If you don’t know who Charles Burns is, here’s a little artistic background courtesy of the Black Hole inside cover — better than I could ever say it.

“Charles Burns grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegleman’s Raw Magazine in the mid-1980s and took off from there in an extraordinary range of comics and projects, from Iggy Pop album covers to the latest ad campaign for Altoids…” So he was working on this one comic for incredibly long and its called Black Hole. This book represents 12 volumes — 10 years worth of Burns’s work and one could consider it a masterpiece.

All 12 comics, originally released from 1993-2004, were compiled and remastered as a book in 2005, so another book report at this point in time may seem a little redundant. But since it was recently announced that David Fincher (Zodiac, Fight Club) will direct a live version of Burns’s classic series, you might as well (re)familiarize yourselves with this awesome tale of alienation and coming of age. There’s no Jake Gyllenhaal in either version as far as I know.

Burns’s classic steam-lined horror style adorns each of the 368 pages. The drawings are simple but very high contrast, with fierce attention to detail on each and every page. Each volume starts with its own unique title drawing. The writing beautifully fits the characters and time/place — Seattle, late ’70s. Hippies and jocks, a lack of haircuts, weasel mustaches, pop bottle glasses dominate and smoking grass is a constant.

Generally the story is centered around two main characters, Chris and Keith. They both fall in love separately and both contract a non deadly teenager-only STD that creates random mutations of the body. For instance, shedding skin like a snake or growing giant boils on the face. Some mutations are more cosmetically unappealing, others work to the advantage of the host, complimenting their style. The book is a commentary on teenage life, if not a reflection on what Burns’s youth was like. Throughout there are parties and young lovers and confusion and crushes and curiosity. Experimentation. Going headlong into the future without any guarantee that anything will be OK.

Black Hole is basically a microcosm for that part of your life when you are experiencing things for the first time. Everyone is on different levels in their development as a human, but plowing ahead at once, direction unknown, hormonally drunk… It’s a little tough to put into words, but if you were a kid once, you know what I mean.

The book is also kind of a love suspense story. Mostly love. There’s even several murders in the book. By the time I had finished reading Black Hole I felt like I knew the characters and it was kind of sad to say good bye to them. The ending, I found, was particularly touching and some water even came out of my eyes. Man water.

The book is actually beautiful and I’ve read it through several times since our 15-year-old shoplifting squad picked it up for me last month. It’s 368 pages long and is out now on Pantheon.

Powr Mastrs is the first release in a projected six volume graphic novel series by artist C.F. — AKA Christopher Forgues. He’s originally from the Boston area. Since he didn’t have computers growing up, entertainment supposedly came in the form of looking at a light switch on the wall or hanging with one of his friends who lived a mile away. This is reflected in the artwork he produces. His one man music project is called Kites and he’s a friend of the Fort Thunder arts collective, which was this vital art and music venue in Providence, Rhode Island. I’ve never been to Rhode Island, but it seems like it would be a cool place to visit. The pre-civil war building that housed Fort Thunder has since been demolished and a supermarket has been erected in its place. Career highlights, so to speak, include starting up the Paper Radio with Ben Jones; precursor to Paper Rad/Paper Rodeo. Forgues has been featured in the Ganzfeld art annual as well as the acclaimed Kramers Ergot and has been publishing his own “Low Tide” comic since the mid ’90s. To find out lots more, just look around the internet for any one of those names.

The tale of Subra Ptareo and the mob of other characters contained within Powr Mastrs picks up in a time so far in the future that it defies our knowledge of Earth and every one of its systems. This is like looking at an apple and telling yourself that the apple is in fact a super computer cruise ship. For example, in a chapter where I think C.F. was working rather lucidly, there is a scientist elf character named Mosfet who has created and trapped a living black goo in a picture frame as a portrait. While Mosfet is sleeping the goo escapes and takes human form using a mobile skin suit which he has stolen. The scientist wakes up in his sleeping cubby hole only to find that the goo is meddling with his inventions. So he sucks the goo into his head to contain it while he goes to create a proper holding tank in the jungle. That might not make any sense, but I see dead people. So what?

Because of the sketchbook nature of this avant-garde novel, we are able to fill in the blanks and colour the fantastic scenes with our imaginations. C.F.‘s fey style is on point as we depart from the norm — what one might expect to see in a conventional graphic novel — and venture into the world of mysticism, transformations and the unknown. From front to back, the 120 page pylon orange coloured paperback reads like a möbius strip. The story seems to take place both at one moment and over eternity. At the end of the day this is just a book with pictures and writing in it, but what makes Powr Mastrs special is that there’s nothing out there like it.

The entire book is hype all the way through. There’s even a little map and portraits of the characters in the beginning, like at the beginning of The Hobbit or the Redwall books. The gas huffing sub-men were my favourite. Let’s face it, writing and illustrating our own six episode graphic fantasy comics / novels would be punishingly hard. Keeping them from being exceedingly lame would also be tough. C.F. has somehow managed to focus hilariously complex and curious ideas from deep in his brain and then present them clearly. I thoroughly enjoyed what C.F. created here and I am excited for part two, although I really have no idea when we can expect to see that. In the mean time Powr Mastrs 1 is out now from Picturebox Inc. and is a fantastic read.