A sexually-transmitted disease divides a group of high school teenagers, with horrible consequences.
Black Hole follows the comings-of-age of two teenagers - Keith, a shy boy, and Chris, a pretty, popular girl - in a small, Oregon town in the 1970s. Both are complicated stories of social and sexual anxiety, set against the freewheeling sex-and-drugs hippy culture of the 1960s.
Black Hole touches on many cultural turns in modern American life: the end of the '60s and its idealism, the advent of fear about sex and HIV, the shakeup of social norms in a fracturing, destructured society, the extreme alienation of youth from itself - such as that which has produced the Columbine killings and their like - and from adult society.
Burns's stunning graphical style - reminiscent of woodblock printing - is not an obvious choice for the subject matter and all the more powerful and strange for it.
Compelling, sad, compassionate, novelistic in scope and depth, Black Hole does not reveal its mysteries readily and will bear (even demand) repeated reading.
Remi George, better known as Hergé - the creator of Tintin - is 101 today. Today a huge worldwide industry has grown up around Tintin - spawning shops and merchandise and countless books and a long-anticipated film adaptation by Steven Spielberg - but, says comic critic Paul Gravett: 'Hergé - the Belgian-born father of Tintin - remains a figure who inspires devotion, controversy and, most of all, mystery.'
Gravett's article is very interesting, as are the commentaries from Chris Ware and Micheal Faber.
While leafing through Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature (a Christmas gift and placed high on my reading list for 2008), I noticed that it refers to Lewis Hyde's The Gift, which I am currently reading! Will wonders never cease!?
Here's how the book found a US publisher. A wisdom of crowds/power of blogs kind of story, if ever there was one. Also has a strong relevance to the whole gift concept.
And here's a synopsis of Tintin and the Secret of Literature, as posted on Tintinologist.com:
"Herge's Tintin cartoon adventures have been translated into more than fifty languages and read by tens of millions of children aged, as their publishers like to say, 'from 7 to 77.' Arguing that their characters are as strong and their plots as complex as any dreamt up by the great novelists, Tom McCarthy asks a simple question: is Tintin literature? McCarthy takes a cue from Tintin himself, who spends much of his time tracking down illicit radio signals, entering crypts and decoding puzzles and suggests that we too need to 'tune in' and decode if we want to capture what's going on in Herge's work. What emerges is a remarkable story of hushed-up royal descent, in both Herge's work and his own family history. McCarthy shows how the themes this story generates - expulsion from home, violation of the sacred, the host-guest relationship turned sour, and anxieties around questions of forgery and fakeness - are the same that have fuelled and troubled writers from the classical era to the present day. His startling conclusion is that Tintin's ultimate 'secret' is that of literature itself. Appearing on the eve of both Herge's centenary (2007) and the release of a major Steven Spielberg Tintin film, "Tintin and the Secret of Literature" should be avidly devoured by not only Tintin lovers but also by anyone with an interest in literature, philosophy or art."
This year, Dublin: One City, One Book - Dublin's annual celebration of literature - celebrates native son Bram Stoker's Dracula for the month of April.
Burns's stunning graphical style - reminiscent of woodblock printing - is not an obvious choice for the subject matter and all the more powerful and strange for it.