Just Do It

Charles Burns, Tue., Jan. 8, 7 p.m., free, Borders, 1 S. Broad St., 215-568-7400

by Sam Adams

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Tue., Jan. 8, 7 p.m., free, Borders, 1 S. Broad St., 215-568-7400

Creepy, spooky and altogether ooky, Charles Burns' Black Hole (Pantheon Books, $17.95) is teenage horror in a lyrically unsettling vein. Drawn in Burns' trademark style, with stylized zig-zags of light cutting through the inky blackness, the graphic novel was a decade in the making — hardly a surprise given the meticulous nature of his art (not to mention his prolific illustration career).

From early works like Dog Boy, Burns has always had a toe in the campy excesses of 1950s horror, as well as its more disturbing underpinnings, but with Black Hole, he divests himself of any ironic distance. The story of a sexual contagion that works its way through the high school population of a small Seattle suburb is at once terrifying and poignant, strip-mining the iconography of sexual unease while creating a palpable sense of adolescent isolation. Taking its quasi-apocalyptic tale to its logical conclusion, Burns circles back to the beginning, going from tongue-in-cheek homage to something close to primordial.