Rhinhart Reads: Maximised

One of my all time favorite comics ended (again) this week and I felt that i needed to mention here so please indulge my ramblings (or just skip to another blog). The comic in question is The Maxx.

The Maxx is a dimension spanning tale of Dave, a homeless man with a purple lampshade on his head who thinks of himself as a hero, his job is to protect his social worker, Julie winters from the evil Mr Gone and his strange black Izz. Julie and Maxx also exist in another world known as Pangaea as the Jungle queen and her faithful protector. The story is part 'slice of life' following Julie, Maxx and her friend Sarah. It's part super hero as Maxx fights Gone to protect Julie. It covers the nature of reality, the human psyche, existence an reality. Oh and there is also a chance that Maxx is really a giant rabbit. Much of the first half of the series is narrated by Mr Gone but he often contradict's himself or just changes what he said int previous episode/issue and, as he seems to be the only character that knows what is happening it added a new level of uncertainty to the story.

                                                         Mr Gone

I first found the Maxx as a cartoon on MTV's Oddities, a late night section on MTV that showed some more unusual cartoons back in the 90's. I think the most famous of these shows is Aeon Flux, there was also The Head which was about a man with an alien who had take up resident in his head to fight other aliens of the same nature. The other series was the Maxx which was, in my opinion the best of the 3. The Maxx was based on a comic book written by Sam Kieth.

The T.V. series and the first half of the comic series can be seen as an unusual spin on a superhero comic with Maxx as the hero and Mr Gone and his army of Izz as the villain but, as I've said it is much more that that.

A few years after seeing the T.V. show I first found the comic but is was about 10 issues from the end and a lot had changed form the events in the show. I managed to find a few back issues and found that the series was faithful to comic in art stile as well as the story so, between the show and the comics i could find I could put the first half of the story together but this just made me want to find out what happens between the end of the show and where i had managed to collect the comics from but unfortunately I could never find all the back issues and for the story of the Maxx, the way the characters interact and the truth about Pangaea(s) you need to read the whole thing and anyway I needed to know why Mr Gone now seemed to be a good guy.

Skip ahead a few years (decades) and comixology comes along and then one week I notice in the new comics The Maxx: Maximised, a digital reprinting of the Maxx so of course I started collecting, this time from the beginning and now, 35 issues on have the complete series. It was definitely worth it to have the full story. As i previously said the Maxx starts out as a slightly odd superhero story but it soon becomes more than that making the reader question the Maxx's reality and how it it is linked to the characters psyche and in some way making the reader look at their own reality. The story goes from being the superhero story to a story about life, broken childhoods, and dealing with the decisions the characters had to make, even those they felt they had no choose in.

Before Comixology The Maxx had a place in my hart as great cartoon and a quest to find the missing issues, always with the slight dread that some part of completing the story would ruin it.

After the comixology run the Maxx is still one of my all time favorite comics and reading it is a journey I would (and will ) willingly take again.

Even after all that my Maxx quest is still not over as I'm trying to find a UK copy of the MTV series on DVD, Bluray or digital. Not sure if that exists though..

Chappie

Title - Chappie

Language - English

Genre - Sci Fi, Crime,

Set in South Africa in the near future where crime rates have rocketed. To combat this the police have boosted their ranks with robot police called scouts. The scout robots were chosen over a robotic tank called the moose. Vincent (Huge Jakeman), the creater of the moose has taken it's rejection badly and is still trying to get it to replace the Scout robots but the police are against this as they feel the moose would be overkill. Deon, the creator of he Scouts want to take his creation tho the next level and when Michelle (Sigourney Weaver) his boss refuses to let him he steals a damaged Scout and the master key needed to program it. He his kidnapped by a group of criminals who are looking for a way to turn off the Scouts whilst they carry out their final heist. Finding the damaged Scout the criminals (Ninja & Yo- Landi Visser, also known as the rap/dance band Die Antwoord) deiced to make Deon repair it and make it work for them. Deon convinces them that the only way to get the scout to work for them is if he loads his artificial intelligence program into it and then they can teach the Scout how to behave. Whilst this is going on Vincent starts looking for the master key so he can make the Scouts malfunction and force his Moose to replace them.

Chappie is a multi layered film. On the surface it has two main storie lines, Ninja and Yo-Landi trying to get the money they owe & Vincent trying to get his Moose tank to replace the Scout robots but the film also has a lot of depth covering family, life and human nature.

I feel that the Vincent story line owes something to the original Robo cop. In fact when i first saw the Moose I couldn't help thinking that it was nice that ED-209 had found work after so long. (ED-209 was a robot that was also designed for the job Robo cop took) and the whole 'wanting to replace the Scouts with the Moose' did seem to echo the ED-209 vs Robo Cop. This isn't a bad thing as the story line isn't necessarily the main focus of the film, it is just one of the two events which are there to move the story along by causing conflict.

The main story of the film follows how Chappie, the name given to the now sentient Scout, affects the three main leads, Deon, Ninja and Yo-Landi, as he learns what he is and what humans are. Through their interaction with Chappie Deon, Ninja and Yo-Landi form an odd kind of family which, by the end of film has an almost biblical feel to it (we even get a resurrection of sorts). Deon, who refers to himself as the creator to Chappie is, for the first part of the film not present in Chappies life much but when he is around he is attempting to guide the way Chappie run's it's life by giving it instructions and commands that affect it even when he is not around, all the while the is telling chappie not to let People stop it from doing what it wants. Yo-Landi quickly becomes a mother figure to Chappie and is torn between caring out the planed heist with Chappie or protecting it and helping Deon nurture it. Ninja's Part in the family takes it time to show. For a long time he just wants to use Chappie and is frustrated by it's unwillingness to use guns. However he slowly takes the farther role fighting and protecting the others when the Moose tracks them down. Ninja was the character I thought i was going to have a problem with at the beginning of the film. He starts off as an almost generic 'Gangsta' character which was alright as Chappie is, in many ways a gangsta film but to begin with his character did seem a bit to generic an just a bit blah. There are plenty of films with the 'criminal needs to get money to pay pay some one off/ get out of trouble with' and Ninja could easily have fitted in any of these but he did seem to grate against the other characters. This is until he starts to take on the farther role and we see his character changed, more slowly than the others. This is one thing Chappie does well , the four main characters affect each other and change. Even at then end of the film when characters who are forced together normal go their separate ways, the new family stay together. There are two characters who don't really develop, Michelle who apart form say no Deon and Vincent eventual lets Vincent use the Moose and then just seems to disappear and Vincent who just gets more angry and then sulkily try's to set Deon up when his plan fails.

Chappies development stats off as he is taught how to behave by the three leads and then develops into trying to understand. He could easily have become a 'Pinocchio' type character, trying to become human and fit in (Like Data from Star trek The Next Generation) but instead he try's to understand why humans do the things they do (Fight, lie and manipulate) and in doing so he understands more about himself and gains the desire, not to be human but to live, which makes him a more human character than some other robots.

One thing that initially put me of watching Chappie was the fact that Die Antwoord was in it, not because I don't like their music, in fact i have recently started to listen to them, but because i have found that films with bands in seem to become affected but the band mainly because the band is trying to get it's self as much screen time as possible, an example of this is Lordi's Dark floors which seemed to add unnecessary scenes just give every band member screen time. This is not the case with Die Antwoord in Chappie, although there is a little bit of self promotion, mainly by the band wearing there own t shirts, this does not affect the film as Ninja and Yo-Landri keep in character and don't seem to fight for screen time .

Chappie is an interesting film, part sci-fi, part gangsta with themes of family and the nature of humanity and it handles all the subject with out creating a mess.