Issue #112
December 9th, 2008
Many people that read comics view the early and mid 90s as a bit of a Dark Age for the medium. I personally think that the notion is at the every least slightly overstated and more related to an era of readers who grew up at the same time and represented the last generation of kids where digital media and gaming didn’t take over a huge portion of childhoods. A lot of those people playing World of Warcraft or Halo would probably be reading comics now. Certainly there were awful books in that era; but as certain is the fact that there are some awful books out now, as there were in the Bronze, Silver Gold and Atomic age. The industry’s quality didn’t go down so much as to causes million issue prints runs for their top books to the comparatively embarrassing numbers that top books print today and even more so, the cut-off point for cancellation. We have BIG II comics (Marvel an DC) that struggle to sell in the mid tens of thousands and are not in danger of cancellation and it isn’t even out of my lifetime that a book not selling a 100 thousand were a disappointment.
Central to the butt of many 90′s jokes is Image Comics. To be brief, Image comics was formed via exodus by the top-selling talent in the industry 
leaving the Big II (mostly Marvel). For good reason or not many of these creators are the most successful in the history of the industry commercially and remain names most of us know, including the likes of Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee. These were (and still are) record holding/breaking creators in terms of sales, having independent titles that rivaled the sales of MARVEL titles—something that is not at all common. This is not meant to be an article on IMAGE so to move on, many of the founders set up studios and invited other talent to participate under the Image banner. Many apparently received check the size of which they had never seen before and thus took sabbaticals between issues that would make Kevin Smith seem as timely as Mark Bagley. Much of the young talent cultivated by Image is where the various negative reflections are probably the most justified. Even the bastard descendants of the likes of Michael Golden and Arthur Adams* can be appreciated, but the next generation, those descended from them created a house style in some studios that can be aptly referred to as trailer park. There are, however, two names post-founders who stood out to me. One, a surprisingly foundational figure in my evolution as a fantasy reader and the other a true jewel amongst the zirconia that currently is working on an SF strip.
I realize most mainstream comic books are—at their bones—Fantasy or Science Fiction. I am sure there is some relationship between my love for comics that related to my appreciation for speculative fiction in general, but it wasn’t something I can admit to being actively aware of. I read my comics and I read my novels and they were very separate experiences. Now that I think upon it I actually had different reading spots for both! I look now at my appreciation for novelists like Jeff VanderMeer, China Mieville, K.J. Bishop, Rhys Hughes, Jonathan Carroll, John M. Ford, Graham Joyce, John Crowley etc.—and I will refrain from using and trendy labels—and it is perhaps true that an American comic book, an Image comic, was my primer** to such fiction. I’m speaking of Sam Kieth’s Maxx. People may know Kieth best for being the penciler of the first arc of Neil Gaiman’s monumental Sandman run, but Maxx had some play on MTV and was published by Image beginning in 1993 and continuing for 35 issues. When you read Maxx you get this odd feeling that it’s being made up as you go along, the structure seems inspirational in construct, as if every issue you had in front of you was freshly thought of and put to paper. In this sense it attacked me as if I was a kid, when a turn of a page really was being introduced to new experiences; when 
we weren’t prepared for the next page—yet the content of the story and the themes were adult in nature. The central character of Maxx is mentally disturbed and exists in two worlds: the one that is real and the one that is fictional. Which was which, or both are ultimately debatable. There is underlining integrity to the character to accompany the delusional madness in both of his roles—in one he’s a bit of a vagabond, in the other, the “Outback,” he is the protector of the Jungle Queen (who doubles as a social worker, Julie, in the world where Maxx is a vagabond). We do not know what Maxx looks like under the mask, as Kieth puts it in an interview at Sequential Tart:
It looks pretty much like the Hulk with his purple pants stretched over his whole body pretty much. He’s pretty much an excuse to draw a circle and a triangle and add some arms. It just came from doodles in a sketch book of jungle foliage and some guy running around.
With that in mind, ‘spirit animals’ play a major role in the series and we know in previous incarnations (unrelated and published some ten years earlier ) Maxx is actually a Rabbit (see the Comico Primer story called Maxx the Hare). You throw in a telepathic serial killer, who is a player in the Outback with a very Bond-villain name in Mister Gone and you have a jaunt into the fantastic that’s rather unique in the field. You add Kieth’s stunning visuals to early stories aided by William Messner-Loebs and even an Alan Moore story later (issue #21) and you have what is perhaps my introduction to the glory of weird fiction.
