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..