Burns, Charles. Black Hole. New York: Pantheon, 2005.

Finished on the Fourth of July. An odd choice for patriotism.

Q: How do you ruin a story about a "bug" that's affecting only teens and turning them into various kinds of monsters and mutants?

A: You include as characters in that story two, maybe four, teenagers, and spend much of the rest of the time looking at cops and politicians and news reporters who are trying to "get to the bottom of this" and "stop whatever it is from spreading before the shit really hits the fan."

Burns doesn't do this, thank god. He saves his story from ruin by making adults virtually absent (like Peanuts) and filling his story with about a dozen teen characters. So it's not really about this bug/virus thing, it's about being a teenager and wanting to spend as little time away from yer folks as posible.

That said, the book remains very flat throughout. There are new turns of the plot as certain characters are shot or disappear or whatever, but there aren't any kinds of emotional swells, along the lines of Jimmy Corrigan, say. I didn't ever feel driven toward a kind of visual poetics or a grand, complex insight that could only be delivered through image. (Another comic read this weekend, by David Heatley, did this in surprising ways even though it's drawn pretty roughly.)

But that said, the art here is incredible. Burns, btw, is the cover artist for The Believer mag, and he does a great job of using only white-on-black (like those Sin City comics) to get at a range of settings and moods. Light. Shadow. And particularly in drawing characters when they were younger, like in an old photo they might be looking at. I imagine this would be extraordinarily difficult—getting the face to look younger (and like, six years younger, not forty) and still making the character recognizable—but maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe Burns is just incredible, and a better drawer than you.

Which reminds me of a great Paul Lynde joke:

Q: Paul, is Henry Kissinger a good dresser?

A: No, but he makes a fabulous end table.