One Coin Reads 26: Black Kiss 2, by Howard Chaykin

Black Kiss 2, by Howard Chaykin

2012

This was not very good.

Chaykin does an interesting thing with cut out textures 

Purchasing this, even at a price of ¥428, might be a kind of trolling, as people had said it's not good. I just thought, for the price of a sandwich, why not?

Do you want pornography layered with blood and hate? This is it.

When they find out their babe is man, they decide to rape him and kill him, before all getting slaughtered. That's a complete story

I am definitely particular about the use of graphic sex in comics. In a mature comic, like a Hernandez Bros story, it's perfectly done. It's sexy and natural and tells a story. In some of the Italian erotica comics, like Manara's, it's sexy for the point of being sexy. In something like this, I don't get it. It's not erotic, and explicitness isn't necessary to the story, so I'm left with the idea that Chaykin just wanted to draw penetrations and make money off of it. And power to him, I'm all for creative freedom, but it doesn't make for an interesting comic.

Chaykin is not repressed

There is an over-arching story, told in ten-page vignettes. Beverly is a succubus that exists from 1900 to 2010, fucking and killing her way through... not high society exactly, but semi-glamourous locations. Along the way, people are as cruel and hateful as they could possibly be. 

As a plot, there's not much of one. Beverly finds a gay partner, anointed Dagmar, who transforms into her doppelgänger to help her live the lifestyle she wants. The gay partner gets killed, and is replaced by another gay man anointed Dagmar II. The next one is Dagmar III.  Beverly encounters lustful, cruel men who she kills.

The book uses gay identity interchangeably with trans identity, and that's not exactly the way the world is, but some people do have shifting identities, and in the past, there wasn't the space mapped out to differentiate. It's commendable that a book like this can recognize sexuality as a fluid thing. But then it's buried in decapitations, rape, slurs and other things which aren't compelling on their own.

I'm more comfortable posting explicit blood than explicit sex, because that's how society has programmed me

I have little experience with Chaykin's work. When I was twelve, I bought an issue of Black Hawk he did, because it was going to be the next Dark Knight Returns. I ignored his work after that, including the original Black Kiss, which didn't make it to my suburb. I mainly know him from the past few years where he had some controversy about The Divided States of Hysteria, but I'm reading this book as it is, without any baggage of him as an artist or an outspoken figure. And this isn't a good comic.

What am I reading?

The art is fine. I like the rendering in a lot of it. There are some janky pictures, but I like the overall aesthetic. The is a weird cut and paste vibe with backgrounds made interesting because there's a graphic element to them, they're not simply processed photos.  The story is not much of a story, but that's fine enough as well. I think you could take the content and make something aesthetically compelling with it. As a package though, it's such an emotionally stunted vision of a dark adult life, it's mind-bending. 

All the people in this talk in this highly eroticised misogynistic and homophobic way.  Almost every page talks about cocks or whores or cunts or faggots.  And I get it, the past could be cruder in the way people talked, but it wasn't every single person. It was how some people talked and thought. Okay, so Chaykin is telling a story about some folks in particular? No. He's doing twelve vignettes in twelve periods and locations, and it just so happens that the people he's telling stories about in every place and period talk the same way. Chaykin is choosing to make gross people the focus of his whole book. At a certain point, this is not Chaykin telling a story with characters who talk a certain way, it's simply him doing the talking.

And none of it is shocking. It's just unappealing.

For me, it doesn't have compelling ideas, the art is fine but unexceptional, and it's not sexy so it doesn't even work as pornography. Chaykin had fun drawing it at least.