Maxx (Youtube 7/12)

Maxx 7/12



This starts with a version of the Darker Image comic book I have already covered.

Gone's viewer makes these odd shapes, for no other reason than Kieth likes to draw panels like that occasionally to make the page look stylish.

Kieth pokes fun of his own pretentious and lofty ideals here, as well as the Paglia name dropping, as Julie comments on what the Maxx has on TV: "Must be the stupidest cartoon ever made. The Crappon in a Hat teams up with Jean-Paul Sartre to fight Nausea. Cartoons today are so pretentious."

Here the Maxx is translated from modern cartoon to acme cartoon, where the acme cartoon is a stylized version of the Outback, but stays self-aware about both his newly rhyming speech and drawn appearance. But we are not out of Kieth territory, as the creatures chasing the Maxx are fears "from the pit of his psyche." They want to rip off his mask and see his face -- which is a standard superhero plot, but in Kieth's hands takes on a psychoanalytic tinge, getting past out personae (which literally means mask) to those personal truths which may destroy us (as Kieth has described earlier, and what Jung calls the anima).

The acme dreamland shifts so something much darker, as the Maxx is reduced to a skull talking to the little girl Julie in a bleak, desaturated landscape. This is a deeper level to the outback, Julie's inner child in a kind of psychologically holy place. Kieth always makes psychological underpinnings part of the story. He always makes subtext into text.

Jung's Anima becomes a literal animal here, as the Maxx fears beneath the mask-personae he is some kind of rabbit he sees in flashes in this episode. This search for the personal truth Kieth puts at the origin of both the spirt animal that is part of the magical fantasy world of the outback, and the Superhero unmasking story. The imagery ties to Gone putting Julie in a playboy bunny outfit when he kidnapped her. Julie makes the whole escapist superhero-fantasy genre into psychological escapism. That escapism is seen as necessary, but also only temporary, as at some point we have to learn what is on the other side. Julie has to confront Lil' Julie eventually. And comic book readers, Kieth indicates, need to get to the other side of their genre in order to be whole human beings.

Maxx (6/12 Youtube clip)

Why O Why did I not write about the Maxx in my superhero book -- Sarah is the anxiety filled writer who cannot connect with her distant overshadowing father. And Kieth is responding to Miller. For all the errors in How to Read Superhero Comics and Why the basic idea gets confirmed for me a few times a year. "I guess in every food chain someone has to be at the bottom. I guess in everyone's life there's a point where your stuck and can't turn back."

Indecent Proposal is brought in by Kieth to continue his exploration of feminism. Maybe the Maxx's anxiety of influence extends to the model of the anxiety of influence -- Bloom here become Bloom's student Paglia. The Maxx squints his pupil-less eyes like Miller's Batman as he confronts the street thugs from Dark Knight Returns. Except he beats them up while Sarah's monologue robs the moment of Miller's operatic glory, and the whole thing takes place inside a small car. "That was cool. This is ugly." With Sarah in play Kieth can always compare the "story" to "what really happened" setting his psychoanalytic depth as the real thing underneath the superhero genre he plays games with on the surface of HIS story.

The Maxx monologues about pain, but the contrast with Miller is always the point -- this is psychological pain. The physical pain of the battles in the story are literally just cartoon silliness involving, as Sara calls the Izz, "little blue men" bouncing around. The absurdity of the Izz allows Kieth to keep action but anchor his story in psychoanalytic realism, just as Whedon anchors his stories in emotional realism.

In the next story, on this clip, we almost get a version of the famous Batman comic book where the kids talk about Batman but interpret him in different ways -- adapted quite well for Batman animated. The story within a story mode is a cute way of being able to show various incarnations of Batman -- Adam West, Neil Adams, Frank Miller -- without sacrificing narrative unity. (As a side note Ellis is up to something similar with Batman/Planetary but goes the more modern way -- parallel universes). For the Maxx we hear about a kind of Superman-Batman version, and something that sounds more like the then-contemporary Wildstorm -- "demented loners". Then we get Kieth's semi-origin story for the character, that is too much of a downer for the kids. Importantly this is not a chance -- as Moore would take it -- to show the Maxx in various comic book styles. The kid's thoughts are just notebook scribbles -- because unlike Moore, Kieth is not interested in exploring the stretch-y-ness of the superhero story. He wants to show the limitations, and then go somewhere else.

