Unless I'm Dreaming Now

Maxx - Still talking out loud

-----------------------------------------------------------
"Now I get to draw really big feet" - Sam Kieth
-----------------------------------------------------------

If you're wandering curiously, briefly, on this page - its existence a precarious mouse-click from oblivion - please, stay awhile.

The child within begs.

" .. all the lonely misguided people in this dark city .. experts at avoiding reality. And with good reason. I'm not sure any of us wants to know what goes on out there at 3 am in some stink-ridden alley.

" God knows who doing God knows what.

" Best not to think about it. Just push it down and go on. .. But I have my fortress, warm and dry, far away from the twisted city below."

Thus pondered Julie Winters before a haunting cityscape, launching the beloved MTV animated Maxx, softly stirred to life from ink and paper by creator Sam Kieth.

As years fade from '95 we fan the dying embers of this rarest burst of creative freedom to grace our silver screens, and, inexplicably, gloriously, sidestep vile twins: studio mindset and cutting room floor [2].

" It was a small company that produced the cartoons for MTV ... [they] gave us complete control. Something like this will NEVER happen again in my career, either in comics, animation, OR movies.

"It was a once in a lifetime thing, and I still am stunned by it" - creator Sam Kieth in year 2000 interview.

Maxx resonated, still does.

Only Julie's bell-bottoms have aged. The Maxx is a timeless classic clutching your soul. As mind falters in layered meaning, visceral visuals play to a heart pounding excitedly in clear assent.

" Disenfranchised. Lonely. Imaginative. Dreamers. Outsiders. The girl who slits her wrists or the guy who hates himself 'cause he wears glasses and was too fat, or skinny, you name it. Kids who were too smart to be nerds, but didn't fit (or want to fit) in with the hip & trendy kids.

" All these people just came to me and created their OWN community.. I mock myself, and the book, but the fans were the only real part of it, and talking to them was a truly humbling experience." - Sam Kieth

Cartoons and comix are the sweet lifeblood of our culture, a preferred and readily digested literary nutrient, and youth's gentle doorway to the stinging hate of the world.

God's deafening silence, the forlorn augury of his messiah, broken lives and promises of parents, all rend the hearts of all children who feel injustice's fetid breath at tender age.

Rare is a child (rarer still youth) without loneliness. Too commonly the young in smothering angst and ache union with the soul is lost and they embark on a demeaning, recondite, and ultimately futile life, engaging the world on its terms - máquina a máquina.

The world is, after all, just a machine.

And you needn't play its game.

Disney's beauty swept the world six decades ago, releasing an animated parade of visual wonderment from the minds of artists, and more rarely, directors, of great vision.

Creation's delight drives ever more exquisite strangeness from an army of willing genius, toiling with ink upon paper, stylus on tablet - themselves feeling, nevertheless, little more than cogs ...

" Why [you ask, reaching for that mouse] is The Maxx different? Just another comic, another grimy juvenile cartoon?"

I can't make you like it.

Only by giving the time, allowing the animated Maxx to captivate you, can the lost self awaken and stir the spiritual you.

That is the only test, the only reason to watch The Maxx.

Should Maxx nudge your faded, perhaps jaded, memories to reverie, you might resume that infant quest for truth, harmony, justice and pleasure - and restore meaning to a flaccid emotional desert masquerading as your life.

I caught this 'cartoon' - or should I say it caught me? - a decade ago plus two on some off-beat ethnic TV channel in a far-off country boasting Maxx's outback. Ten minutes a week of poignant collage, enigmatic plot, and delicious production, held me to a weekly pilgrimage, returning with migratory adeptness to some elusive late night moment ... for my fix!

Hadn't read a comic for eons. Never heard of Sam Kieth - or Bill Loebs. MTV .. who cares? Rusty unseasoned viewing taste, inured to boobtube banal trite, Maxx quickly overwhelmed, signposting my psyche subliminally, permanently.

Then, apparently, forgotten.

Twelve years later a neuron fired, a memory twitched, ..

"Hey, Joe, remember late-night TV, some purple guy, superhero, running around a wilderness, then 'Bam' he's in the city? What was that??" [ Noo! .. must not forget .. my Jungle Queen ... I Am The Maxx!! ]

"Who knows? Search Wikipedia."

I did, and there he was. TV series, the nineties. Ah, so much forgotten. Time, I think, to return and pay homage to Maxx, Sam, and Bill.

The Maxx is ...

" .. Sam Kieth's dark epic about the struggles of a hurting young woman told in the brilliance of little creatures, alternate planes, and a purple clad alter-ego hero who she called Maxx."

