…an ongoing series of articles spotlighting movies, music, art, comics, and other assorted media that we at Rooster Republic Press find ourselves enjoying. Once a week, on Thursdays, we will showcase new and old works and, hopefully, help spread the word on great stuff you might otherwise miss out on.
RoosterVision was previously the name of our non-fiction imprint, and since those titles and that line of books are no longer, we have decided to resurrect RoosterVision for the purpose of this showcase. Enjoy!
For this week’s “RoosterVision” article, we take a look at Pantheon’s hardcover release of Charles Burns’s BLACK HOLE. There’s a strong chance you’ve seen this recommended by horror fans and comic fans alike, and it’s definitely worth picking up if you enjoy either of those. Burns tells a very good story, and he is a hell of a good artist.
BLACK HOLE is basically a perfect execution of story and illustration. The book is a modern classic, in our opinion. Someday, the inevitable film adaptation will happen and a whole new generation will find this gruesome, body-horror masterpiece.
Right from the opening page, Burns wastes no time by dishing out the metaphors. BLACK HOLE is about sex and science and rites of passage and if the story’s body-horror inclinations aren’t apparent, just give the book a couple of pages. Burns is not afraid to go full Cronenberg, here.
Burns’s style oozes off the page. His black and white inks make each page, each panel, little masterpieces of style. Moody hardly begins to scratch the surface of the work displayed in BLACK HOLE. Chiaroscuro has rarely looked better in a horror comic.
The cover image (featured at the start of the article) is, we think, an iconic one. However, we love the image under the dust jacket, and it rarely (if ever) gets shared, so we thought we’d show it off with a few pics…
BLACK HOLE is available in paperback as well as hardcover, and you can check it out HERE.
That’s it for this week, readers. Thanks for checking in! And remember…
