Kiss

MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL — Issue no. 5, August 1978

Book: Marvel Super Special

Issue No.: 5

Published: August 15, 1978

Title: “Kiss”

Cover Price: $1.50

Format: Digital scan

Opinions vary when it comes to the music of the rock band Kiss. I am fond of their first few albums. Also, the Replacements covered Kiss’s “Black Diamond,” and I can’t think of a much better endorsement than that.

But regardless of one’s feelings about Kiss’s musical talents, the band’s marketing skills are undeniable. I remember being a little kid in the late 1970s who knew next to nothing about the popular music of the day, but I knew who Kiss was. I didn’t know what they sounded like. But I’d see TV commercials for their concert tours. With their cool makeup and elaborate costumes, they looked like superheroes. I remember telling my mom “I wanna go see the Kiss concert!” She wisely responded with “LOL no” (or at least the late-’70s equivalent of “LOL no”).

Point being, if even a dumb little kid living in rural Alabama with no cable TV knew who Kiss was, the band was doing a good job with the marketing.

I also have vague recollections of the band doing a TV movie. I think maybe I caught part of it at some point? I do not recall Kiss’s Marvel comic books, but I was just getting into comic books at this point in Kiss history, so it’s understandable I would have missed seeing those.

According to Wikipedia, Kiss only appeared in four Marvel comics. They first showed up in two Howard the Duck books, so I guess the band was in-continuity. That’s pretty cool. Their other two appearances were in Marvel Super Special magazines — this one, plus issue no. 1 from 1977. The ink used to print the first issue contained traces of real blood from each of the four members of Kiss, and I’ll admit that’s a good gimmick.

No blood was involved in the printing of this issue of Marvel Super Special. And, maybe because it lacked a good gimmick, it didn’t sell as well as the first Kiss Super Special. Marvel magazine editor Rick Marschall notes in his bio that he’s already looking forward to working on a third Marvel Kiss book, but that apparently never happened.

In his bio, Marschall also talks about the new “Marvelcolor” process for Marvel’s color magazines of the era. I am a bit obsessed with the old analog color printing processes of comic books. Yeah, I know modern digital printing is better in basically every way, but the analog processes had a lot of character and had a lot to do with what I think comic books should look like.

I read a digital scan of this Marvel Super Special, and it’s hard to really gauge a book’s color work based on a scan. But I do have an issue of a color Hulk! magazine from this era, and the color process used for it is definitely a step up from the regular comics of the day. Don’t get me wrong — I love Ben Day dots and the limited color palette of Bronze Age comic books. But the Marvelcolor process (at least based on my Hulk! magazine) allows for more subtle coloring, and the white paper helps the colors pop a bit more than they do on (off-white at best) newsprint.

Aside from bios about Marschall and the rest of the creative team, this magazine also features a Marschall-penned editorial, a four-page Kiss pull-out poster, and an interview with the band about that Kiss movie that I mentioned earlier.

And, yes, there’s a comic book story in this magazine, too. It’s about 40 pages long, and it’s about as silly as I was expecting a 1978 comic book story about the rock band Kiss to be. It has its moments — it features a Sherlock Holmes-ish lizard-man character who wouldn’t be out of place in a Howard the Duck comic.

Despite the silliness, the creative team doesn’t phone it in. I was especially impressed with John Romita Jr.’s penciling work. This is one of J.R. Jr.’s early professional jobs, and he already knows his stuff. J.R. Jr.’s style here is different than his modern work, so it’s interesting to see how much he’s evolved over the years.

Next time — Hulk! Plus my week 33 wrap-up!