Publication History
Black Kiss became one of the most controversial North American comics of the late 1980s, due to the comic having the sort of explicit scenes of sex and violence unseen in most comics published at the time. The twelve-issue series was written and drawn by Howard Chaykin, best known for his American Flagg! series which often hinted at the sort of sexual content which Black Kiss showed in detail. In fact, the publisher Vortex's usual printer refused to print the book due to its content.
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 (however, this was not done when Vortex released a series of collected editions called Big Black Kiss in 1989).
The series attracted a vast amount of controversy, mainly over its sexual content, but also because of the pairing of sex and violence that Chaykin used throughout the series, and especially in the later issues. However, the series attracted praise for bringing the hard-boiled crime genre back into comics, and Chaykin himself was appreciated for his storytelling techniques.
Chaykin has described his thinking behind tackling such controversial topics:
| “ | The book was done at a time when there was serious talk about trying to create a rating's system for comics, and the idea was that I would do a book that would be appalling and offensive...and funny | ” |
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