I'm going to be traveling so I can't make it. Have fun storming the castle!

We had a nice meeting with 6 attendees.


tartanphantom, Slam_Bradley, Rob Allen, kirby101, spoon and icctrombone




Subjects covered:

George Tuska
The Black Kiss book
Bob Brown
The Howard the Duck /Disney battle over its appearance 
Vince Colletta Pimp ?
Free comic book day
Kirby's Captain America run
Creating comics for Charlton without interference
Ditko's second time at Marvel
McFarlane Overrated ?
Why Kirby left Marvel
Movie trailers and the spoilers
Reveals in movies
Bongo comics

And much more but I need a secretary to record all the content. 

What a great mix of topics, so eclectic. I mean, Bongo Comics, why Kirby left Marvel, and McFarlane overrated all in one topic. That’s a great mix.

Also, I had no idea until now that there’d been a battle between Disney and Marvel over Howard the Duck.

George mentioned Black Kiss in passing and how it was a big, big seller. Then we talked about how the second volume did not sell as well. Probably due to a change in publishers and people not seeing it as the comic shops. That was about it. We did not get into details about the content.

Well the first volume was in 1988/1989, the second wasn't until 2012, so the market and Chaykin's brand were vastly different by the time the second series came out.

Black Kiss came when Chaykin was hot after Flagg and Shadow, but was losing luster a bit as Blackhawk was not well received, and this was shortly before he mostly left comics to write for television. He co-creator, Dean Motter had a lot of heat coming off Mister X as well And Kiss came from Vortex which was Motter's home publisher for Mister X at the time). It was a "hot" book as a lot of books were in the late 80s, but that doesn't necessarily mean it sold well. It did well enough that in 1989 Vortex put out three issues of Big Black Kiss, each of which collected 4 issues of the original 12 issue series, but no sequels or spin-offs form Chaykin were to come for more than 20 years, so any cache it had in the market had been long lost by then. At that point it was Chaykin indulging himself in what he felt like doing rather than in cashing in on any market demand for Black Kiss, and it came out right at the height when the new52 was in full swing, Marvel Now was launching, Image books like Saga and Fatale were just reinvigorating "indy" comics and retailers didn't have a lot of extra money to order in on vanity projects like Black Kiss so it had negligible market penetration. Pretty much the only people preordering it to let retailers know what the demand for it was were hardcore Chaykin fans and old guys who were adolescents or young adults who remembered having bought Black Kiss mostly for its forbidden titillating allure and Chaykin's brand at the time it came out. So no surprise that second series didn't set sales charts on fire, as the quality of that book (and I haven't seen it to judge) was going to be completely irrelevant to its sales in the market as it was in 2012.

In fact, I'm pretty sure the only reason Image agreed to publish it at that time is because they were slightly drunk off the success of books like Saga, Fatale, Peter Panzerfest, Walking Dead, etc. and were throwing whatever they could at the wall to see what stuck and caught the fancy of retailers and Image #1 speculators (a trend at that time) to fuel sales and shelf space. This was the time when I was helping out in a shop and doing most of the ordering on anything not Marvel/Dc for the owner-it was a book I told him only to order to pulls for, but he was one of those old guys who was titillated by Black kiss in the 80s and ordered big, and he didn't sell a single shelf copy and took a bath on that book.

-M

And why they put pants on him. I think Howard even commented about it in one of the B&W magazines.

I listened to an interview by Chaykin, and he said it was a very big seller. The following series, not so much.