‘Black Kiss Omnibus’ (review)

Review by Jack LesCamela

Written and Illustrated 
by Howard Chaykin
Published by Image Comics

In the interests of full disclosure, anyone reading this review should be aware that I’m a moderator for Howard Chaykin’s public page on Facebook. I’m there because I love Howard Chaykin’s work and have done since I first saw it in the late 1970s, and I’m writing here now because I continue to love Howard Chaykin’s work.

“The content of comics, generally speaking, bores my ass off. I am not interested in teenage power fantasies. I’m interested in adult power fantasies because I’m an adult and I have power fantasies.”

– Howard Chaykin, 1985

Black Kiss #1 was published by Vortex Comics in June, 1988. I’d just turned eighteen. It’s no exaggeration to say that its arrival felt right on time. For me.

The 1980s saw the comics industry expand and find a new level of maturity. Stories, themes, and storytelling techniques got increasingly sophisticated and mature.

Publishers took chances in terms of format and content. New publishing companies started up. The self-imposed limitations of the past like the Comics Code Authority were thrown off, in defiance of decades of infantilization of the medium.

It was a heady time for a comics reader. Until it wasn’t.

Towards the end of the decade, all these exciting changes started garnering attention from the outside world. The media, those curious about cool stuff; but also, your moral scolds. Because, of course.

In a bid to avoid the medium being censored from without, the big two comics publishers Marvel and DC began talking openly about instituting ratings labels on all their books. It was the C.C.A. shuck and jive all over again, because some people never learn.

Many comics professionals of note took umbrage with this. If memory serves, there was a public letter and the undersigned declared they wouldn’t work with any publisher that used ratings labels on their comics.

Howard Chaykin was among those who signed off on that letter. Then he did them one better.

He did Black Kiss. It goes like so:

Cass Pollack is a jazz drummer with mob ties. Fresh out of rehab, he discovers his wife and their little girl brutally murdered—and he’s the prime suspect.

Desperate to evade both the mob and the law, Cass runs straight into the fading (but not faded) movie star Beverly Grove. Looking just as sexy and beautiful as in her glory days, Beverly needs his help.

There’s a mysterious reel of film she wants to get back. Someone is blackmailing her over it. If Cass can get the film for her, she agrees to be his alibi.

From there Cass finds himself up to his neck in trouble. He’s caught between crooked cops, Satanic cults, long buried Hollywood secrets, and a doppelganger with a difference. Beneath it all, something much more dangerous lurks. And why is everyone listening to The Boswell Sisters?

Chaykin was a recent transplant to Los Angeles from New York when he wrote and drew the book. He was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and felt paranoid in his new surroundings.

All of that comes through on the page. Black Kiss is Los Angeles comics noir. Chaykin doesn’t just go through the motions hitting the expected stylistic cues. There’s a feverish intensity and nastiness to proceedings. The result is like catching In a Lonely Place (1950) or Kiss Me Deadly (1955) late at night, except holy shit are they a lot dirtier than you remember.

Much of what passes for adult comics then and now is in reality just adding grimness and gravitas to superheroes. That’s not so much adult as adolescence with the veneer of adult.

In contrast, Black Kiss is gleefully pornographic. It delights in sex, violence, gallows humor, and transgression.

It’s an adult comic wholly uninterested in being seen as “important.” It’s filthy genre fun for adults. You know, the profane stuff they’re really into as opposed to what they like to say they’re into.

The art is stark black & white, and it’s some of Chaykin’s best work. Its lubricious nature has made it dismissed and continually misunderstood.

Chaykin’s approach of “graphic design in the service of narrative” is in full effect. It’s not just the content of the book that’s for adults, it’s the storytelling. It requires you to pay attention to both the words and pictures.

That’s followed in the book with the Black Kiss 2 miniseries, which was published twenty-four years after the first one. 2014 saw Chaykin doing the Black Kiss: XXXmas in July Special. Finally, this collection finishes its comics section with the first appearance in print of the Black Kiss Hallowe’en Special.

I won’t recount the plots for the remaining books, except to say that Chaykin doesn’t just tell the same story repeatedly. Part of the reason he waited so long to do a sequel was because he never had a hook for it.

I think the later works are a bit weirder. They somehow manage to be lighter in tone, yet darker and more disturbing. Chaykin’s art is strong throughout.

The remainder of the book is a multitude of supplementary materials. There’s an essay by Chaykin about how it all came about, two text pieces written for previous publications by Walter Simonson and Sam Hamm, pinups, covers, and the like.

Something that comes up repeatedly with talk of Howard Chaykin is how prescient he seems to be. The fella is a regular Cassandro.

For example, he did the comic American Flagg! through First Comics in 1983. He seemed to predict our current political and cultural moment there. Seriously.

Chaykin’s Black Kiss preceded Frank Miller’s noir comic Sin City by three years. It anticipated the sexually charged movie thrillers Basic Instinct and The Crying Game in 1992 by four years.

Despite selling absurdly well, Black Kiss was dismissed sniffily at the time, and has mostly been forgotten. As Chaykin has pointed out, comics readers tend to prefer teasing cheesecake to actual sex.

Black Kiss Omnibus is a beautifully put together book. It’s great to finally get all of it together in one collection at last.

There’s one thing I miss. One of the features I loved about the original issues of the comic were that the editor (the late Lou Stathis) and Chaykin made crime fiction recommendations to the readers of the comic.

That was the first place I ever ran across names like James Ellroy, Jerome Charyn, Charles Willeford, and Chester Himes. I in turn read their books, and it changed my life.

Something like that probably rightfully has no place here. Still, those recommendations added much to the experience of reading Black Kiss for the first time back then.

Highly recommended.

Jack LesCamela lives in Los Angeles, where he has a small apartment and too many
bookshelves. He has worked in bookstores and libraries for over thirty years.