The Maxx Creator Sam Kieth Dies At 63

Writer and artist Sam Kieth, who co-created The Sandman with Neil Gaiman and Mike Dringenberg, died of complications from Lewy body dementia.

It’s been a rough week for celebrity deaths, but this one stings. Sam Kieth, the revered comics artist who co-created The Sandman with Neil Gaiman and Mike Dringenberg before making an indelible mark with his creator-owned The Maxx at Image Comics, died of complications arising from Lewy body dementia on March 15. He was 63.

A masterful cartoonist, Kieth brought a superb sense of caricature combined with incredibly detailed pencil and ink work to the world of superhero comics late 80s and early 90s, before joining the creator exodus from Marvel that led to the formation of Image Comics. There he created The Maxx, a bizarre, allegorical tale about the titular homeless superhero set in two realms: the “real” world of the City, and the Outback, a primordial fantasy landscape that is actually the subconscious of freelance social worker Julie Winters. Running for 35 issues, with Kieth on art and plot while William Messner-Loeb scripted (and the legendary Alan Moore jumping in for one issue) it’s a genuine trip – a deeply personal, deeply weird meditation on fate, forgiveness, redemption, and trauma, a far cry from the musclebound and malevolent antiheroes that dominated the Image books of the time.

And it got an animated adaptation – one that brought Kieth’s work to Australian audiences. In 1995, MTV commissioned 13 episodes of The Maxx as part of their swiftly-abandoned MTV’s Oddities animation banner. This aired in Australia on SBS on Saturday nights, in a programming block that also hosted the experimental short film series Eat Carpet and just-as-experimental animation showcase Liquid Television, also an MTV production, which gave us Peter Chung’s Æon Flux.

Anecdotally speaking, it was genius programming, in that a solid block of experimental, head-spinning animation was just the thing to throw on while you were pre-loading before heading out on a Saturday night. It was a regular ritual with my crew, and we certainly weren’t alone there. Thanks to SBS, Sam Kieth’s The Maxx left an indelible mark on Australian alternative culture in the 90s – arguably only a footnote, but one I’m fond of revisiting.