Not only does Burns provide a portrait of Seattle back in the 1970s, probably trying to shed light on the differences and the continuities between the years in which Black Hole was published, in constructing Black Hole as a complex and refined narrative and graphic pastiche, he turns to the Pacific Northwest of the United States as a collective fantasy, a well-defined and self-sufficient cultural landscape, with its own landmarks, “myths of foundation,” and territorial icons (both natural and urban).

In foregrounding the world of adolescents and young adults, however, Burns also traces a subtle parallel between two distinct phases of American history: his portrait of a group of teenagers from the 1970s, in fact, is echoed in 1990s Seattle, which, in the time span in which Black Hole was published, was almost unanimously identified as the new mecca of young counterculture.Ģ The setting of the whole story, thus, can be read as something more than a simple backdrop of the lives of its protagonists. The characters’ clothes, along with references to musical icons of the time (David Bowie, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix) scattered through the novel, or to the use of drugs as a way to escape reality, are among the narrative elements that evoke the juvenile countercultures of the 1970s. Black Hole is set in the 1970s, “after the fall of ‘60s idealism” (Appleford), as Burns himself states. Those who are unable to hide the marks of the disease are condemned to live in the woods, leading a misrecognized existence outside human and social visibility. As summarized in a review published in The Washington Post, Black Hole, set in the suburbs of Seattle, “covers the high school years of a group of kids who find themselves catching a venereal disease known as ‘the teen plague.’ After sex with an infected partner, they deform and mutate” (Schwarz). 1 Charles Burns’s Black Hole was published in twelve issues between 19, and as a volume in 2005.

Black hole by charles burns