Kiss did not start corpse paint. Neither did Sarcófago, and neither, strictly, did Per Ohlin. All three answers are given confidently and all three are wrong, because the question contains two different objects and nobody separates them before answering. One of those objects is a technique that was old when Kiss picked it up. The other is a purpose, and the purpose is where the whole argument actually lives.
Sort the two apart and the fight dissolves inside a paragraph. Kiss took a technique that already existed and turned a painted face into a registered asset. Ohlin took the same greasepaint and turned a painted face into a statement about a body. Those are opposite operations performed on identical materials, which is why partisans of each can produce a chronology proving they were first and both chronologies can be accurate.
What Kiss actually did
The New York four played their first show on 30 January 1973 at the Popcorn Club in Queens and put the four finished characters on stage that March at a club in Amityville, and from that point the face was never treated as decoration again. The Demon, the Starchild, the Spaceman and the Catman were designed as separable properties, each with its own graphic signature, and the band filed to protect the makeup designs as trademarks in 1978. The name went out under licence across more than three thousand product categories. Merchandise turnover between 1977 and 1979 is estimated at a hundred million dollars, and there was a Marvel comic, a run of dolls, four simultaneous solo albums on 18 September 1978 and a television film that October.
Then comes the detail that settles what kind of object it was. On 18 September 1983 the band took the makeup off in public on MTV, played thirteen years without it, and put it back on in April 1996 when the arithmetic changed. An asset can be switched off and switched on again. That is what distinguishes it from a conviction, and it is the whole difference between the Kiss face and everything meant by corpse paint.
The paint was second hand when Kiss bought it
The technique has no Norwegian origin and no American one either. Screamin' Jay Hawkins was working with the props of the grave in the fifties, Screaming Lord Sutch after him, and Arthur Brown was performing in black and white paint under a helmet that had caught fire by accident at Windsor in 1967, a year before "Fire" reached number one in Britain and number two in America. Alice Cooper watched that and built a career on it; by 1972, four years after the first record, he was on the cover of Forbes being described as a new kind of tycoon. Secos e Molhados were painting their faces in Brazil in 1973, Klaus Nomi was taking the same materials towards opera, Dave Vanian of the Damned towards the crypt.
Kiss were not first with the paint. They were first with the paperwork. The claim that matters is not who applied greasepaint earliest but who worked out that a face could be capitalised, and on that question there is no contest at all.
The lawsuit that never happened
The two traditions met once, briefly, in a threat. Gene Simmons considered legal action against King Diamond over a painted face he judged too close to the Demon, at a point when Kiss were not wearing the makeup but still held the registration on it. Nothing was filed. The singer had already stated his own descent plainly and it did not run through Kiss at all.
I said, I don't have a lot of money that you can sue me for, but you have a lot of money that other people can sue you for. It never got to be a lawsuit, it just got stirred up. I was never influenced by them, my influences were Peter Gabriel and Alice Cooper.
King Diamond, fan questions in Metal Hammer, 9 June 2022
Read it for what it demonstrates rather than for the anecdote. One party to that exchange owned a face and could send a letter about it. The other had painted a face for four years and owned nothing, which was not an oversight. There is no register anywhere on which a black metal band has ever tried to place a design, no licensing body, no infringement action, and the absence is total.
What Sarcófago changed and what Ohlin changed
The underground's own dispute is narrower and more interesting than the Kiss question, and it is genuinely unresolved. Metal Storm has called Sarcófago the first band with true corpse paint on the strength of the photograph on I.N.R.I., recorded and released through Cogumelo in July 1987. Jørn Stubberud of Mayhem insists his own band got there first and credits Ohlin with coining the term. Both men are describing something real, and they are describing different things: one a picture, the other a word and the intention behind it.
The reconciliation is straightforward once the two objects stay separate. Sarcófago fixed the appearance, four musicians in white paint, leather, forearm spikes and bullet belts, photographed with no theatrical distance anywhere in the frame, and according to Lords of Chaos that photograph is what Euronymous wanted every black metal band modelled on. Ohlin supplied the reading. He was not dressing as a corpse for the duration of a set, and everyone around him understood that he meant it, which is the part no register can hold and no lawyer can defend. The lettering underwent exactly the same conversion a few years later, for exactly the same reasons, and that story is told in why Black Metal Logos Are Unreadable.
There is a second structural difference that gets missed because it is so obvious. In Kiss each design belongs to one man and identifies him: the star over the eye is Stanley and nobody else, the bat wings are Simmons and nobody else, and the entire commercial apparatus depends on that being true. In black metal the design identifies nobody. Members of the same band are frequently indistinguishable in photographs, several bands share what is effectively the same pattern, and no band has ever complained about it. A signal built to say this is me and a signal built to say there is no me here cannot be compared on a timeline. They are not competing for the same title.
| The Kiss line | The black metal line | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose of the paint | Build a character the audience can name | Remove the person standing behind the face |
| Ownership | Trademark filed in 1978, licensed across three thousand product categories | No registration, no licence, no infringement action ever brought |
| Who the design identifies | One named member, exclusively | Nobody, and deliberately so |
| When everybody copies it | The value rises and the lawyers are called | The signal dies and the originators stop using it |
| Can it be switched off | Yes, and it was, from 1983 to 1996 | Only by leaving, which several of them did |
The verdict
One face went to a patent office. The other went into the ground with the shirt. They are made of the same greasepaint and they have never once meant the same thing.
So the honest answer to who started it is four names and four different sentences. Arthur Brown put the paint on a rock stage. Kiss made it property. King Diamond carried the theatrical version into metal and kept it there for almost fifty years without ever pretending it was more than theatre. Ohlin removed the character from behind it, and that removal is the only one of the four moves that could not be reversed, because a face that claims to be a face cannot be taken off at the end of a tour and monetised in the meantime.
The question survives because it flatters both sides. Kiss partisans get to say the underground is derivative. Underground partisans get to say the arena act was cynical. Both are half right and neither is discussing the same object, and the material sitting under the argument, the records, the scene and the men who built it, is laid out in full back to the top.
