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Black Hole Discussion Guide: Home
Charles Burns
Articles, Interviews, and Reviews
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Gross AnatomyThe Washington Post, October 30, 2005.
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Down with the KidsThe Guardian, November 18, 2005.
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A Trip Through a Black HoleTime, October 21, 2005.
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The Charles Burns Interview by Darcy SullivanThe Comics Journal, February, 1992
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“I’m Not on This Planet Forever”: An Interview with Charles BurnsThe Comics Journal, October 31, 2014.
Other Works by Charles Burns
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X'ed Out by
ISBN: 9780307379139 -
The Hive by
ISBN: 9780307907882 -
Sugar Skull by
ISBN: 9780307907905
Videos
Discussion Questions
(From the Association of College and Research Libraries - Residency Interest Group)
- In what ways does this book capture teenage angst? Is the STD the cause of this angst? Why or why not? How well does Burns capture the typical American teenage experience? Are we writing teens off a bit by just calling them “angsty”?
- Why do the characters seem so ostracized from the adult world? Are adults leaving them out of the picture, or vice versa? How does the disease itself ostracize teens from their peers as well as adults? Is it just the disease that is responsible?
- Drugs and sex factor in heavily to the lives of the characters. Is this common among teenagers? How do drugs and sex influence the characters? Is this behavior just a product of the time period in which this book is set?
- When teens are infected they often mutate in some way. Could this mutation be a metaphor for something (or several things)? Teenage experience? STD stigmatization? Do the unique types of mutations reflect anything about the characters themselves?
- Are there elements of horror in this book? What are they? Does the subject matter lend itself to the horror genre? How so?
- How does Burns’ artwork affect the mood of the book? Does it add to or detract from the story? Black hole imagery is used frequently in the book – what does this imagery reflect about the story itself?
- Were the characters differentiated enough? Were they supposed to be? Did any character stand out or were any particularly memorable?
- Burns took a full ten years to write this entire story and it was serialized in a number of comic book issues. Would you have guessed this reading it all at one time? How well does the story flow – does it seem disconnected or disjointed?
Reserve a copy
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Black Hole by
ISBN: 9780375423802
Suggestions for further reading
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The Arrival by
ISBN: 9780439895293In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland and sets off for a new country, where he must build a new life for himself and his family. -
Stitches by
ISBN: 9780393068573One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had throat cancer and was expected to die. Small, a prize-winning children's author, re-creates a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. -
The Portable Frank by
ISBN: 9781560979784Frank is a unique, visionary comic, exquisitely drawn and so fully realised that adults and children alike find themselves pulled deeply into Woodring's hallucinatory mindscape.