Their physical deformity is so repulsive that they are forced into abandoning their regular lives. Like one of the characters has a ugly slit in the back that can be covered up by an upper garment. So while some suffering from the bug can conceal their state, there are others who abandon their regular lives and start living in the woods as outcasts because their bodies have become too alien for ‘normal’ people to accept them. While some teens maybe able to hide their deformity, others cannot.įor example, one teen who has the disease may have a mutated face, while another teen may have a gross deformity in the back that doesn’t show until he/she is half naked. It shows up in unique ways in each victim. It’s sort of a horror comic about teens catching a sexually transmitted disease that’s simply called the “bug”, which manifests itself in some or the other grotesque form. “It’s not an appropriate book to be reading in a public place” boyfriend told me when my eyes were scanning the dark panels of the book on a metro train, with a stranger peeping in to see the pages. Set in the 70s America, the book is a mix of all the words I just wrote. The ‘graphic’ graphic novel that will keep you engaged till the last page.
To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin.What do you say about a book, where the first chapter begins with an intriguing illustration of a frog cut open and stray blood drops splattered around it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself.Īs hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it-back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. There's no turning back.Īs we inhabit the heads of several key characters-some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it-what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it, or even to treat it. The disease is manifested in any number of ways-from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable)-but once you've got it, that's it. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. Description "The best graphic novel of the year" ( Time) tells the story of a strange plague devastating the lives of teenagers in mid-1970s suburban Seattle, revealing the horrifying nature of high school alienation-the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety, and the ennui.
0 kommentar(er)
