare ... that you're at an assembly and someone says, 'We're checking everybody here for disease,' and you're like, 'Oh, shit, I'm going to infect my entire school.'"

At the center of Black Hole is a classic love triangle--Keith's totally into this hot girl Chris from his biology class, but every time he thinks about her he sees horrible things: blood, bugs, flesh splitting open. Chris, meanwhile, is into Rob, but Rob's got the bug, which she discovers during a graveyard makeout session. The second mouth at the base of Rob's neck gives it away.

As he uses science-fiction distortion to replicate physical anxiety, Burns conjures the sounds, sights and smells of a '70s teenhood to a black-and-white T using a visual vocabulary that's almost writerly. Icons abound: Renderings of overflowing skull ashtrays and empty packets of Kools lie on a desk next to a makeshift toilet-roll bong. A note-perfect version of the ubiquitous Jimi Hendrix Experience poster--which hangs in Burns' studio--winks in the background of a burnout's living room.

Burns is rightfully proud of his cartoon semiotics. Like a set designer, he carefully collects and translates each piece of atmosphere, taking gleeful delight in getting the details just right. "And look, see here, these dirtball guys in their living room--everyone's been in a living room like that. There's an ashtray made out of a log, rolling papers ... vinyl chairs they drug out of someone's garage that're held together with duct tape ..." In the same panel an M.C. Escher poster--Hand With Reflecting Sphere, the one with the old dude holding a crystal ball--peeks out from a corner of the room.

In comics every line has a purpose, and in Black Hole, while the presence of the log ashtray, a barely visible copy of Neil Young's Harvest or an eensy packet of Zig-Zags might barely register, each contributes hugely to the ambiance.

He even calls on old friends to get the stoner terminology just so. Like giving a "charge"--blowing smoke into someone's nostrils from your own. And "bag action" as in, "Burns, man, I hear you're in the market for a little bag action."

Black Hole No.4, subtitled "Bag Action," is prefaced with this timeless anecdote: "We're hanging out at this reservoir, having a smoke out, and Mark launches into this big rap about how he's going to die first. He's telling us he wants to be cremated and how we're supposed to divide his ashes up between us. Then he says, 'Every time you roll a joint, put a tiny pinch of my ash in there with the dope. That way you'll be getting high and I'll be getting high with you.'"

To Burns, this is the quintessential stoner story, one that everyone's heard a version of. "You know that guy?" he says.

Don't let the pot jokes and teenage-boy medium fool you. Examined closely, Black Hole is almost frightfully intellectual. Burns is attracted to comics because they're capable of rendering their subjects pitch-perfect. In a way they're so surreal they're more real than nonfiction. By distilling things into clear black lines he captures their very essence.

It's not just a drawing of Jimi Hendrix. It's a drawing of a drawing of Jimi Hendrix in a drawing, which makes it not just a drawing but a symbol, part of a code that conjures '70s adolescence. It's so meta that Burns, man, it blows your fuckin' mind.

And though it's called a comic, Black Hole is a harrowing series, and in it Burns makes the most of his craft. The static frames and dark, sweeping ink strokes create a feeling of dread and tension. It's a beautiful wonderland, yet you're always on guard, waiting for something truly hideous or violent to happen. Like in the final frames of No. 1, when Chris tears off her skin and tosses it into a bush, where it hangs limply in the breeze. Or when Rob is clubbed to death, gore flying out of his nose. It's peaceful and calm when severed limbs turn up in the woods, and the sticks and leaves that illustrate the endpapers look disturbingly like tendons.

Still, you can't look away.

Like with the dark, brambly woods or a murky puddle, you're intrigued by that something lurking beneath the surface.

Because the black hole is much deeper and darker than it appears.

Jessica Pressler (jpressler@philadelphiaweekly.com) is PW's associate editor.

Charles Burns comics are available on www.fantagraphics.com