The Monsters of Suburbia: Black Hole and the Mystique of the Pacific Northwest

Abstract

This essay focuses on Charles Burns's Black Hole, a graphic novel, published in 2005 and set in the Seattle suburbs, which undermines the cultural myths that, durong the time between the late 1960s and the 1990s, have been related (often uncritically) to the Pacific Northwest. Black Hole positions itself among the texts that reshaped Northwestern culture in the 1990s, and addresses the social and urban changes that, over two decades, have affected the whole area in which its story is set. In so doing, it debunks both the myth of the Pacific Northwest as the American ``Ecotopia,{''} and, by featuring adolescents as protagonists, common stereotypes associated to youth.