Haven’t blogged properly in a while, so it feels right to come back with something that is surely universal: comic books.
I was sad to hear about the passing of Sam Kieth. It’s hard to overstate the impact The Maxx, both the comic and its later MTV adaptation, had on me. It started when my cousin Ben gave me a copy of Darker Image #1 for my 11th birthday. As a kid, I didn’t fully understand it, but I felt it. The loneliness, the strange humor, the dream logic.
From his obituary in The New York Times:
“At a glance, The Maxx, which debuted in 1993 in Image Comics and ran for five years, might have been mistaken for a typical superhero comic, but Mr. Kieth’s bold art aesthetic and exploration of mature themes gave it an adult edge.
At the center of the story is a woman named Julie, a rape victim who creates a subconscious world in which she feels safe. Mr. Gone, a serial rapist who had attacked Julie, can enter that haven. When Julie hits a homeless man in an automobile accident, the man is transformed into the Maxx, who becomes her behemoth protector in both worlds, a creature in a purple and yellow costume who has sharp white teeth and hands with middle digits shaped like claws.”
Kieth described it this way: “The closest thing I could think of was that it’s Don Quixote, a person stuck in an unpleasant real world who dreams of a world where he has control and power, but keeps returning to unpleasant reality.”
The art was unlike anything I had ever seen. Weird panel structures, occasionally partially-painted pages, wild and elastic figures, scratchy lines, distorted anatomy. The layouts felt dreamlike and blurred reality and imagination in a way that matched the emotional tone of the story. Later I’d find back issues of his work on Wolverine and The Hulk and fell in love with all over again.
Recently, while working on a project with my friend and artist Langston, The Maxx was the first thing I thought of. I sent him several pages for inspiration, which reminded me how deeply Kieth’s work still shapes the way I think about comics.
Fantagraphics is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary with a series of facsimiles of first issues they published over the years, including Love and Rockets, Eightball and Hate. Perhaps it’s not too late to squeeze Kieth’s I Before E in?
They’re also releasing some big ticket items, including MAD: The Complete Harvey Kurtzman Years:
“For the first time, the entire original run of MAD comics and magazine by creator, editor, writer and cover artist Harvey Kurtzman in a lavish five-volume collector’s box set, in oversized facsimile, with extensive notes and historical essays. In 1952, the first MAD comic was created as a way for the writer/editor/artist Harvey Kurtzman to do something quick and easy in between his elaborately researched war comics for EC. Against all odds, sales success soon turned it into his main job and inspired him to expand from goofy parodies of other comics into even zanier satires that revealed to the kids of America how hypocritical the adults, and entire structure of society and capitalism around them, truly were.”
Before Kieth, I was obsessed with Mad Magazine, even the reprints from its earliest years. Since Kurtzman never received so much as a “created by” credit in Mad, this feels like something I’ve been waiting for my entire life.
At this point I should mention I got to attend a Q&A with Jaime Hernandez of the aforementioned Love and Rockets, gosh, last September? I didn’t learn a lot, having read and watched a lot on the man’s work, but it was great to meet him. He had been at Michigan State all week and apparently I was the only person to bring a book for him to sign.
While we’re on the subject of Fantagraphics, I don’t know anything about licensing, but if someone there happens to see this, here’s what I’d love: an American version of the French Charlie or the Italian Linus. Retro looking, monthly or quarterly. Reprints of Peanuts, of course, and maybe some Popeye, Mickey Mouse, Uncle Scrooge, Pogo, whatever’s possible. Mix in newer material too, and coordinate it with the books you’re releasing. Even just call it Fantagraphics. Just a free idea—take it or leave it =)