62 Dicks: Black Kiss 2 #1 Review

Yup, 62. I counted them.

Black Kiss 2 is the sequel to a 1988 story about the hunt for the Vatican’s pornography and the transsexual vampires who stole it, so you should have some idea of what reading this story entails. At my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to remember that Juggs isn’t a comic book, they kept Black Kiss 2 #1 behind the counter, and at this college town comic store in Godless, liberal Boston, they never keep books behind the counter. “I normally don’t do this,” the owner told me, “But it’s summertime, and I couldn’t risk some kid coming in, finding it, and bringing in all his little buddies for a cheap thrill.” So I asked him for a copy and some Vaseline. But I digress.

The point is that Black Kiss 2 isn’t gonna be for everyone, or if fact, anyone if they’re younger than, say, 16 years old (by then, they’re old enough to get around any nanny software on their computers, and have seen all this stuff anyway). It is sexually explicit, and considering it is a story about demons and vampires, we’re not talking airbrushed Playboy sexually explicit. It’s not Two Girls, One Cup, but you should ask yourself how you feel about tentacle porn before you put on your raincoat and sunglasses and ask your friendly comic retailer for a copy.

Who Knows What Evil Lurks In The Pants of Men? Dynamite Reprinting Chaykin’s The Shadow

Howard Chaykin’s reboot of The Shadow for DC Comics back in 1987 tends to be overshadowed (Get it?) by other stuff around the same time period, including The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and Chaykin’s own American Flagg! and Black Kiss. Partially because all those books are so damn good, and partically because DC lost the Shadow license a long while ago, preventing the book from staying in print. Turns out that maybe the Conde Nast guys who own the character didn’t think there was a long-term future in letting Chaykin’s successor, Andy Helfer, graft The Shadow’s head onto a robot… although in retrospect, it was probably a more realistic take on the character than Alec Baldwin.

But Chaykin’s original miniseries, Blood & Judgment, is some of the best comics from the 1980s that you could find. Excellent art with a logical and interesting way of bringing Lamont Cranston from the 30s to the 80s… although it felt more like the 70s what with the way Chaykin wrote Cranston as banging anything that walked, moved or crawled in a skirt, usually without even bothering to check for an adam’s apple first. Plus, the book contained splash pages that you could put against anything from Dark Knight you, if you’re anything like me, xeroxed and tacked to your wall in high school.

Pissed Men: Avengers: 1959 Review

Since AMC’s show Mad Men became a hit by turning mid-20th century nostalgia into a bankable commodity and by casting Vincent Kartheiser in his second role where I want to stomp his balls off, it was only a matter of time before the copycats started showing up. Much like Raiders of the Lost Ark begat Tales of the Gold Monkey and Bring ‘Em Back Alive, this year Mad Men has given us the creatively leeched Pan Am and The Playboy Club… with pretty much the same predictable results.

And so what with Marvel Comics hoping to bring in new readers and not being fools (Because Marvel doesn’t reboot! Marvel doesn’t NEED to reboot to keep their number one market sh… wait, what?), Marvel’s thrown their own hat in the Good-Old-Days ring with Avengers: 1959, apparently having missed the twin memos that the current trend is toward reliving the 1960’s, and that the last go-round with 1950’s nostalgia ended by jumping the shark. Literally.

Look: I’ve been around the block enough to know that the idea of a comics company sniffing for a bandwagon to jump on is hardly new. Let’s face reality: if Roy Thomas hadn’t snapped up Star Wars license, then Marvel would be the ones trying to pretend they hadn’t released Star Hunters – a comic so bad they pulled the “kill the hero and bring him back with a new costume to save the book” trick 120 days after the book started. Being a realist I know that if Mad Men was about Christopher Street in New York, Marvel would be releasing Avengers: What Price Glory Hole? right now. So I won’t try to hold the copycat feeling against this book.