"An Excuse to Draw a Naked Girl with a Tail" – Charles Burns Talks Black Hole

You’ve all read Charles Burns’ horror masterwork Black Hole, right? If you haven’t, get the hell out to a comic shop, or good bookstore, this very afternoon and pick up a copy of the extremely pretty Pantheon hardcover edition. The story, concerning a group of teenagers in Seattle in the ’70s and sexually transmitted “plague” that transforms the infected in monstrous ways, is worth every cent – and then some.

It’s a great, sprawling, sexy, sad, layered work, truly befitting the term “graphic novel.”

For those that have read it, or want to get excited for it, there’s an excellent, in-depth interview with Burns that’s just been posted. An excerpt:

That woman at the signing thought it was a romance story and if you regard it as a horror story than that’s legitimate as well. But I wasn’t specifically trying to make a horror story. I was going to do the story the best way I could. I could have told a similar story without any of the obvious horrific physical transformations. I could have just had adolescent kids struggling and running away from home and all these things. But I wanted to push it into even stronger, more extreme situations. That was the reason I chose to do the mutations and the transformations. Or maybe it was just an excuse to draw a naked girl with a tail, I don’t know.

Go, read.