Image Matters: Kiss Psycho Circus

A surprisingly successful collab between hair metal and the king of the 90s Indies.

The two lightning bolts kinda-sorta yet didn’t quite look like the sigruenen of Hitler’s SS.  The band’s logo said it all:

Just. Edgy. Enough.  

If you say, ‘picture a seventies rock band,’ the image of Kiss comes irresistibly to mind. Warpaint, Karo syrup blood, flaming guitars and big black hair, It says something about Generation X, but Glob only knows what, that Kiss was the first band we adopted, and we did it when the hottest thing around was disco. They were a safer band than they liked to pretend, its signature song may have been Rock and Roll All Night but its highest selling single is still Beth.

I think they would have preferred an audience that was closer to their own age but we were the ones buying the Double Platinum Album.   Kiss, (in case you somehow missed it), was always all about the marketing and Gene Simmons was a comic book nerd.  He’d been born in Israel and immigrated to the US as a child. Comic books were how he learned English.  He strongly influenced the band’s aesthetic and their stage personas very easily lent themselves to the image of superheroes. And Generation X was the last comic book generation when Marvel still had a right to be called the House of Ideas.  In May 1977, Kiss made the first of its many Marvel Comics appearances… It was in Howard the Duck.

However, this was followed up by Marvel Comics Super Special #1 (1977). 

Yes, it’s the one where the band members donated their own blood to be mixed with the ink. Kiss battled Mephisto and Doctor Doom for 40 pages.

This led directly to their first (and only) feature film.

It was supposed to be a Hard Day’s Night meets Star Wars but anyone who saw Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park can tell you it sure as hell wasn’t that.  It did cement Kiss’ image as a kids’ band. 

It was no surprise that when Peter Criss was fired/quit that his replacement was debuted on ABC’s Kids Are People Too.

Life on the road, being together 24-7, started taking its toll. It began to feel like the band was swapping out members every time the tour bus needed an oil change. 

In 1983, they took off the makeup. It wasn’t the end of the band but it kind of was. Older Gen Xers had moved on to Prince, and the younger members had Michael Jackson.   If you still wanted to Rock and Roll All Night you did it with Van Halen. There were lifers in the Kiss Army but that wasn’t most of us.  We occasionally ran across our Double Platinum albums when we moved but it was always on the list of things to throw in the dumpster on our way out the door… Maybe.

Then in 1996 came an MTV special, Kiss Unplugged. The current members of the band invited the original members back for a reunion.  Enough water was under the bridge by then that memories of the good times outweighed the bad, so Ace and Peter said, ‘sure.’ The acoustic guitars worked. For the first time in fifteen years it didn’t feel like they were just going through the motions.  The old energy was back.

Next year the OG Kiss was back in the makeup and were on tour again. They were also planning an Album called Psycho Circus.  The funny part is that they hadn’t come up with the name, Image Comics had.

The Nineties were defined by three words, Dark And Edgy.  Back then nobody in comics was edgier than Image.  It was like Vertigo but stuff actually happened.  The artwork was raw and kinetic.  Advances in printing technology allowed artists to push boundaries they didn’t even know they’d been imprisoned by. 

Psycho Circus was way different from Kiss’ Marvel days.  It was an anthology title that combined Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes with EC Comics.  It was 90s urban fantasy when that was just getting started.

The setup is that there is a traveling circus that feeds on and reflects people’s hidden fears and deepest desires.

The principalities who govern and accompany the circus are the Four-Who-Are-One.  They are the primordial forces who predated the ancient gods.  They have taken human avatars at the circus and they are:

The Beastking:  Personification of primal instinct, the rough beast that stirs in each of us. Embracing instinct rather than intellect, he knows neither cruelty nor mercy. His is the element of earth.

Host: Tiberius MacLir the Animal Wrangler

The Celestial: Into whose care was given universal balance, the ultimate harmony of the cosmos. Observes situations dispassionately and sees all sides of a dilemma. His is the element of air.

Host: Matthew Stargrave the Stiltwalker

The Starchild:   He who draws from the deep wells of the soul and emotion, bringer of passion and pain. He can move a heart to tender love or murderous rage. His is the element of water. (because there were things the Celestial did want to be bothered with?)

Host: Fortunado L'Etoile the Jester

The Demon: created of fire and shadow, blood and thunder. He embodies vengeance and terror, the darkest impulses of mortal souls, but also the purgative flames of rebirth, destruction that proceeds creation. His is the element of fire.

Host: Johnathon Blackwell the Ringmaster

Some of the supporting members are:

Madam Raven: A very Todd Macfarlane character.  “A witch who is damned to the Psycho Circus. She is usually the first member of the circus to speak to any mortal character, and is a Fortune Teller at the circus”.  As I remember it she was in pretty much every issue.

Kismet the Disappearing Girl: She had weird nightmares about masks.  She was in several issues and eventually joins the circus.

Adam Moon:  Also a very Todd Macfarlane character.  He hates everyone in his town although, it has to be admitted everyone in his town treats him him like shit. The Demon starts following him around and destroying these people.  The kid wants the Demon to stop but as Gene Simmons points out, “You wanted this.  If you want it stop, hang yourself.”  Then Adam wakes up.

Like I said, the stories were mostly Macfarlane having a chance to let his EC freak flag fly. It certainly had his signature dark and gothic stormy night preferred aesthetic. 

The artwork on the other hand was by Angel Medina, it featured his highly detail pencils and highly expressive characters. He was primarily known for his action scenes up to this point but signature use of heavy inks and deep shading added the kind of intensity that horror thrives on. Medina was frequently criticized for bad proportions and inconsistent panal layouts but in a horror comic who really gives a rancid fart about any of that.  It was a perfect match.

The story structure was surprisingly deep.  The stories were all standalones, as you would expect in an anthology, but it didn’t reset to zero at the end of each story.  They were all interconnected if only lightly. 

The comics were enough of a hit that Kiss used the name for their tour. 

It did so well that it was used as the narrative for a first person shooter that I didn’t even know existed until I started this article. I may have to take a closer look at this game because it appears to have been made by the survivors of the Dai Katana debacle… On the infamously buggy Lithtech 1 engine. 

This title’s success was one of the first indicators that there was trouble on the horizon for comic books.  Like I said earlier, Kiss’ audience was Generation X.  By the late 1990s that should have no longer been the primary market for something that had always been overwhelmingly for adolescent males.   Comics had become a hobby for guys in their late twenties and early thirties. 

They were eating their seedcorn.

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