Maxx (5/12 Youtube Clip)

Notice, in the scene with Sarah and her mom, how Sarah is silhouetted in black with white glasses -- that is one of Miller's signature visuals, invented for a Batman shadow with white eyes. The Maxx sitting next to her -- the superhero hilariously doing nothing -- helps us see the connection to the genre through his own, earlier, rain soaked monologues. In the story within the story the carjackers -- Izz -- are dressed like Miller's mutant punks in Dark Knight Returns.

Check the parody of dark monologues -- practically a meta-monologue (in the RAIN no less) -- with an admission of total failure at the end: "If dad had to shoot somebody, why couldn't it have been her. Did my saying that shock you? Good. Writers are supposed to shock people. We say witty and uncontrolled things that rip the shroud off a decaying society and expose it for what it is. Well, thats the idea anyway." Gaiman gets tossed into the mix as well, as Sarah makes fun of her classmates that are "necro-nerds and sand-freaks" that is to say fans of Gaiman's Death and the Sandman, complete with haircuts to match. "Death is not some cute chick."

Always interested in psychoanalysis, even of the dime store variety, Kieth loads Sara up here, with a father out in a "gone postal" murder suicide and a hippe chick mom -- of exactly the sort Camille Paglia (Julie Winters' hero) would HATE. Julie and Sara's mom are friends, but rehash a Steinem-Paglia battle when they get together. In counseling, Sarah sheds more light on Julie than Julie sheds on Sarah. The use of this context for character development will become quite popular in the Sopranos and imitators like Grosse Pointe Blank.

There is also a cute joke as Sarah compliments herself on her ability to foreshadow just before she says the line "My father is gone."

"I could feel the gun in my hand. But more importantly I could feel the sweet hot hatred my dad must have felt," she says as Jimmy breaks her heart. She does nothing with the gun of course -- she is a writer, not a post-Miller vigilante. Using a short story within a larger superhero narrative -- putting Sarah alongside the Maxx -- Kieth is doing what psychoanalysis is supposed to do: he is exposing the subterranean origins of surface behavior, as he demonstrates that the silhouetted comic book figure monologuing dark thoughts in the pouring rain is little more than a teenager who someday wishes to be a writer -- but it NOT one yet.

The Maxx (YouTube clip 4/12)

"I wish it was time for Cheers. But it's not. It's time for vengeance." Brilliant. The deflation of the superhero monologue is one of Kieth's best maneuvers, but I suppose I should not stop to point that out every single time. Especially here, as he makes his third run at the "talking out loud" gag that is maybe a little old now. I will say that I love how 19th century the men look in the one shot of the crowd.

The Maxx refers to Mr Gone as a sorcerer here. This is an interesting City-Outback parallel. The sorcerer is going to be someone to fear because he controls reality, and can control your mind. The fact that in the city Mr Gone is a rapist says something important about the hold rape has on its victims -- something Kieth is very interested in both in the Maxx and in his other comic book work (Four Women)

The incorporation of stylized sound effect balloons even in a cartoon where there is sound is awesome. It really saves that device from the Adam West Batman cartoon.

"I have penetrated to the wet soft white squishy but toothed heart of darkness." I do not want to over-read this line. But in a series about sexual violence and male anxiety around powerful sexual women, I cannot but connect the Izz to the vagina dentata, and Freuds famous statement that "The sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology," (in other words, the heart of darkness). My gender theory professor friends would be quick to point out that Mr Gone is quite phallic in appearance, with his bald head (these same friends described Capt. Picard like that). Kieth is loading his symbols.

