All throughout April and May, we’re crowdsourcing a coronavirus quarantine comics reading list. Each weekday for a month, we’ll post a new recommendation from someone in the comics industry to help folks get through the isolation. This includes writers, artists, letterers, editors, comics journalists, publicists, and more…all paired with a local shop that’s currently selling the books via mail order.

Today’s pick comes from writer Zac Thompson…enjoy!

I’ll recommend something that I think everyone who loves comics should read. It may come as no surprise: Charles Burn’s Black Hole. This sublime tome of teenage sex, angst, and body horror took ten years to make and it shows. It’ll disturb you within the opening pages, but you won’t be able to put it down.

Okay, bear with me a minute, this next bit will feel painful. Black Hole takes place in suburban Seattle, the 1970s – there’s a plague running rampant through the teenage population and it’s transported via sexual contact. Okay, phew.

The book follows a wide cast of characters, some kids who have the bug, some who don’t. At times a Cronenbergian body horror nightmare and at others a strangely sweet John Hughes by way of Harmonie Korrine coming-of-age story. Charles Burns' storytelling is effortless and beautiful. His bold lines and all black and white cartooning will leave you mesmerized.

Anyone I’ve ever given this book too couldn’t put it down, even if it made ‘em sick. -Zac Thompson

Black Hole
Writer/Artist: Charles Burns
Publisher: Pantheon
The setting: suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways — from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) — but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters — some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it — what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself — the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape.

Get it from a local comic shop with this directory from the Comics Industry Collective of stores open and doing mail order!

Click here for the full coronavirus reading list!