“New Is Always Sexualized”: Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss (1988) as Critique and Celebration of Anti-Queer Tendencies

Functioning as a social mirror and critique, comics allow for discussions on contemporaryphenomena and social issues, including anti-queer violence. Focusing on the hypersexualization of transgender people and anti-transgender violence, this paper explores the complication of queer representation in one of the revisionary comic books of the 1980s, Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss (1988). The paper opens with a brief history of the representation of sexuality in American comics and the “anti-comicsist” efforts to eliminate comics for their explicit material. The second subsection demonstrates the duality of comics as both social critique and celebration of social issues. The next subsection provides a close analysis of anti-queer police violence, offering a comparative analysis of the fictional representation and reality of anti-sexual-minority violence. Finally, the subsection titled “Industrializing Hypersexualization” offers a discussion on the circulation of pornographic comics with hypersexualized portrayals of femininity as a reaffirmation of patriarchal norms. Such close reading of Chaykin’s pornographic vampire noir crime story will show that American comics of the late 1980s simultaneously reflect and reproduce social problems like antiqueer violence, specifically through visual tools such as perspective and onomatopoeia. Having gained a literary status and academic recognition, comic books provoke useful discussions on queer representation in cultural products.