KISS: The Circus of Souls

Updated and restored February 3, 2007
email: angelynx@spookhouse.net

KISS: The Circus of Souls

"Everything I know
What I know is true
Every one of us
Is inside of you
We are one
We are one"

--from the KISS album PSYCHO CIRCUS

February 12 2008: I report, with deep sadness, the death of Steve Gerber: who I loved, and if you read on you'll see why.
All of KISSnation should pause and remember him for the wonderful and inspiring work he did with the Four Who Are One.
Contributions to The Hero Initiative, an organization that raises funds to support comic book creators in their later years or times of trouble, would be a nice way to memorialize him.
Read much more about Steve, including tributes and memories, here.

Somewhere in the worldwide game-without-frontiers that is KISSnation, there must be one little community reserved for people who have never been all that excited by KISS as a band, but love them like crazy as comicbook heroes. If there is, move me in. I have tried for years to love KISS' music, but over and over again I found that - for me at least - it couldn't live up to the tremendous power and mystery of their image.

Where they've done that is on paper.

Twenty-one years ago, when Marvel Comics published its KISS Super Special #1, I was twenty-one myself and had more axes to grind than the whetstone guy at Camelot. I was an angry kid (yeah, 21, still a kid) and ate rock'n'roll revenge three meals a day. Rock was the only place I could take all the strongest things about me - my temper, my imagination, my sense of magick and destiny - and all of them found a home in that comic book. Even today, though it seems a bit forced and corny (as a lot of 70s comics do now, accustomed as we've become to natural dialogue and humanized heroes), its sense of wonder and hope and the goodness of great power - the ability of superhuman power to not corrupt, but elevate and ennoble, the ordinary person - shine through as bright as the beam of Paul's Black Star. With the two Marvel Super Specials KISS went a long way toward realization of their dream status as something much more than mere rock stars.

And now they've gone far, far beyond what that book ever did or could, with Image Comics' gorgeous and mystical KISS: Psycho Circus. This ultimate vision of KISS as heroes far transcends the simple idea of human beings granted superhuman powers - it goes all the way to the source of such powers, the source of elemental forces, magic, and of the KISS ideal.

--Want to read more about KISS's history in comics? Click and read on.

Rather skip the backstory and just read about PSYCHO CIRCUS?
Here's my exploration of the magickal symbolism of the Four-Who-Are-One.

A new chapter in the comicbook history of KISS unfolds soon!

Spacebass has an ace-cool PSYCHO CIRCUS page. (Way neater than mine.=)

KISS Asylum -you want the best, you'll get the best!

And KISS ONLINE rocks for sure.

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"..and I sure know something..."... This nonprofit site is no way officially affiliated with or licensed by KISS or their management, Marvel Comics, Image Comics, or McFarlane Toys. All trademarks, licensed images, copyrighted artwork and text used on this site remain the property of their copyright holders, and no infringement is intended or should be inferred. All opinions expressed are those of the author.

This The Kiss Webring site is owned by angelynx@spookhouse.net.

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