Black Kiss is a hardboiled erotic American comic book limited series written and drawn by Howard Chaykin, which was originally published in 1988 by Vortex Comics.
The series' explicit sex scenes and the inclusion of transexual femme fatale Dagmar Laine saw Black Kiss labelled among the most controversial comic series of the late 1980s. A sequel series, Black Kiss 2, followed in 2012.
Creation
Writer-artist Howard Chaykin had already carved out a reputation as an acclaimed but controversial creator with the independent series American Flagg! and his violent reboots of The Shadow and Blackhawk for DC Comics before he began pitching Black Kiss. His decision to write the book was influenced by DC's ill-fated attempt to introduce an internal ratings system for its comics.
Chaykin wrote a four-page outline for the story some years before under the working title Smoke Dreams, expanding it to full script in 1987 after leaving DC. He labelled the series as an "erotic horror" and noted that this put several publishers off producing it, going with Bill Marks' Canadian company Vortex Comics when he didn't baulk at the contents.
Chaykin told Amazing Heroes: -
Despite this he felt there were elements of comedy in the storyline.
Later, he described his thinking behind tackling such controversial topics: -
Chaykin would later acknowledge the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the novels of Alan Furst and Raymond Chandler and his own experiences living in Los Angeles as influences on Black Kiss. He also claimed Dagmar was partly inspired by "Puerto Rican drag queens" he had worked alongside at an art studio, and an encounter with a "transvestite doppelganger" of a previous girlfriend on Madison Avenue, while much of the architecture was based on real properties in California - particularly Glendale, while sex scenes were modelled on stills from Adult Video Review.
Publication history
Ahead of the release of the first issue, Marks described the series as "100% unrestricted Howard Chaykin", with Chaykin himself noting Black Kiss would "offend just about everyone who reads it". The series was split into 10-page chapters, published in a 16-page monthly comic., priced at $1.25 per issue - a high price at the time. The story was in black-and-white, which Chaykin felt was necessary for it to work. To help retailers who had worries over selling what could be described as pornography, Vortex released the series sealed in a plastic bag. This meant that casual browsers could not open the comic, or obviously see the internal content; inside the bag the book featured additional black card sleeves to hide the covers. The book's sexually explicit content led to Vortex's regular printer refusing to handle the series from the fifth issue onwards.
Partway through the series' initial publication, Chaykin told Heidi MacDonald he was pleased with the strong initial reaction to the book, and felt that it got doing a sexually-orientated book "got it out of my system", taking a shot at his peers by noting "I have more than one idea". He called it "the most vilified comic book in the country right now" but defended the book's salacious nature by noting that if readers "can find anything to jerk off to in that book, I'm astounded.". Chaykin also claimed he had received further offers to work on other erotic comics, which he dismissed because he was "tired of reading sex stuff by guys who have never had a date". Vortex reported the title was selling around 50,000 copies an issue; Marks claimed this made it the third-best selling independent title on the market (behind Mirage Studios' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Dark Horse Comics' Aliens), though as The Comics Journal pointed out this was due to Marks using his own definition of 'independent' that conflicted with that used by most others in the industry.
Following the conclusion of the series' initial publication in 1989, Vortex repackaged it as a three-part mini-series called Big Black Kiss, reprinting four chapters a time in a 48-page, $3.25 format. The series did attract legal attention. In 1989, customs officers in New Zealand seized imported copies of Big Black Kiss on grounds of indecency; at the time law in the country regarded all comics as children's literature and made no account of material intended for adult readers. Following a raid on London comic store Edge of Forever saw several titles seized under the Obscene Publications Act 1964, British police identified Black Kiss as "unacceptable in any format".