October 30, 2005

Chris Rhodes "felt cold ... like a ghost ... like a dead thing had crept into me," she writes in her diary after losing her virginity to a less-than-clean sexual partner. The teenagers of Charles Burns' Black Hole (Pantheon, 400 pages, $24.95) not only have pregnancy and your usual sexually transmitted infections to worry about, there's a disfiguring plague -- referred to only as "the bug" -- making the rounds. It's hard enough to get through high school without worrying that the horns you're suddenly sprouting will let everyone know you're easy.

Burns focuses on a group of high school students in the Pacific Northwest. Each infected teen manifests the disease differently. Some are so scarred from the bug they abandon their homes and form a campsite in the woods where they can hide from curious onlookers. Others are able to hide their mutations with turtlenecks and long sleeves. The story revolves around Chris, who is able to pull off her skin in one unbroken sheet; Rob, who has a second mouth on his neck that starts talking when he falls asleep, and Keith, who knowingly and willingly infected himself by sleeping with a girl who has a tail.

Burns's storytelling technique is surreal and unnerving. The book's violent conclusion does not offer much resolution, and there is no clear line between what actually happened and what was hallucination. Black Hole recalls the films of David Cronenberg, with the blurred line between intimacy and infection and the betrayal of the body at a sensitive time in a person's life.

Burns has been working on Black Hole for 10 years, and Pantheon has now collected the entire run, first serialized by Fantagraphics. It is a remarkable work that rewards the patient fans who have been waiting a decade for the completion.

In the title of True Porn 2, edited by Robyn Chapman and Kelli Nelson (Alternative Comics, 248 pages, $19.95 paper) the word "porn" is something of a misnomer. "Porn" implies sexy, or at least arousing to someone, and for the most part True Porn 2 is not that. The second anthology in this series brings together cartoonists writing and drawing autobiographical stories from their sex lives. The stories are funny, disturbing, sad, corny, disgusting, and sweet, but none of them could be described as sexually arousing.

In "Warsaw," James Austin Murray tells of a friend's insistence during a trip to Warsaw that he have sex, even if it means purchasing a bored prostitute in a sad little motel room. In the story "Menage a Duh," Manning Leonard Krull admits to bungling three opportunities to participate in threesomes owing to insecurity, anxiety and just plain obliviousness. In "Jamie," Lucas May remembers a childhood friend who was also his first homosexual encounter after running into him and discovering he's now a pre-op transsexual. In "Aaron," Sharon Lintz remembers an old co-worker from her days working at a porn magazine.

There are embarrassing moments with parents, pets, exes, crushes, and first childhood experiences. The editors did a commendable job including writers of both sexes and artists of every persuasion, and while there are a few low spots, for the most part the anthology remains good reading -- even if you'll want to shower afterwards.

In one of those strange coincidences that brings about several simultaneous projects about an identical topic, Ande Parks's Capote in Kansas, illustrated by Chris Samnee (Oni Press, 136 pages, $11.95) is being released within just a few months of two movies about Truman Capote's research and writing of his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Parks takes a more fictional approach, calling his book a "drawn novel," he explains in the afterword. "While set within an historically accurate timeline and structure, Capote in Kansas is not always an accurate reflection of the actions of those involved."

Capote in Kansas begins with the author deciding to travel with fellow novelist Harper Lee to visit Holcomb, Kan., site of the brutal murders of the Clutter family. Parks follows the two writers through initial missteps with the people of the town, to a meeting with the killers, and, oddly, the introduction of victim Nancy Clutter as a ghost who befriends Capote.

This is a lot of material to cover in 120 drawn pages, and for the most part Parks slides down the surface. Only once does Capote in Kansas offer something new to the story of In Cold Blood, a four-page flashback to young Truman and Harper as they sit and wait for a visit from Truman's father, who never arrives. The short, quiet moment limns the relationship between the two in a waya full chapter of a Capote biography never could.

It's the ghost of Nancy Clutter that is the largest misstep. It oversentimentalizes the book and weakens the portrayal of Capote. Capote's struggle with the material for In Cold Blood has been well documented in biographies and now films, and he truly seemed to believe he was bringing something new and great into the world, the "nonfiction novel." Parks externalizes the author's drive for this book, making his motivation not the pursuit of greatness but the need to tell the world about a murdered girl who, Parks insinuates, Capote fell in love with. I suppose the ghost is used to counterbalance Capote's affection for the killers, but Capote spends most of his time with Clutter's ghost talking about dresses or trying to do headstands. It offers very little to the story and cheapens the author's genuine turmoil. The quality of the prose and the art work is overshadowed by this serious flaw.

Jessa Crispin is the conductor of bookslut.com, a Web site devoted to literary matters.