The doll again appears again, and it is quite creepy.

I skipped over the Maxx being refered to as Br'er Lappin, but this is foreshadowing, and we will get to it later.

Gone enters in a mask, and African mask, and with it Kieth sets up one of the reasons the superhero genre works to his advantage -- the superhero mask, Maxx's mask (referred to in this scene), plays into psychoanalytic ideas about masks and their relation to the truth. We will be headed into Jungian theory soon -- theory Kieth is clearly familiar with -- and this is the set up. In this scene Gone explicitly says Maxx is not a superhero and that this is about something more complicated that comic book ideas about good guys vs bad guys -- an interesting turn that Gone, sorcerer, has much in common with Kieth, who sees the larger picture. The Maxx continues to be dumb. The whole scene goes completely into left field as Gone (rapist-sorcerer) and the Maxx (superhero) have a civilized chat, where the "hero" is educated on the nature of reality.

We are told that Julie is in danger -- but what threatens her is "the truth," which is quite psychoanalytic and not at all superhero stuff. Gone says that the outback is real and that the "real world" is just a dream where we play out our fantasies. Julie created a fantasy world of control in the city, and the Maxx has to keep her from learning too much of the truth all at once -- very like an analyst, or an internal psychic defense. Julie is revealed, obliquely, to be a rape victim who used her money to build this world where she controls things. And the Outback is clearly associated with her inner self -- which of course psychoanalysis would say is more "real" than the masks we wear when we are acting tough, as superheroes act, and as Julie (her underwear on the outside of her clothes) acts.

Kieth is heading for territory comic books -- like action genres in general -- are really bad with: describing internal states. He is developing a new language for having superheros and complex inner states share the same page, in something other than the monologues of grim and gritty superheroes.

Hilariously, when the Maxx recounts his meeting with Gone, he says "At least that's what the villain said. And who can believe a villain?" As a superhero, the Maxx cannot really change or grow in any meaningful way -- stuff happened and he chugs along as unaffected as Superman or Batman might be.

The Maxx (YouTube clip 3/12 [mislabeled 2/12])

ThomasDaTubeEngine has the second the third parts of his Maxx cartoon out of order. Here is what should be part three.



This episode opens with a wonderful moment of Julie posturing in the mirror -- she looks just like every hot supehero female, who seem to stand around like that all the time, by default. But Julie breathes out and her whole body changes -- shoulders slumped, belly out, breasts in. People always say that those comic book women are unrealistic -- and of course often the proportions are so bizarre this is true. But I live in New York and have seen women that are as skinny, for example, as Quitely's Jean Grey. Just as, in the last episode, Julie admits that sometimes yes does mean no, Kieth here admits that women can sometimes look like superhero characters -- but only for a moment. Kieth is creating a middle-ground between superhero comics and their absurd women, and indie-comics and their "real women don't look like that, give-me-a-break" exasperation. [Boy, I do not know what I think about that sentence, but I am leaving it in for now.]

In addition to the serious sexual violence (Gone) meeting the cartoon foolishness (his henchmen), Kieth adds a third texture to the mix -- the total dead pan. "Oh. I get it. It's that guy's cape." There is something of the jaded comic book fan in this voice, and it strikes me as very much the audience Kieth is going for -- or trying to build.

In another example of deflating the superhero genre, the Maxx kills a hostage (or thinks he does). This is a very Wolverine moment, but is immediately taken down when a moment later he faints from being shot in the leg.

Gone himself is not immune to such takedowns. Here we see him shaving in the bathroom -- and getting shaving cream out of a fixture that shows a cows ass. Bad-ass in his living cape, he now appears pudgy, and weird, in the full light of the bathroom.

A kidnaped, tied up, and sexed up and not at all afraid Julie makes fun of his "tawdry sexual revenge" scheme, and the "baroque posturing" -- which we will recognize as the baroque posturing of ordinary superhero comic books. She dismisses the whole thing: Mr. Gone is not so hot since any crackhead on her block can kill her, and actually, she is not all that physically great -- she has a fat stomach, chafe marks from her jeans, stubby arm pits, and bad breath.

