The Maxx, by Sam Keith and William Messner-Loebs (superhero comic/cartoon, 1993-1998)

[lb_lee]

"We all need some place to go away to... some place we can be the people we should've been instead of the people we've become. Some safe place where we can escape reality."

Blurb: In our world, the Maxx is a homeless man who sleeps in a box with a hopelessly enmeshed relationship with his social worker, Julie, but in the primordial Outback, he's a superhero fighting for his Jungle Queen! But it turns out the Maxx, Julie, and the Outback are all hopelessly psychologically intertwined, and a killer named Mr. Gone seems to know way more about all of them than he should...

Why is it worth your time?: This is a very edgy '90s story that Sam Keith says tended to strike specific teenagers in just the right way at a specific time, and indeed, that's how we got into it. It is EXTREMELY uneven in quality, but Keith mashes Outback and "real world", realism and cartoonish exaggeration, together in a way that nobody else does, and it's still beautiful to watch. In an unusual twist for us, we will recommend the MTV Liquid Television cartoon over the comic; by virtue of its brevity, it forced the story to cut some of its worst excesses, and its ending is less unsatisfying and, in our opinion, much better placed.

Plural Tags: abuse intermediate focus, realitymashing, memory work, otherworld, children, nonhumans [spirit animals], visions

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: The cartoon has subtitles on Open Subtitles. It was released on VHS, DVD, and someone put it on archive.org. The comics version is available on paper and ebook, and someone may have textually transcribed them for readers with print disabilities on archive.org? That would be a pleasant surprise!

Misc Notes: The comics version of the Maxx came out in six trade paperbacks (and maybe one of side-stories), but vol. 4 starts with a big time-skip and loses William Messner-Loebs as writer, leaving Sam Keith pulling double duty, and it shows. The cartoon, by virtue of being made in 1995 (and thus before the comic ended) was stuck with the first three volumes, and thus it ends there. The cartoon was 13 episodes, each roughly 10 minutes long, so you can smash through the whole thing in less than three hours.

Comments

Content Warnings

[lb_lee]

So many content warnings. Terrible things happen to people in the Maxx! Death, rape, violence, mental illness, dead bodies, homelessness, suicide, depression, animal injury and death, murder and manslaughter, victim-blaming, and psychological manipulation. Also school bullying and people not getting better. The endings are at best bittersweet, and the comic's ending especially bothered us when we read it; it's very much a, "things are fucked up beyond all repair, guess we'll just restart the universe and erase ourselves from existence" thing. At least the cartoon has the bittersweet ending of Julie and Maxx separating, perhaps giving them a chance to grow and change for the better.