Understanding Maxx (and Julie, and Sarah)

Firstly, understand, I come to praise Maxx, not dissect him - yet the story is most eminently dissectable.

Though students of neither Psychology nor mysticism, many still recognize terms, references, allusion, or interplay of their precepts (now hackneyed concepts) binding Maxx's story in fascinating authenticity. Sam Kieth and Bill Messner Loebs knew the precise quantity of inventive cement and clichéd aggregates to craft this intelligent dark tale into a disturbingly endearing experience.

The Maxx is a Gordian knot of psychological motives, a carefully and intrcately weaved tangle indeed. And if in the end a mere comic book, not science, The Maxx still has a tremendous amount to teach us in this delectable onion peeling of a mind that might well have been our own.

"Odd things may happen but Maxx will always remain a grim and gritty character. Maxx is going to be like an antihero, but kind of strange .. not .. a silly book at all, at most it will be sardonic.

My art deviates from the norm, so my stories will as well. But if something silly happens, it's because I'm making fun of the idea, of [it] being cute." - Sam Kieth

Complicating the plot is a favorite pastime of viewers, and reviewers. Don't go there. Let Sam clarify:

"It's two worlds, one story is set in the modern world, and Maxx is involved in these unsavory things.

" He's this seedy bum sort of character who sleeps in garbage bins, but he sees things in terms of this dream world. He's this gritty regular guy who keeps having these hallucinations, slipping into another world.

" There's also this woman, a social worker who's trying to help him out. She's trying to convince him that the modern world is real, but he's coming to this realization that this other world is the real world and the real world is a dream." - Sam Kieth

Harder to unravel are the relationships.

The Maxx releases clues gradually, revealing via Kieth's whimsically endearing comic style, here a nexus, there a misconception, and just to the side (by the dumpster) yet another assumed ambiguity. And some, well .. never.

Subtleties Kieth builds on this framework keep us in delighted confusion, lapping up the imagery, then debating friend or self their meaning long into the lonely city night.

Following the tale's surface, we find Maxx a superhero in appearance and word, yet oddly ineffectual by deed, heroics confined to squishing Isz and wrestling Mr Gone, who we aren't quite sure isn't imagined, too. Julie Winter's role seems uncomplicated, if professionally offbeat. As Leopard Queen she and the Outback are obviously (surely) in Maxx's imagination.

Maxx, not only ineffectual, is disconcertingly unconvincing - especially when declaring "I am The Maxx!"

Only Gone's supra-perceptive intrusion on our characters' ordinary city lives remains a disturbing inconsistency. We take the Isz' leakage into this realm as Maxx's problem, not our misunderstanding of the script. Not yet.

We double-take when Julie is not only kidnapped by Gone's Isz, but a darker, tougher Julie cuts her way to freedom in a most startling scene. Thanks for nix, Maxx.

Hmm, methinks this little tale has a darker side, and is no mere toon.

The foil, Sarah, is deployed as commentary glue and minor catalyst. Her role is key, but vaguely superfluous, except .. why, of course! She's a loser, big time. If you couldn't identify with Maxx or Julie, you're certainly going to love/hate/dig/or-see-yourself-as Sarah.

We could go on about spirit animals, a cornerstone of The Maxx, but their native piety and reverence is rather trivialized by the overriding constraints of The Maxx as an illustrated comic-series. Had Kieth the clout of Von Trier, or animator Miyazaki, Maxx would, and should, have been a 170-minute classic, dwelling on the niceties of subtle detail and fleshed-out, err, unreal people.

Comix are, after all, collections of somewhat self-contained episodes; difficult to transpose to a continuum while faithful to original.

Poignancy peaks when Julie meets her eight-year-old self, deep in their 'holy place,' in sepia tones. "We shouldn't be here."  A symbolic skull invokes Julie to ask if Maxx is dead in this hallucination.  Little Julie explains Maxx cannot exist here.

Julie: "I won't remember this, will I?"

The Plot peaks as Julie's sublimated childhood trauma reveals in exquisite pain the lesson acquired of her mother: "Mommy always fixes everything .. or makes it disappear"

The lesson surfaces in Julies' toughness saying goodbye to Maxx. The scene stands as superbly-written parting interplay. Bigger movie shops regularly botch this scenario despite their high stakes, and high pay.

Sam and Bill craft here a masterful demonstration of games we play, hurting ones we love, from buried and forgotten immaturity.

Maxx: "I think if you look deep inside, you already now the right thing to do"

Julie: " You're right Maxx, I do. But I'm the only .. one strong enough to do it."