Importantly Gone reiterates what the cop said in the first episode: she was asking for it, wearing her underwear outside of her clothes. He is referring to her crazy outfit from her first appearance but "wearing underwear outside your clothes" has a different meaning -- it is the most traditional way to make fun of superheroes.

Mr Gone monologues in the dramatic way we have come to expect from comic book villains -- except here, we can barely hear him as he is not the focus, and his captured woman in the bunny outfit (significant for reasons we will get to later) is coming to kill him. He talks about the Outback and this elaborate fiction she has built -- it seems for a moment that we are in Morrison territory, which the fantasy world as the real world and our dreary world as something we have to rise above to see the truth. But the damaged Julie Maxx had a vision of re-asserts herself, and we see what Gone means -- he is talking about psychic pain and the fictions of self we build to avoid confronting it. Here is Kieth's thesis -- the superhero is not enough, because physical violence is not the problem, emotional violence is.

The Maxx (YouTube clip 2/12 [mislabeled 3/12])

ThomasDaTubeEngine has mislabeled this Maxx cartoon -- parts two and three of twelve should be the other way around. The right movie is here. This one takes us to the end of issue 1 of the comic book.



This opens with a really silly and entertaining cartoon National Geographic sequence, which jumping slugs, "Crabbits" (very much like the animals on Avatar, no?), and then the Izz. "It is just stupid" is just as funny a description of why the slug has no natural predators as it was when I saw this years ago.

Back in the city we see the Izz again, but this time they are black. Interestingly they are voyeurs, very much out of Rear Window, but also very telling of the comic book fan who sees all this sex and violence in a voyeuristic fashion, like the Izz, jumping around from one "frame" to the next. The tableau of life shown is significant: a man nervous about sex with a powerful woman, old people doing nothing, and a couple fighting give us three views of romance between men and women, important for this series and it's rapist villain. When we see people basically alone - a guy sitting, a girl dancing, and a man ignoring the kids jumping on him -- we are transported to the outback, and see these things as connected to this other world -- a savage world in which their loneliness makes them either monsters or the monstrous victims of violence.

Over these scenes, Julie is giving a fairly long monologue on third wave feminism, in which she admits that sometimes "no" does mean "yes," and admits that maybe a liberal is a conservative who has never been mugged. At 14 I found this really impressive. It strikes me now as interesting more in the way such a monologue is juxtaposed with the superhero genre Kieth is playing with on the Maxx. Batman's monologues as he gazes over the city at nigh from high on buildings are really dramatically refigured here, as Julie walks home through the streets at night. And reversing the perspective on the superhero monologue is not enough -- he also keeps throwing cartoon creatures, and lines like "Ya got any toast" so that we are always aware of the unreal, willy world in which all of this is happening.

Mr. Gone in the glasses, and in the layundry room, is terrifying. Notice that his living cape owes something to Spawn, also at image around this time. Notice also that Glory is not the sexually active teen of horror movies, punished by the monster who will in turn be taken down (or escaped from) by the good girl virgin. She rejects sex -- sending her boy away to cool off -- and is punished. She is dressed slutty like Julie, but the context indicates that this has more to do with laundry day than any active desire to be provocative. The fade to black when her boy returns, are also especially effective.

When the Maxx mentions the woman in the alley he was trying to save, reported rape, we have one more shut down of superhero tropes. Julie chastizes him for assuming responsiblilty for the lives of hurt women. All he can say is " I am the Maxx" a very superero thing to say, along the lines of "I am Batman" or "I AM BEOWULF." That kind of male tautological posturing -- along the lines of God's "I am what I am" in Exodus -- does not cut it here.

As the Maxx chases an Izz notice the heavy breathing -- just from going around the block. The comic book rooftop chase scene is really brought down to size, as Kieth continues to set up his claim that the guiding principles of superhero comic books have severe limitations.

