How OTT can comic-books get? Forget Adam West’s pre-Family Guy ‘Batman’, all flab, fairy-dust and best forgotten, and say hello to Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss 2, a transsexual, murder mystery beyond any conceivable bad taste. Where else does a pre-op hooker have a glass rod shoved up and splintered in her cock?
The Mel Brooks of comic-books, Chaykin’s all Jewish, burning-cigar-to-the-butt ballsiness, and serves up his take-no-prisoners, porno parade with one, hugely controversial ingredient; a slick, very sick smile. But, less Holy Moses than wholly outrageous, Jewish black comedy is the twisted incest sister of camp!
Don’t believe it? Try thinking Julian Clary’s white-knuckle, off-the-scale-entendres without scatological grandparents Joan Rivers and Lenny Bruce. What’s not to get? Imagine the daily hell of sharing your first wank, your first period, your first everything in a smothering, non-stop cloud of motherly concern. Privacy? Forget it – any random, sexually-suggestive remark – even by accident! – becomes Freudian family fodder, endlessly dissected over brunch.
It’s that deeply weird, total transparency – a cringe-making obsession to publicly air tastelessness – that binds camp and black comedy. Oh, forty SAS guys chain-linked in anal coitus might just be descriptive fact, but toss in irrelevant detail – they were dressed in pink net chiffon – and Camp suddenly raises its joyfully poisoned penis.
Which is where Black Kiss 2, an unhinged, insanely funny mash-up of splatter-gore, camp and sick comedy comes shooting its’ thick white wad. You think you’re beyond shock and terminally jaded? This comic begins with a 1920s femme fatale coming alive on a cinema screen, and violating every orifice of the entire audience with the multiple, killer penises she’s grown! Briefly, Black Kiss 2 is a fixated, hetero-fetishist’s wet dream of (literally) killer broads, and cocks in frocks festooned with sheer net stockings, razor-high heels and boa constrictor corsets.
That’s merely the entree; think Buffy the Vampire Slayer spread-eagled for pro-active gang-rape, with a pussy that bites penises to bloody ribbons and spits on them. Frankly, I immediately orgasmed encountering heroine Ilona Fontaine, an immortal, female demon rapist and Hollywood starlet, with an optional 14-inch dick. Got your motors running?
Mine too, but Chaykin’s premise gets sicker still; Ilona manically recruits identikit, transsexual clones of herself – each successively christened Dagmar – for homicidal, straight man-raping sex. ‘I’m the real thing’, she coos to Dagmar Number One in issue # 2, ‘I breed and bleed’.
Not surprising – at an A-list, Hollyweird party, she’s just walked past a woman blow-jobbing a celebrity cowboy’s horse. No wonder Black Kiss 2 is R-rated, just like Ilona’s severely abused lady-parts!
‘I guess Olympus the wonder horse dies of jealousy every time you take a piss’, she whispers to her hugely endowed consort. Okay, the viciously abusive, revenge sex gets teeth-grindingly distasteful throughout, but shockingly, Chaykin has a golden, gorgeously perceptive ear for the cadences of camp.
So, each meticulously-researched decade Black Kiss 2 covers – from the 1930s till now – bulges with note-perfect, queer subtext. You want hordes of straight closet-cases gagging to be raped by transsexual penises? They’re here, in the coast-to-coast, 1930s ‘Pansy Club Craze’, and there’s even an appreciative, 1970s cameo drool for Dagmar from Andy Warhol in Studio 54. A cri de Coeur against sexually-diverse censorship, Black Kiss 2, post-Charlie Hebdo, is more necessary than ever, no matter how extreme or distasteful it is.
Author Chaykin, after all, intended his opus to be ‘appalling, offensive…and funny’, and he’s brilliantly succeeded. So take a walk on a wild side Lou Reed never dreamed of – all peeled penises and stir-fried patriarchy. Who could possibly say no?
