I recently received a generous package of comics from the fine folks at Kiss Me Comix. They’re a small press publisher that has been in the game for quite awhile. KMC is Rod & Barbara Jenkins and Robert Boyd, plus others. According to the letter Rod sent me, they do everything themselves, by hand (except for the computer lettering). I’d heard of KMC for awhile, so when they offered to send me their material, I was certainly interested.

Two of their books are superhero action-adventure titles, Excessive Force and Bountyhunter, and I’m afraid to say, there’s very little I can recommend about either one. Gratuitous profanity, hackneyed dialogue, scenes that are long on action but short on characterization, embarrassing typos, word balloons that change size, weak painted color… they’re far from good. I also received the first issue of a book called Lynx by Rod and Barbara’s 14-year-old daughter Ryan. It looks like it’ll probably be a superhero book as well; it’s still in the origin phase right now. Obviously one can’t judge a child’s art by the same standards as an adult’s, but I will say that she should work on her storytelling skills more. Too many panels looked similar to each other.

What I’d like to talk about here is the one bright spot in the KMC lineup – Barbara Jenkins’ Serenade. One part Gothic romance comic, one part supernatural horror, one part cross-cultural drama, Serenade feels like it’s attempting to appeal to several different audiences at once – the literary comics crowd, the paperback romance readers, and the fans of Anne Rice and Tananarive Due, with a touch of David Mack’s Kabuki thrown in as well. It’s far from any of those places yet, but I have a good feeling about it, and I think with time this could develop into something not only solid, but utterly unique in the black comics field.

The story focuses on Serena, a young Korean singer who’s the trophy wife of a cosmetics manufacturer. In the issues I read (5-8), he gets murdered and she works through her grief by going back to singing, which is around the time when she starts seeing ghosts. The writing tends to get repetitive in places – for instance, the excessive foreshadowing of Jonathan’s death – and the story is decompressed past the point of rationality. Did we really need an entire issue – silent, no less – spent on the funeral? Plus, the fact that Jonathan was murdered seems to go unaddressed. There are hints that Serena will avenge his death somehow, but in the short term, one would think that instead of wallowing in grief she’d want the killers caught, especially when they were just a bunch of gangbangers who mistook him for someone else.

That said, I like the character of Serena and the whole culture clash she faces, being a foreigner who suddenly must learn how to manage the international business she has suddenly inherited. I’d like to see more of the relationship between her and Albert who, though he’s a servant, seems well-acclimated to her cultural ways. And I’d like to know how the seeing-ghosts thing will play into the story. This book can go in a bunch of different directions, all well worth exploring.

The one directon I hope it doesn’t go, however, is the long underwear one. In the KMC house ads, Serena’s wearing a costume of some sort. I cannot emphasize this enough: THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN TO SERENADE WOULD BE TO TURN IT INTO JUST ANOTHER SUPERHERO BOOK. It simply does not read like one, it doesn’t look like one – and let me say that the painted art is quite lovely, and is evocative in places of Kabuki – and I get the feeling that Barbara doesn’t really want it to be one. Serenade is not an excellent book, but with the right amount of imagination and vision, it could become a very good one. But please, no tights and masks. Not for this book.

(In a recent development, it would appear that images from Serenade are being appropriated without KMC’s permission.)