The Maxx (YouTube clip 1/12)

[This post is part of a series of posts looking at Sam Kieth's The Maxx issue by issue or youtube clip by youtube clip as the case may be. For more in this series hit the label at the bottom of this post.]

ThomasDaTubeEngine is my new hero. You know what Mr. T.D. Engine did? He put the Maxx Cartoon on YouTube -- all of it. The Maxx cartoon, done for MTV, is a very faithful adaptation of the comic book -- basically all the dialog is here, and the animation is minimal so that it looks exactly like the comic book as often as possible. Even the shapes of the panels are recreated in parts. I do not know how long this will be up for, but as long as it is I am going to use this for my primary material, because life is better in youtube clips.



Everything about the opening, including the weather, tone of voice, and location, suggests the self-serious monologues of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns -- "its wet, dark and wet" is a pretty good description of the imitators of those books, and "dirty kind of, but real too" is exactly what they thought of themselves. Then he starts talking about Cheers and you know this is not Watchmen. For me the gag has not gotten old, and it is followed by another brilliant one -- well I don't know if it's brilliant, but it gets me every time: the Maxx's monologue, which includes exposition for the scene, turns out to be speech: "Sometimes it's luck that saves them, sometimes it's fate, but sometimes it's ME!" "Yes, and sometimes its us. Freeze." And that is the very first appearance of this character for those that did not get the Darker Image preview thing. Brilliant.

Gone gets a surprisingly scary intro after that joke, and importantly negates the Maxx's attempt to save the woman. The heroics and speeches are all wasted, and the Maxx is a failure right from his first appearance. This is not the defeat to be corrected in the finale that is so common in superhero books -- this is supposed to be the bit where our hero is introduced fighting low level street thugs in an alley, where he can show his stuff and be cool, like Batman. And it is totally reversed. That reversal sets up the bigger one coming in the comic book: significantly more than Morrison's X-Men, the Maxx never was a superhero.

The scene in the outback suggests this too: superheroes are mostly creatures of the city, but the outback scene makes it seem like he is a fantasy character displaced. And again his big moment is undercut: "Who writes this crap?" is Julie's first line.

Kieth does a great job with intros. Julie has no money, tries to help people, and dresses "kinda like a hooker," because she is a Paglia feminist -- as seen in the Paglia poster hanging on her wall: she is sexy, but also in charge of herself. She has no patience for a police officer's suggestion -- prompted by a college professor importantly -- that her outfit sends out the wrong signals, signals that might attract a rapist and murderer like Mr. Gone. And of course she is sexy in a particularly ridiculous comic book style outfit. Again, the basic superhero comic book stuff is here, but in a slanted way. Instead of the grim and gritty superhero monologuing about Nietzsche (the Maxx is too dumb to know Nietzsche), you have the sexy comic book girl with the Paglia poster. The fact that the Maxx is a failure is important -- Julie is really our main character. She is the one that saves people (people like the Maxx) and she is the one who will needs saving, but not the kind of saving the Maxx can provide.

That is not the end of the first comic book, but it is the end of the youtube clip, so I will save the rest for next time.

The Maxx: Darker Image #1

This is the first post in what I hope will be a successful issue by issue look at Sam Kieth's The Maxx. I reserve the right to abandon it at any time. I considered doing an introduction answering the key questions of Why? and Why Now? but I thought it might be better to just dive right in and see what comes up when.

The first appearance of Sam Kieth's The Maxx was in an 8 page short in 1993's Darker Image #1, alongside Rob Liefeld's Bloodwulf and Brandon Choi and Jim Lee's Deathblow. Bill Messner-Loebs did Kieths dialogue, which strikes me as odd considering that the art and the story are Kieth's but I don't know much about the Maxx beyond the comics I have. The Maxx stands out in this trio: the purple and yellow, along with the very odd shape of his jaw, make him much more like a traditional cartoon than Deathblow or Bloodwulf. "The Maxx" sounds like something that would match those ridiculous names, and the whole early 90s X-Treme comics trend, but it would be revealed to be something ironic down the line; Bloodwulf and Deathblow, as far as I know, do not have much of a sense of irony, which was their downfall, and the downfall of many a self-serious post Miller-Moore comic book.

