Classic Comic Compendium: THE MAXX

We lost Sam Kieth a few weeks ago.

Here on the Beat, Christopher Chiu-Tabet wrote a touching obituary and our chief Heidi MacDonald put together a wonderful bit of reminiscences. Kieth was unique. He could probably have coasted to superstardom as the co-creator of The Sandman, but he bowed out early on because he didn’t think he fit the aesthetic. Leaning harder into the horror than the fantasy that it would become. He chose to go his own way.

His style and storytelling are singular. You can point to influences in bits and pieces in his work. You can point to people who have taken influence from his work. But there really isn’t anything else out there like Kieth’s work. His characters are often exaggerated and strange, yet given a level of detail that make them look real. His layouts and visual storytelling choices result in complex and stunning pages, matching the weirdness of his characters. And the subject matter of his stories could be as challenging and complex as his characters.

Early on this manifested in his series for Image, The Maxx.

“The shows in my mind are almost always better.”

The Maxx: Maxximized – Volume 1 by Sam Kieth, William Messner-Loebs, Jim Sinclair, Ronda Pattison, and Mike Heisler reintroduces us to the disturbing world of Kieth’s creator-owned masterpiece. It’s an offbeat, incredibly dark, tale of a superhero who might actually be just a homeless man fighting a supervillain that might be just a murderer and rapist. Possibly even a dead one. And the fallout of trauma and pain on the women in his life.

To say that The Maxx is weird would be an understatement. Some might fight it incomprehensible and challenging. Others may even find it problematic now. Though, some definitely did when it came out too. It’s not a standard superhero story. The superheroics are more window-dressing for a tale of secret worlds and retreating into fiction in order to deal with trauma. Including a rather complicated interpretation of feminism by one of the lead characters in Julie, as well as her reaction to other rape survivors. Re-contextualizing and re-interpreting what’s going on is a recurring motif that’s used in the series and that becomes more apparent in the fourth issue as it introduces another key character in Sarah and how she fits in the broader narrative.

The art here is gorgeous. I definitely liked the original colours by Steve Oliff and his studio when the books originally came out through Image, but I understand Kieth’s perspective on rushed art, influencing his decision to have the comics recoloured by Ronda Pattison here. There are some modern effects here and there that kind of look a little weird given the original time frame of the book, but by and large these new editions are incredible. Kieth’s designs, layouts, and overall weirdness combined with Jim Sinclair’s finishes and Pattison’s colours shine with a beautiful, hallucinatory and dream-like quality to the Outback sequences, a bit reminiscent of his own painted work. Elevated in how it intertwines with Mike Heisler’s lettering.

“In fact, I was already having trouble remembering the details of what he said. It was like a dream.”

It dawned on me on this most recent re-reading that The Maxx is kind of like the Isz in the series. If you dress them up in different clothing and costumes, people looking at the creatures perceive them as what they’re dressed as. In the first volume, we get carjackers and grandmothers. The series is dressed up as a superhero tale in the beginning, so that’s the context in which it was originally perceived. But as The Maxx: Maxximized – Volume 1 by Kieth, Messner-Loebs, Sinclair, Pattison, and Heisler show us it’s much, much more.

These permutations happen as the perspective and point of view change in the fourth issue, change further again shortly afterwards as various other Image characters crossover into the book, if I remember correctly there’s even a Dr. Seuss inspired issue, and a famous reshuffling in the Alan Moore scripted issue #21. All in service to a story that is as much about these fictions that we create as walls to keep ourselves safe from our nightmares as it is about a weird man in a superhero costume.