I know some people out there like Charles Burns, and in particular like Black Hole. You're within your rights to like it, but I definitely did not - I found it dull, labored, hollow and unchallenging. So, keeping within my rights, here are quotes I particularly agreed with from a review that I liked.
When I start reading the comics of someone dragged through the aesthetics of RAW, someone held up by his peers as having little equal, someone producing his long-awaited masterpiece, I excpect to find a creator working at the top of his game, armed with all the tools available to him. I expect to find a comics creator, someone who blends word and image, who employs the full language of comics at his disposal. Instead I find a book of illustrated prose. As beautiful as Burns' images are, they rarely do little more than show us what his captions have already told us.
Black Hole is a slight work. As a prose short story, it would appear very thin. As a novel, it would be viewed as a joke. I'm afraid, and a little bit ashamed, of a medium that has produced so few great works that this is held in such esteem.
His characters don't confuse horniness with love and never have sex without romance. Every act is perfect. They exhibit little humor, they stab at philosophy without asking the relevant questions.
I leave you with a meanspirited pic I made. Sorry, I'm annoyed with my own writing and art tonight. Maybe sometime later this week I'll share my frustrations concerning Jimmy Corrigan...
When I start reading the comics of someone dragged through the aesthetics of RAW, someone held up by his peers as having little equal, someone producing his long-awaited masterpiece, I excpect to find a creator working at the top of his game, armed with all the tools available to him. I expect to find a comics creator, someone who blends word and image, who employs the full language of comics at his disposal. Instead I find a book of illustrated prose. As beautiful as Burns' images are, they rarely do little more than show us what his captions have already told us.
Black Hole is a slight work. As a prose short story, it would appear very thin. As a novel, it would be viewed as a joke. I'm afraid, and a little bit ashamed, of a medium that has produced so few great works that this is held in such esteem.
His characters don't confuse horniness with love and never have sex without romance. Every act is perfect. They exhibit little humor, they stab at philosophy without asking the relevant questions.
I leave you with a meanspirited pic I made. Sorry, I'm annoyed with my own writing and art tonight. Maybe sometime later this week I'll share my frustrations concerning Jimmy Corrigan...
posted by Odorless Boatman at 1:00 AM
8 Comments:
don't confuse not getting it with bad writing!
(i did a sloppy little MS paint thing to reflect that new slogan, but i couldn't make the html look. so sad.)
so true. so goddamn true.
Megan - Feel free to respond to some of the comments made by the review I linked. Because I know I got it; I also know there was very little to get. Burns is confusing seriousness with profundity, and perhaps you are too.
Anne - Yeah, it's a shame. I had high hopes.
okay, so, as we both know, i don't really have very much familiarity with comics, so i talked to my dad about black hole, since he'd be better able to counter this argument than me. all i can really offer is that i know what i like and i have no problem saying that i'm an excellent judge of worth (as far as the arts go), and i definitely think Burns is great. I can't really get into the technical aspect of things.
my dad didn't really offer a lot that i couldn't though. He said that, yeah, Burns isn't blending the medium as well as someone else might be, but that he is a fantastic artist, and as his peers have pointed out, someone with few equals. In my dad's opinion (and i suppose mine as well, since i really am not sure how blending the medium would do anything to make the story better, and you seem to complain pretty seriously of the story) the art makes up for anything that the blending lacks.
as for the inherent harmony of the characters (never confusing sex with romance, never confusing horniness with love, et al) perhaps the disharmony lies not within the characters interactions with each other, but with the characters and the world they live in. All these characters are alienated from their surroundings. You can only have so much conflict in a story, you of all people should know that, being a writer yourself, and Burns how chosen to make that conflict lie elsewhere than character a vs. character b.
now, if you just don't like it, which is the feeling i'm getting, well fine, taste is taste and there's no accounting for it, but i think you should consider that perhaps you're slagging Burns a little too hard. He's a beautiful artist, and his stories are no worse nuanced and arranged than some of your favorites (think about the inherent depth of, oh, say, scott pilgrim...)
Well, to take things one at a time:
he is a fantastic artist, and as his peers have pointed out, someone with few equals.
I'm not even sure this is true, frankly. Burns is a better-than-average draftsman, certainly. And he knows how to use a brush to get a more expressive line than Daniel Clowes (to cite another current 'indie comics' darling). But in Black Hole, compared to even the little other work I've seen of his, he's not performing as well as he can. The character designs are rather similar, for instance. Still, that's not my main source of contention with the book.
really am not sure how blending the medium would do anything to make the story better
Think of it this way: you're watching a scene in a movie, and a character puts on Neil Young's Harvest. Do we need the narrator to tell us, "She put on Harvest by Neil Young"? No, because we've just seen it happen. But I just opened Black Hole to an entirely random page, and that exact scene happens. It's amateurish; reminds me of 30's superhero comics (i.e. a picture of Batman punching a bad guy. Caption: "Batman socks the crook in the jaw." Batman's word balloon: "Now I'll punch you, evildoer!" Crook's word balloon: "Oh no! Batman's just punched me in the jaw!") If you're telling a story in a medium with a visual component, you should take the visual component into account in your storytelling. Burns doesn't, for some reason; much of this book could have been told either without pictures or without captions, and yet he feels the need to lean on both.
perhaps the disharmony lies not within the characters interactions with each other, but with the characters and the world they live in.
Well, I'd say that's what Burns is going for. But it results in entirely unbelievable characters. These are teenagers! And yet they're some of the most un-teenagery teenagers I've ever encountered in fiction. I'm not saying the problem is that there's no character v. character conflict, because there actually is, but rather there's little sense of internal conflict in any of the characters. Part of this, no doubt, is that Burns wastes internal monologues on having characters tell us it's raining when the art's already made that obvious. His "high concept" gives him the opportunity to explore numerous issues relating to being a teenager (though, frankly, there's not much subtle or original about it - the concept's a small step from being called "X-Men"). But he addresses very few, if any, of these issues. And that's a major failing.
his stories are no worse nuanced and arranged than some of your favorites
But that's exactly my problem: Burns's story has no nuance. He gives us characters with little-to-no depth and a story that's amateurishly told. As the critic in the linked review points out, this is a story that would have gotten very little acclaim or notice if it were published in a different medium; the fact that Burns is writing in comics allows him to dully relate hackneyed themes and give critics who have little familiarity with the medium a chance to seem "with it." Burns has laid everything out, made everything obvious, written a story that's so unchallenging that anyone can "get" it.
These are my ultimate problems with Black Hole:
1. There's a sense of wasted potential - a writer who came up with a potentially potent metaphor and then lacked the skill to take advantage of it.
2. The way that it's been critically lauded when much more deserving works are overlooked. This isn't Burns's fault, obviously, but it's the reason I would even address Black Hole here, rather than just forgetting about it. 2005 was an excellent year for the comics medium, and to see something so poorly done praised over much more innovative, skillful, interesting, and powerful works is somewhat bothersome.
I really need to stop drinking so much Mountain Dew.
i'd have to re-read black hole to really contend with any of that.
frankly, i think this is just one person's opinion vs. another's, i still think black hole is pretty great.
Like I said right at the start, you're certainly within your rights to disagree. Just as I'm within mine to think that a 38-year-old cartoonist - or at least this 38-year-old cartoonist - didn't and doesn't understand teenagers enough to be writing about them.
i think black hole's major downfall is its rather silly use of sex to demonstrate greater points.
when a writer busts out bizarre, dramatic stds in a weak story, that's a pretty good sign that the writer is aware that he has a rather uninspired story.
it was an interesting premise but the book itself is totally unmemorable.
okay, off to class!
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