The story: In the outback, on the run from a big cartoon creature with a hammer, The Maxx heads for a hut for safety, but it holds a sexy jungle babe in a leopard bikini who straddles him and stabs at him. A violent scene shift reveals a sexy woman is using a needle on him, but she is trying to help him after he broke into her apartment disoriented; she sees the crazy costume, but treats him like a homeless person she feels sorry for.

The fantasy action sequence may be a hallucination: the first line of the comic is the Maxx's "Huh. The sounds inside my head have started again." The sound-effects make is importantly unclear if the repeated "CHUNG!" sound is a pounding in his head, or the pounding of the feet of his giant antagonist: the creature may just be in his head. So the first part of the story may be metaphor for things going on in the real world. This is of course one of the big claims of comics: that they are not just escapist fiction, but capable of questioning the things we take for granted in the real world. What makes the Maxx stand out is that rather than make the implicit claim that this comic has real world relevance, the comic makes connecting those two worlds part of the narrative. This would be a bit like Enchanted, if it, you know, didn't suck.

Kieth plays with the grim and gritty narration, but disrupts its self-seriousness with a lot of weird irony. The Maxx says "The sounds in my head have started again. Good, It helps me think ... Focus" and then he goes on to talk about his claws. It could be Wolverine, except the first word of the comic is the dumb "huh," and he says of his claws not that they are made of razor sharp unbreakable adamantium, but that they "still feel wet. Interesting." The deadpan reaction throws the whole scene askew. And the comic runs from there: the creature smells like "sweating leather and peppermint." The creature has a weird Tolkin-esque faux-arab name with two apostrophes and a q with no u (Ret'qark'n), but the Maxx describes him as "God Clan. Really mean." The Maxx is right of the bat, not that bright or reliable: he is like Wolverine if Wolverine had been invented by Whedon -- his tough guy posturing keeps getting undercut. "Being near death makes my senses sharper" he says, just before the creature happens to pick up his hiding place out of dumb luck, leaving him to just run away rather than fight.

Kieth's layouts are energetic and strange -- panels have weird shapes and are often dominated by playfully stylized sound-effects. The woman is beautiful and sexy and hits all the standard comic book buttons -- big breasts, revealing clothing, straddling the male protagonist with a needle just like in Casanova. But she is also more hips than boobs and turns out to neither victim nor aggressor. When the Maxx looks out over the city at night from a broken window along side stone carvings of creepy bird heads he should look like Batman -- except we are too far away to find it stirring, and it is placed on the far right of the page in a way that makes the interior of the woman's apartment where he was unconscious far more important. (Notice also the little hands pointing to where we should look -- if you know the technical name for that hand, and it has one, let me know in the comments). The final page is the glamour pose we expect, similar to the one on the first page, but the story emphasizes its own disorientations now: We end with the woman's narration: "I cant help wondering what he used to be. What kind of uniform those rags were?" She thinks it would be cool if he turned out to be one of those "Youngbloods" but concludes with a worry that if she cant get his head straight he is going to get her evicted.

All the 90s superhero stuff is here, sort of, but everything is really off kilter: the perspective is wrong, the gender politics are wrong, the fight-scene was a washout, and the whole adventure part of the story -- which is sort of why people you know buy these things, may just have been a dream. Many issues later it will turn out that Kieth is working on a plan to sneak a whole different kind of story to us under the trappings of a superhero comic, pretty much the only kind of comic book that was going to get any attention in 1993.

Next Time: Maxx #1

Retro ad watch: Valiant's DeathMate (Their Love Will End all Time) is apparently "The Biggest Crossover Event in the History of Comics."

I got the issues out of storage...

The issue by issue analysis starts soon.