Episode 176: On Charles Burns' 'Black Hole' and the Medium of Comics

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2024

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Comics, like cinema, is an eminently modern medium. And as with cinema, looking closely at it can swiftly acquaint us with the profound weirdness of modernity. Do that in the context of a discussion on Charles Burns' comic masterpiece Black Hole, and you're guaranteed a memorable Weird Studies episode. Black Hole was serialized over ten years beginning in 1995, and first released as a single volume by Pantheon Books in 2005. Like all masterpieces, it shines both inside and out: it tells a captivating story, a "weirding" of the teenage romance genre, while also revealing something of the inner workings of comics as such. In this episode, Phil and JF explore the singular wonders of a medium that, thanks to artists like Burns, has rightfully ascended from the trash stratum to the coveted empyrean of artistic respectability—without losing its edge. BIG NEWS: • If you're planning to be in Bloomington, Indiana on October 9th, 2024, click here to purchase tickets to IU Cinema's screening of John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, featuring a live Weird Studies recording with JF and Phil. • Go to Weirdosphere to sign up for Matt Cardin's upcoming course, MC101: Writing at the Wellspring, starting on 22 October 2024. • Visit https://www.shannontaggart.com/events and follow the links to learn more about Shannon's (online) Fall Symposium at the Last Tuesday Society. Featured speakers include Steven Intermill & Toni Rotonda, Shannon Taggart, JF Martel, Charles and Penelope Emmons, Doug Skinner, Michael W. Homer, Maria Molteni, and Emily Hauver. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! REFERENCES Charles Burns, Black Hole Clement Greenberg’s concept of “medium specificity” Terry Gilliam (dir.), The Fisher King Seth, comic artist Chris Ware, Building Stories “Graphic Novel Forms Today” in Critical Inquiry Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity Vilhelm Hammershoi, Danish painter Ramsey Dukes, Words Made Flesh G. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form Dave Hickey, “Formalism” Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art Chrysippus, Stoic philosopher Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes, or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdstud, and happy academic New Year to all who celebrate.
0:55.8	This is the first flagship show of the fall semester, and we're back with an episode on a banger
1:01.3	of a graphic novel, Charles Burns Black Hole.
1:05.7	Black Hole tells the story of a group of teens in 1970s, Seattle.
1:13.3	The story is told from the perspective of a young man named Keith and a young woman named Chris. Keith loves Chris, but Chris loves Rob. Rob hooks up
1:20.5	with Chris at a party, and even though he gives her an S-T-I, they end up together. Keith pines for Chris,
1:30.2	but meets a beautiful and sensitive artist named Eliza, and finally lets go of his futile crush. Keith and Eliza end up driving off into an uncertain
1:37.4	future, each wounded by violence that erupts in their lives, but hopeful, despite everything.
1:47.0	Now, so far this all sounds like a story from teen romance comics, but Black Hole weirds teen romance and coming-of-age genres, introducing
1:53.9	an element of body horror that mutates this story as surely as the bug mutates the bodies of its
2:00.4	teenage hosts. That's what the kids
2:03.2	call the STI that's taking kids out at school, the bug. If you get it, your body starts to change
2:10.3	in ways that are generally horrifying, and sometimes alluring. Eliza has a cute little lizard tale.
2:19.3	Chris likes to French kiss the tiny extra mouth that Rob hides under his shirt.
2:24.7	Black Hole takes us into the zone where horror and desire mingle indissolubly.
2:31.0	Not for nothing did we choose Black Hole as one of the texts we discussed in our course,
2:36.5	The Beauty and the Horror, this past summer.
2:40.3	Beauty and horror are concepts that, while apparently opposed to one another, share a secret affinity.
2:47.8	Likewise, it might seem that the eminently Apollonian practice of formal analysis stands opposite to the Dionysian intensities of sex, drugs, and horror that pervade black hole.
	...

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