Black Hole

Listed in "500 Essential Graphic Novels" as: Horror (Best of the Rest)
Contains: Black Hole #1-12
Year: 1995-2004
Publisher: Kitchen Sink/Fantagraphics Books, Collected Edition: Pantheon Books
Writer: Charles Burns
Artist: Charles Burns

Hello, readers...

Sorry it's been a few days.  I probably could have finished Black Hole sooner, but I wanted to wait until I had a good opportunity to finish it, have it still fresh in my mind, and be able to sit down and tell you all about it.  It's listed in the "Horror" section of the book and I know the spooky stuff always goes down good for me in the month of October, so let's get right to it, shall we?

Let's start by taking a look at that label that's been slapped on this one. Horror...  I really don't know if I'd call this one horror.  It's got a bunch freaky looking kids running around and some parts of it are pretty eerie...  It's even been said that creator Charles Burns wanted to evoke 1970s horror films with the whole feel of the book...  But for me, it's still maybe a bit of a stretch to call this one out-and-out horror.

The setting is Seattle, the 1970s and I guess it kind of does open like a horror film.  We've got a couple of kids in a biology class, some freaky images of a girl shedding her skin, some other kids smoking dope in the woods.

The premise of the story, I guess, is to examine the lives of high schoolers.  They have their parties, go to their classes, gain and lose loves on a weekly basis, but there's one rub.  There's some sort of sexually transmitted disease going around.  It doesn't seem to be very debilitating and the kids aren't dying from it, they're just getting pretty disturbing-looking mutations and disfigurements.

The strange alterations of appearance are different for every kid.  One has a tiny second mouth on his throat, you can see the girl above with the tail, they can be as mild as some bumps on the skin of the chest or as severe as total facial disfigurement.

As I said, I think I'd file this one under more of a general fiction label.  There aren't any rampant killings, no monsters chasing people around, just a focus on three or four of the high schoolers as they try to get through their late formative years, but now they've got the issue of worrying about getting this disease that might turn them into a freak every time they choose a lover.

Burns examines and makes us care for his characters.  He doesn't kill them off one-by-one like expendable archetypes.

This was another one of those books that I was dying to read.  I'd seen it in bookstores for the last five or so years, heard acclaim heaped by the shovel-fulls, and really, it just looked intriguing.  I thought this would be nothing short of an absolutely stellar five-star read.

Though Burns' art is absolutely stunning, after reading about these kids for a while, it becomes just a bit redundant.

They lament the woes of their teenage lives, party, screw, lament, get high, run away from home, screw, lament, and so on and so forth.  Some moments were really unforgettable, memory-provoking (especially if you weren't the most popular kid at high school), and beautiful.  Maybe the further you get from high school, the harder it is to relate but while liking this book, it wasn't one that I was itching to get back to time-and-again as I made my way through the 300+ pages.

Bottom line, I guess: This book is visually stunning and unforgettable, but one (this reader at least) can only take so much high school drama, awkward sex, and drug trips before it becomes unexciting.

Mr. Kannenberg's rating: 4 out of 5
My rating: 3 out of 5
18 down, 482 to go

Join me next time as I get back to yet another Vertigo comic in David Lapham's Silverfish. We'll then move on to our next Top 10 pick in Gene Kannenberg Jr.'s 500 Essential Graphic Novels with The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation.

I'm then going to to another set of five books in the same format I have been, with four Best of the Rest picks from Mr. Kannenberg's book building up to a Top 10 pick.  After that, I'm kicking around the idea of doing five or six horror books in a row to celebrate Halloween.  I love reading spooky stuff all during the month of October and I figured that'd be a good way to share some more of my own tastes and habits with you guys.

So anyway...  Come on back if you like what's on the horizon there and take good care of yourselves in the meantime.

Hell Baby

Listed in "500 Essential Graphic Novels" as: Horror (Best of the Rest)
Contains: Hell Baby (Kyofu Zigoku-shojo) (Original Graphic Novel)
Year: 1989 (Original); 1995 (Translation)
Publisher: Blast Books (Translation)
Writer: Hideshi Hino
Artist: Hideshi Hino

Hey guys!  Back already!

With staying up half the night last night to finish reading and blog on "Terry and the Pirates", I might have two entries here dated September 12th!  Ah, well...  That's OK.  You faithful had a bit of a wait between the previous two entries.  And while we're on the subject: anyone who counts themselves among the faithful readers of this blog, I THANK YOU!

I know that my dear brother Andrew (who does a film blog which was a major inspiration for this blog at http://1001movieman.blogspot.com/) always leaves comments on things and Mr. Mike McLarty just tonight showed me a little retweet love on Twitter. (By the way all you comics nuts should follow Mike if you're on Twitter, he's @MrDystopia.)

I thank and respect you both.  If anyone else is out there and wants to comment, whether you love or hate, wanna praise or curse, or just get ANYTHING off your chest about the reviews here, PLEASE COMMENT! 

We won't bite, we promise. (*shudders at the thought that someone may be saying to themselves, "Hey... Your BLOG bites, pally..."*)

Anyway...

Hell Baby...

It's a dark and stormy night...  Only we're not crouching over Snoopy's typewriter, we're at a hospital in Tokyo.  As rain pounds the window and lightning sporadically lights an office, a doctor tells a young father that his twin daughters have been born.  As the doc leads the new daddy through the eerily dimly-lit rooms, he says, "As you can see, your first-born is perfectly normal..." 

But the doctor struggles for words as he leads Dad into the room where the second daughter lay.  You see, she's not "perfectly normal".  She's...  Well...  Take a look below.

As you can see, she's pretty grotesque. 

Fearing for his family's honor, the father decides to keep the beautiful normal twin girl and asks the doctor to lie to his wife and everyone else about the existence of the hideous second child.  He then ties it up in a garbage bag, takes it to the local dump, and pitches it next to a heap of trash.

The vengeful journey of Hell Baby begins...

Here we have the first bit of manga on the blog and I was anxious to get into some of that, having read a little before, but not enough to have any working knowledge of it.  This book had to be read backwards and right to left.  I dug that.  Some of the original Japanese characters were still there and simply had English translations next to them.  I thought that this helped maintain the authenticity and feel of the work.

The story itself was a bit strange. 

Sometimes we had four or five panelled pages with very artful prose, almost as though we were reading an illustrated poem.  There were beautiful, meaningful panels here and there that left me staring, seeing perhaps something of a transcendant image, despite Hino's visceral art style.

But sometimes Hino embraced the gore.  Limbs and heads went flying, blood splashed walls, fluids of dead animals were supped upon...  He certainly picked some places where he didn't pull the punches.

As a whole, though, in my opinion, the whole thing was a bit slow.

I suppose we could view Hell Baby's journey as an extended metaphor for life, some of us being born viewed as ugly by unwanting parents, tossed into the garbage dump of existence, clawing our way through the dump and struggling on...  Even then, this would fail to excuse the relatively slow pacing of the plot.

There really were some touching, humorous, and shocking parts in this little book and Hino's art is like nothing I've ever seen before (even in my limited other readings of manga), which is cool.  But taking this one, sitting with it and visualizing it as it plays out leads to little more than the entertainment value of a B-rate horror film.  And remember, those can be LOTS of fun, but would you showcase them among the films that changed your life?

Hell Baby is a unique work with its own atmosphere, but by the time I get to novel 100 of this thing, I'll probably strain to remember any real impact it made on me. 

Mr. Kannenberg's rating: 3 out of 5
My rating: 2 out of 5
7 down, 493 to go