Charles Burns’ long-running series Black Hole is the peak of the artist’s great career in horror comics. Burns has a knack for locating pathos and unsettling emotions in horror scenarios, and this story about a sexually transmitted plague among small-town teenagers is no exception. The series ran throughout much of the 90s, but since Burns finally published the last few installments and the collected book after the turn of the millennium, presenting it in its long-awaited definitive form, it seems appropriate to count it among the best books of the 2000s. Burns’ noirish style is well-suited to this unsettling story, in which teenage anxiety about sexuality is externalized in the form of various mutations that turn affected teens into monstrous creatures, their sexual anguish etched into their bodies as scales, boils, rashes and new appendages. Few books do a better job of capturing the fear, and the excitement, of nascent desire and adolescent longing, as these diseased teens are driven mad by hormones and embarrassment. (via)