Wavy Edges

One of the first things that jumped out at me while reading "Black Hole" by Charles Burns was that the panel edges changed every so often. Initially, I noticed that these changes happened while a character was dreaming, but it eventually became clear that these new panel edges are used to indicate multiple different scenarios. In each scenario, whether it be dreaming, flashbacks, or drug trips, the panel edge appear wavy or crinkled. A note: There are no page numbers.

Like I already mentioned, the first time I noticed these crinkly edges was when a character was having a dream. In the second chapter(?) we can see Chris lying in a tent, fast asleep. Here, the panel borders are straight, sharp. And then it shifts into her dream where she's at a swimming hole with a couple of characters she doesn't remember the names of, (one of which serves as another narrator), and they're all naked. Here, the panels get wavy, and the imagery starts to get really strange. There's a large serpent, a hole in the bottom of Chris' foot that looks like a vagina, and a lake filled with zombie-like people eating soggy thrown out food. The dream ends with Chris being strangled under water by the snake with Keith's (the other narrator), head. She wakes up screaming and the panels go back to sharp, straight lines. Only...Chris rips off a layer of her skin like a snake shedding it's scales, and because this scene is in the unwavy panels, we can only assume that this is something that's actually happening to her.

What I find interesting is there is a moment before Chris' dream where Keith has a sort of vision during Biology class before passing out. But we don't get the wavy lines around the panels, just a bunch of snake, trash, and vagina imagery. I think that this is supposed to mean that this vision, or premonition as Keith thinks it might've been, serves the story in a different way than Chris' dream. Looking through the rest of the book, it's clear that each of the images that flash through Keith's mind are things that actually happen. There's the frog with the split belly that's the cause of this premonition, Chris' split foot that Keith helps her with when she steps on a piece of glass, Chris' back splitting as she sheds her skin, and the image of a woman's hand covering her vagina. This woman, as we can see from the bracelet on her wrist, turns out to be Eliza, the woman who gives Keith "the Bug." All of these images circle around in Keith's head until they form a black hole, and Keith passes out.

The wavy border lines make many appearances throughout Chris' chapters. Much of Chris' story is told to us through flashbacks, like how we find out how she got "the Bug," how she decided she was going to go live in the woods, when she meets Keith again and he decides to help her, and when we learn what led up to the murders of everyone with "the Bug." Almost her entire story line is told through flashbacks and wavy borders.

In each scenario where these wavy borders are used, we get to see some form of story telling, even if it feels like a way to tell the story without showing what's really going on. The copious amount of flashbacks made the story line confusing, but having the borders being wavy really helped to distinguish between something that was a flashback or not.