I Still Love You, Vol. II: Larger Than Life
The fortune of superheroes existing in reality
My father has been a comics industry professional for somewhere in the range of forty years. I’ve been told my name being shared with Wolverine from the X-Men was mostly a coincidence, but I believe otherwise. I did grow up loving the mutants, and things like the old Batman TV show and the early wave of Marvel films. When I was in high school, my interested veered to more story-based indie releases instead of the mainstream superheroes. By the time I was living on my own I faded away almost completely from the format altogether, only sporadically checking in with films and purchasing selective graphic novels by writers I was already familiar with. There are some things I still enjoy, like the classic book and movie of Watchmen or the unfortunately-now-Nazi-sympathizing-Jeff-Bezos-owned-and-operated-Amazon-Prime-Video adaptation of The Boys. Generally though, the masked and caped crusaders aren’t exactly my speed, unless they’re spitting blood and ziplining across an arena.
I didn’t get into the KISS comics until recently, firstly because there are a lot of them, and secondly because I admittedly do not do as much reading as I’d like to throughout the year. Sometime within the last couple years I ordered the massive KISS Kompendium anthology book on eBay, which reprints every KISS comic book from the first 1977 Marvel Super Special, “printed in real KISS blood,” through the 2002-2004 Dark Horse Comics run. That initial Marvel book is silly as it is spectacular, turning the Catman, Demon, Spaceman, and Starchild into bonafide cannon superheroes. Between 1977-1979, and 1997-1999, it’s my understanding that there was nothing bigger in rock and roll than KISS, priming them for the slew of merchandise that manager Bill Aucoin helped spawn to the many comic book avenues they explored. The former era has even been dubbed “SuperKISS” over the years by fans, both to describe their fantastical presentation as well as the Aucoin-led merch overkill.
Like all great superheroes, eventually they make their way to a television or movie vehicle. KISS had appeared on TV plenty of times in the ‘70s as themselves, whether it was the bombastic and evil simplicity of their 1975 appearance on The Midnight Special, their tongue-in-cheek hokey and hallowed time with Paul Lynde on his 1976 Halloween special, or the infamous off-the-rails 1979 interview with Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show. A year earlier, in October 1978, KISS starred in their own feature-length TV movie entitled KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park, a Scooby-Doo-like action-comedy-mystery decades before the band would appear in their own Scooby-Doo cartoon in 2015. KISS Meets The Phantom is legendary in KISS lore, for everything from its full-force camp across the entire runtime, to vocal and physical stand-ins for Peter Criss and Ace Frehley due to tensions within the band at the time of filming. Notably, the band had no acting experience whatsoever outside of their brief televised performances, a skill that would be rectified when Gene Simmons launched his film career in the mid-‘80s, and Paul Stanley spent time in the title roll of The Phantom Of The Opera in 1999 in Toronto, during one of KISS’ most important eras as a band, the Psycho Circus reunion tour.
Despite the film’s shortcomings, KISS Meets The Phantom was almost a perfect avenue for the original four band members to expand their personas to something bigger than just a music group. They were exactly what they wanted to be, a sideshow version of The Beatles with Alice Cooper- and New York Dolls-inspired glam. One of the most thrilling parts of KISStory are their critically maligned attempts at risk-taking, beginning with the four individual solo albums released just a month before the movie aired, continuing with the movie itself, forays into disco and power pop on the Dynasty and Unmasked albums in 1979 and 1980, and especially (Music From) The Elder in 1981. As the title suggests, the album was intended to be a soundtrack to either another comic book or another film, but the project never got further than the band’s most controversial studio recording. I have a plan to talk much more about this album in another volume of this newsletter, but I wanted to talk about it briefly now in the context of KISS’ artistic visions of the time.
I also touched upon the 1999 New Line Cinema film Detroit Rock City in this newsletter’s inaugural volume, where a group of four ragtag teenagers who play in a KISS tribute band called MYSTERY make an intense and difficult road trip from Ohio to Michigan to see KISS live on stage for the first time in 1978. I loved this film from a too-early age, before I even learned to love KISS themselves. It was a foul-mouthed, juvenile rock and roll odyssey that spoke to me as a foul-mouthed, rock and roll juvenile. I think the storytelling is brilliant; through all the hurdles the boys face, they get their dream in the end to see their favorite band. I don’t think I would have gone through all the shit they did to see any of my favorite bands of the time, even considering how it was much easier to take a musical road trip in 2008 than it was 1978. I’ve made pilgrimages to plenty of cities in the country to see bands I love since I started driving and flying on my own, but it’s never been nor will ever be like it was depicted in the film. The MYSTERY band did what they had to do because KISS were their superheroes too.
Detroit Rock City was one of the many products of the rejuvenated KISS interest in the late ‘90s, hand-in-hand with the band being depicted in their own Christmas special called KISS Saves Santa on the first holiday episode of Family Guy. They were cartoons existing as real characters in TV movie in a cartoon universe, that’s how big KISS’ pop culture legacy was at the time. And, as I referenced earlier, KISS would return to animation in 2015 for their Scooby-Doo crossover, Rock And Roll Mystery. By this time, it was no longer Peter Criss and Ace Frehley, but longtime members Eric Singer and Tommy Thayer respectively, with all four band members being referred to only as The Catman, The Demon, The Spaceman, and The Starchild in the movie. They even recorded an original song, their first since their 2012 album Monster, entitled ‘Don’t Touch My Ascot!’ That same year, they released a collaborative track with Japanese pop idol group Momoiro Clover Z, the English title roughly translating to ‘Try To Bloom In A Dream About The Floating World,’ which reprises the band’s superheroic status and melds perfectly with Momoiro Clover Z’s.
KISS has the perfect band story, filled with ups and downs that are crucial to every following moment across their fifty-year career. Between their deep-seated lore and long-established place in pop culture, it is overwhelmingly wonderful to get lost in KISSWorld. All of that contributes to why I love the band and find myself falling back into heavy obsessions with them. They’re my favorite superheroes. And a world without heroes is like a world without sun. You can’t look up to anyone without heroes.
*Today’s artwork is from the Rock And/Or Roll podcast, originally posted here.