In its focus on the world of adolescents, Black Hole fits the more general frame of 1990s Pacific Northwestern counterculture, being a text that produces and shapes the identity of the place while simultaneously trying to represent it, and successfully contributes to a counter-narrative of Seattle and of Pacific Northwestern local identity.Ĥ In their readings of Black Hole, critics and reviewers have either interpreted the bodily mutations of the protagonists as a set of metaphors referring, for instance, to the AIDS epidemic (Zeigler Raney), the school shootings in the US (Zeigler), and the generational clash (Schwartz) or tried to provide a psychoanalytic reading, defining Black Hole as “the most Freudian graphic novel you will every read” (Arnold). Both grunge and Twin Peaks played an important role in addressing some of the stereotypes commonly associated to the Northwest and to its evocative scenery, pointing to the crucial role that teenagers and young adults had in countering and deconstructing the image of peacefulness that was allegedly a defining character of that area of the United States. Burns’s attempt is all the more interesting, since in the 1990s the Pacific Northwest was gaining notoriety as the cultural landscape for that diffuse rebellion that characterized a whole generation, “Generation X,” i and that is perfectly evident in grunge music and some aspects of David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks. Black Hole, on the contrary, positions itself among those texts that in the 1990s were reshaping Northwestern culture, questioning both the unproblematic relationship between urban culture and the landscape, and the positive character conventionally, and often uncritically, ascribed to nature. Thus, Burns unveils the most frequently recurring stereotypes related to this region of the US, trying to elucidate how the Pacific Northwest as a cultural myth fails to accommodate the condition of social marginality of distinct categories of people and groups.ģ There is a significant cultural, and specifically literary, tradition that has related the Pacific Northwest states (especially Washington and Oregon, and also, to a lesser degree, Idaho) to nature and wilderness, and has analyzed most of the artistic production of the Pacific Northwest and of the Northwest in general as the outcome of a close and idyllic symbiosis between the landscape and its inhabitants. 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). Overlander rv app.1 Charles Burns’s Black Hole was published in twelve issues between 19, and as a volume in 2005.
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