Most victims eventually feel the need to exclude themselves from society and go live in the woods. Some deformities are extreme, others can be covered up, but all are irreversible. A group of high school kids are aware of a sexually-transmitted plague affecting some of them, that leads to hideous deformities. This graphic novel is set in 1970s suburban Seattle.

To say nothing of sprouting horns and moulting your skin. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying (and, believe it or not, autobiographical), BLACK HOLE transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it - back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie any more, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high-school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape.

As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness of it, or even to treat it. The disease is manifested any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. And you thought your adolescence was scary.

Black Hole by Charles Burns