Yes, kids, it’s a graphic novel this time, one of the best. I first encountered the work of Giant Artist C. Burns in his famed “Dog Boy” series, which led to my discovery of “El Borbah” and “Big Baby”. He also wrote and illustrated one called “Curse of the Molemen”—all of which titles are available at Denver’s new book stores, comic stores, and it may be, some Mile High used bookstores too. This was all happening in the time of David Lynch, meta-phantasmagoric weirdness was the new cool. Widely purported to be his masterwork, Burns’s Black Hole is set among drugged out high school students in suburban Seattle in the mid-seventies. Keith and Chris share a biology class. Keith wants Chris; Chris thinks Keith is a really nice guy. Alternate chapters present both points-of-view. Enter "The Bug", a strange sexual plague. Victims are affected in different ways—rashes; sprouting tails and other limbs, shedding their skin, tiny mouths opening at the base of their necks—but whatever the symptoms case to case, it’s an utterly dehumanizing experience for everyone. Bug sufferers have retreated to makeshift camps in the woods outside the city, knowing they will never be accepted by conventional society again. Burns amplifies the typical adolescent sense of psychological isolation, physical awkwardness, hormonal confusion, sexual and hygenic anxiety with canny black and white penwork, using the Bug trope to deliver a message about vanity and moral sacrifice. Complicating matters, a murderer of "Bug" victims is on the prowl, tacking eerie homemade voodoo dolls to trees, and sufferers begin to disappear, one by one . . .
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