There is, I think, some guilt by association applied to Maxx and to some extent Kieth. The first ‘modern’ appearance of Maxx occurred in the pages of Darker Image#1 which was meant to be the kick-off to an anthology miniseries that featured Maxx and characters by Image founders Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. I remember when this was being marketed with the same tag-line that now makes me cringe in the book market, “grim and gritty,” but make no mistake—this had a lot of buzz around it and I would be surprised if it wasn’t near the top of the sales list when it was solicited. The other two characters featured were Deathblow and Blood Wulf. Deathblow was Lee doing Frank Miller and Bloowulf was an obvious Lobo clone by Liefeld. So we have the bad—yet admittedly upfront—tag-line, characters that were more than just influenced by prior characters (and really, one Lobo is quite enough) and of course in the intended miniseries it is the only issue to have ever come out though it’s hard to believe it was for financial reasons as this almost had to be a big seller.
In a word, we had Image. At least the worst side of it.
It’s easy to dismiss Maxx, however, it remains this terrific run of comics; a precursor to what we’d see from Image now, a generation after. That unbridled creative enthusiasm that creates cult favorites that we wish would stick to the mainstream. Where Pushing Daisies thrives and where “social worker/jungle girl meets superhero hobo ” is the only hook one needs.
Image Isn’t Everything…
Looking more toward the future and now we are starting to see work from one of those aforementioned creators who first made waves with Image—this one was actually the real deal. Many of the studio hands at Image would not stand the test of time in terms of fan interest but one that seems to have done so is Travis Charest. Charest took over chores on WildC.A.T.s where he did runs and issues with writers like James Robinson and Alan Moore. I’m a comic book original art enthusiast and you can almost use interest in that market as a model. Charest pages are substantially more in demand than any of the new talent by Image in those initial years and is one those artists who would not have needed Image to become a major artist in the field (if it was his desire to be so). He is an incredible artist and it just so happens he’s working on a Science Fiction project, Space Girl, that he puts out on his MSN group. This a throw-back SF strip that promises big ideas, adventurous fun, and in some manner looks like a reprieve for an artist who is not known to be fast and allows him to put thought to paper quickly in a fashion that paint other artists green with envy.
The highest compliment I can give an artist is that if I can walk into a local shop here and he could have a graphic novel that doesn’t look silly in the company of the European product lining the shelves. Don’t get me wrong, there are obviously fantastic artists in the American market but on any given Tuesday, but the new comic shelf probably has a good percentage of fill-in artists represented, and I don’t care how people want to rationalize it—the majority of the time that implies a downgrade or at least a mild straying from original creative vision. There is no half-stepping on the shelf here, everything is beautiful —whether that beauty describes the fantastic, horror, or reality—and nobody does SF in comics like on this side of the pond. Charest has the chops to shine in any country’s sequential art top shelf.
I just hope to see more of Charest’s work in the future, and especially in American comics as we needs talent like him to remind us that artists still have a place in the factory. I say this while really not preferring the ultra-realistic, statuesque posing, lifeless art that accompanies many books now, but Charest has that ability to bring just enough reality to something like super heroes but still recognize it is still a different reality even if the capes inhabit cities that bear the same names as our own.
Recent quality purchase. . .
Sweet pulp goodness with a Bradbury story!
The State of the Empire. . .
The next interview up conducted by myself (excluding the one I’m putting up later today) takes us on a trip to see the Wizard. No ruby reds, silver, baby. Sometimes this month we should also see the first edition of our new monthly feature entitled Synergy. I recently put the promo up.
*Looking back it seems rather obvious now but I want to credit comic book artist Buzz for really pointing it out via an interview at Comic Geek Speak.
** A Maxx first appeared in Comic Primer#5. The first Image incarnation of Maxx appeared in Darker Image#1
Jan-ken-pon is the time traveling, force-walking, multiverse crossing column of Jay Tomio, owner of 1/3 of everything you see currently on screen and the editor of Heliotrope. Galactus was once his rollerblading Herald. Some call him the Bodhisattva
