Black holes and parallax gaps: the contemporary graphic noir of Charles Burns’s Black Hole

Abstract

As a literary and filmic mode, noir has long been interested in revealing the breakdown of the symbolic order and the effect this breakdown has upon its protagonists. In his graphic novel Black Hole (published serially between 1995 and 2005), Charles Burns combines noir’s current of symbolic unmasking with the visual elements found in the subgenre of body-horror to explore the insistence of the material real upon the daily lived experience of his text’s protagonists, suburban high-school students who function as the contemporary correlatives of noir’s losers and loners. In doing so, Burns critiques the masculine power structures implicit in the normative world of suburban America – as well as in the genres of noir and horror – by drawing the reader into his text as a subject who is asked to utilise and overcome the limited perspectives of Burns’s narrators.