Mr. Gone: "Julie learned something from her Mom. The ability to suppress, to submerge, and to bury.

Passed down from mother to daughter. And that's how our little story ends .. not with a bang, or a whimper, but with a 'thwakk' "


And now you know have to see the video - to find out what exactly was "thwakked."

Julies' encapsulated childhood is an incisive, conceptual tour de force that the entire production crew may savor as their finest career effort. I have never witnessed a more sage unfolding of fractured childhood, nor more stunning display of comix-animé power to portray a milieu.

No other art form can hold a candle to it.

The Maxx is ..

Stylized comix transform worldly dross to iconized imagery, an évocateur of undying popularity in a seemingly improbable cultural niche, amongst youth and young at heart.

Too readily dismissed, this true art form not only refuses to yield, but relentlessly grows from tireless and driven enthusiasm of pencilers, inkers, letterers and colorists. Kids who can draw - oldies who won't stop - digging and drawing from personal depths they barely know or understand.

Toon illustrators seek the essence of what we mere mortals are commonly blind to, removing inessential detail, cluttering only for emphasis, enhancing color and ambiance to dreamlike effect.

Softly veiled coarse reality. Life's slap, velvet-gloved.

Viewer-readers ingest this purified experience directly into the mindstream to instantly arrive where it's at. Cartoonists wield immense leverage in audience comprehension, more so in ultra-honed acuity of enthusiast niche dwellers, the kids.

Maxx gets you where it's at, and fast.

And if the toon sucks .. no hiding place.

The Maxx does not suck.

The Maxx is, and will always be ...

[1] Readers at IMDB offer eloquent praise:

" .. a beautifully disturbing piece of art. Even as animation, much more a reality then half the [live] rubbish being churned out .."

" .. darker, more complicated, and better written than any of the live-action movies in the new release shelves .."

" .. as bizarre as the Maxx's psyche and will leave you wondering what you just watched. The amazing cinematography amidst the complexity of storyline .."

" .. after its two hours have passed: scary, very funny, thoughtful, intelligent, profound, disturbing, highly imaginative, and ultimately quite moving."

" .. is far more imaginative than live-action stuff, because it's loose of the bounds of physics .. It makes .. films based on comic books .. seem clunky and artificial by comparison."

" .. the most intelligently written story every to hit the genre of animation .. a psychological thriller .. haunting, other-worldly style of animation."

" ..the best adaptation of a comic book into animation. .. deep, well written and with superb voice performances. .. the wonderful art .. looks exactly as the comic book."

" ..a deep psychological introspective lightly camouflaged as a weird-out superhero story. .. not to be missed for the artwork, the story itself, or the excellent voice work - particularly the late Barry Stigler's deliciously urbane, drippingly evil voicing of the main villain, Mr. Gone."

" ..deep and involving.. every line spoken can be taken in two ways and have two possible meanings just as the city and outback each have their duality."

" .. brilliant and looks like a comic book come to life. The voice acting is top notch and the dialogue is unlike any other I have experienced in a comic to screen adaptation."

" Fantastic all-around .. and unsettling. Deep characters with their own sets of problems and circumstances set up around superb animation."

[2]: Rant on the video release by Michelle Klein-Häss:

" The Maxx released as a single videocassette has several cuts, some of which render some parts of the video sheer nonsense.

Mr. Gone's recap is not on this tape, and neither is the song "I Want To Marry A Lighthouse Keeper" from the soundtrack of "A Clockwork Orange," which figured so strongly in the original.

From what I can gather, the cuts were made to squeeze the entire series on a T-120...ludicrous when you consider that VHS duplicator tape stock comes in longer lengths without resorting to the thin tape stock you see with T-180s.

Save your money and find a friend who's taped the entire series and copy their tapes. The official MTV release is not worth the tape it's recorded on. (set rant mode OFF) "

Michelle's The Maxx episode log:    http://anp.awn.com/mxeplog.html

Maxx: "Because I'm the Maxx!"

[Aren't we all?]

The characters in "The Maxx" are ©Sam Kieth.
The original animation © MTV 1995
All rights reserved by the respective copyright owners.

Images in this article captured from the MTV release.
Capture utility was SnapShot component of VLC Media Player of VideoLan team. Montage & collage by SheepOverboard's illustrator from Sam Kieth originals ~ in awe and admiration of, and in tribute to, his work.

It is believed that the use of low-resolution images extracted from the video to illustrate the copyrighted comic book characters where no free alternative exists, hosted on servers in the United States, qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other uses of these images might be copyright infringement.