CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

“Good taste is the enemy of creativity. —Pablo Picasso

It’s a good thing all those warnings turned out to be false—otherwise we’d all be tapping our way through life with a white cane. Everybody jacks off— and anyone who says they don’t is either lying, getting someone to do their handiwork for them, or hormone-dead.

Of course, whether you choose to cover-up or fess-up is your business. Whatever your choice, though, you can take solace in the knowledge that, no matter how you play it, you’re not playing it alone. As a result of the AIDS plague and ensuing safe sex campaigns, more and more people are coming out of the bathroom and openly grasping self-abuse as their preferred means of self-expression—thus elevating auto-eroticism from its previous low-rent status as the light beer of sex to its new role as universal common currency on the world markets of carnality.

Keep in mind, however, that what separates the men from the boys isn’t

KISS ME DEADLY

the size of their toys so much as it s the source of their stimulation—and, make no mistake, when it comes to doing the rattlesnake shake, stroke for stroke, you’d be hard pressed to find better stimulation than Black Kiss.

“My God!” says the astonished voice on the other end of the long distance line upon hearing the pronouncement. “I was just talking to somebody about providing masturbatory entertainment for 14-year-olds, and you just put it all in perspective!”

The voice belongs to Howard Chaykin, who should know; he is, after all, the creator of Black Kiss: a glossy, 16page comic book published monthly by Vortex Comics in Toronto.

Chaykin’s concurrence notwithstanding, Black Kiss is far more than just a stroke book for adolescents, and he knows it. Straddling both the carnal and the charnel with equal dollops of enthusiastic abandon, this ripe communion of violent murder, blackmail, shattered taboos, and hardcore omnisexual copulation stands alone as the greatest adult comic book of all time.

No overnight sensation, Chaykin’s current status as the industry’s most controversial author/illustrator comes after two decades of working for virtually every major comic book

publisher extant. However, it’s his work during the past five years on such books as The Shadow, Blackhawk, American Flagg!, and Time2 which has cemented his reputation as being, well...

“I was standing in my supermarket when I read that thing in CREEM, I tell you,” Chaykin laughs. “I picked it up to look at it, saw there was an article about comics in it, and discovered that I was ' the undisputed master of sex and violence in comics,’ which amused me to no end. I just cracked up, I was so delighted.”

Less delighted, no doubt, are those readers who take umbrage to Chaykin’s (literally) graphic approach to sex, such as his inclusion of an oral sex scene during his recent Blackhawk series for DC Comics.

“Somebody reviewing Blackhawk defined the characters that I do as being involved in degenerate sex, and they wanted me to do stories about

loving people involved in loving sexual relationships. These people are going to be real disappointed when they lose their virginity.

“Let’s face it, I don’t think most comic book people get laid anyway. The feeling I get from a lot of the comics I read is that these people don’t have real relationships because, if they did, then their characters might talk like they did.

“Admittedly, the characters I’m writing about are a bit on the extremeon the edge—but these people are at least as realistic as five masked teenagers running around fighting crime with their mutant powers. My characters don’t say, ‘I hurt’ at least once every issue but then again, angst is something my characters tend not to be able to afford.

“The basic premise, i.e., doppelgangers—the use of twins; the use of mistaken identity—is something that I’ve always been playing with. Basically, the idea of twins with a dick between them—a premise that emerged in 1979 or 1980 when I was seeing a lot of porn for the first time and getting really bored out of my mind with some of the premises.

“The fact is, nobody was really

Jeffrey Morgan

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interested in porn because most people flashed by the plot anyway. I wanted to do an entire story where the plot and the eroticism were directly connected. And since I am a major believer in motivation by obsession...

“Let’s face it, it’s an underworld I know something about, having lived through it for a good part of the '70s—albeit in NewYork as opposed to Los Angeles. The characters and relationships are based on a lot of people I’ve known and circumstances and situations I’ve known.”

Anyone who reads Black Kiss and finds themself thinking that the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat album would make a fitting soundtrack for the proceedings going on would be far from wrong.

“I was an Underground fan when I was in my late teens and early twenties,” admits Chaykin. “Among my friends, I am the only guy I can think of who saw the original Underground live. I saw them in Chicago and it was a phenomenal show. Taj Mahal was the

opening act. It was a great night.

“Look, I’m 37 years old, and a lot of my sensibilities come from—I mean, Lou ReedTs someone I completely understand. I’m glad Lou Reed is not dead. So yeah, I don’t deny the fact that I’m a bit bent out of shape in terms of my taste.”

As for the title Black Kiss, Chaykin says, “Basically, the book is an oral extravaganza for very specific reasons, all of which will ultimately become very clear.

“The original title was Smoke Dreams because originally the book started out as simply an erotic book before I realized I needed a premise, too. So, you know, it could’ve been a western. It could’ve been a science fiction piece. I decided to do a noir piece because I’m living in L.A., and this was my first L.A. type of job.

“See, what I’m trying to do is a strip that fakes place in the ’80s that looks and feels like the ’50s. I’m having a very good time, it’s a satisfying job, and it’s kind of nutty. I thought it would be fun to draw real things and real people in real places.”

Then realizing what he has just said, the undisputed master of sex and violence in comic books laughs and adds, “sort of real people.”