BLACK KISS Omnibus Hurt

For the first time with every stop along the way, Howard Chaykin’s groundbreaking adults-only series, the Black Kiss Omnibus collects the legendary 1988 run, its 2012 sequel Black Kiss 2, plus the Black Kiss Xxxmas Special and, created just for this volume, the all-new 28-page Black Kiss Halloween, which will mark Chaykin’s final excursion into this hardboiled erotic noir. Throw in a look back at the project’s long history of sensationalism and censorship, plus a large assortment of extras from across nearly four decades, and this 400-page volume is the definitive collection. The series' explicit sex scenes and the inclusion of transsexual femme fatale Dagmar Laine saw Black Kiss labelled among the most controversial comic series of the late 1980s. Writer-artist Howard Chaykin had already carved out a reputation as an acclaimed but controversial creator with the independent, mature readers 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 "erotic horror" and noted that this put several publishers off producing it, so he finally went with Bill Marks' Canadian company Vortex Comics when they didn't balk at the contents. Chaykin told Amazing Heroes "Black Kiss is about blackmail and pornography and making fun of people and public humiliation and people caught up in situations they can't do anything about... and the importance of wearing the right outfit for the right social occasion... The book was done at a time when there was serious talk about trying to create a ratings system for comics, and the idea was that I would do a book that would be appalling and offensive...and funny." Condition: Bumped corners.