Books

It's fitting that it took Charles Burns more than a decade to complete his eerie, mammoth Black Hole -- about as long as it takes a child to go from adolescence to adulthood. That is, if they live so long, which in the world of Black Hole (see below) is anything but certain. Set in the Seattle suburbs of Burns' 1970s youth, the 368-page comic is less like a horror movie than the nightmares you have after watching one, particularly if you hit the bong a few times first. A sexually transmitted plague ("the bug") is working its way through the teenage population, leaving some with easily concealed deformities and turning the rest into mangled freaks who haunt the woods outside of town. In his RAW days, Burns delighted in exhuming junk culture for cerebral kitsch value, but here he turns it inside out, relegating B-movie creeps to the background and bringing the undercurrent of dread to the fore. His supple brush lines and spiky, white-on-black shading have never been more dangerously seductive.

Chris Ware, meanwhile, is still drawing like the guy who never got laid, his insanely detailed pages at once alluring and impenetrable. There's probably no better draftsman in the medium, but the latest volume of Ware's Acme Novelty Library illustrates the dangers as well as the pleasures of entering his world. He crams minute, perfectly formed bits into unexpected places: a slap at U.S. imperialism just below the UPC symbol, a complete strip on the edge of the book's cover. But sometimes Ware's mini-mania verges on obdurateness; some strips require a first reading just to figure out how to read them, and six consecutive pages of microscopic, geometrically arranged text are likely to repel all but the most generous fans. Ware is doing better, more oxygenated work in the New York Times magazine, where the restrictions of a weekly one-page schedule are bringing out the clarity in constraint.

Charles Burns and Chris Ware, Thu., Oct. 20, 7 p.m., Free Library of Philadelphia, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.