Artist Sam Keith dies at 63

Decider's reporting the veteran artist Sam Keith is dead at 63 years old. But there's one item listed here that they probably should've left out, although there are other things he drew that were in questionable taste, more on which anon:

The comic book world is saying goodbye to one of its most distinctive voices. Sam Kieth — the boundary-pushing creator of The Maxx and an early artistic force behind The Sandman — has died at 63 following a battle with Lewy body dementia, a degenerative brain disorder that causes cognitive decline, hallucinations, and Parkinson-like symptoms.

Born January 11, 1963, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Kieth emerged in the 1980s with a style that felt immediately out of step with traditional superhero comics — in the best way. While his early work at Marvel put him on titles featuring Wolverine and the Hulk, Kieth gravitated toward stories that leaned more surreal, psychological, and emotionally jagged than your typical capes-and-punches fare.

That sensibility fully crystallized in 1993 with The Maxx, his Image Comics series that quickly became a cult favorite. Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, the story follows a homeless man who believes he’s a powerful protector in another world. Its exploration of trauma, identity, and fractured perception struck a chord with readers — and eventually led to an animated adaptation that cemented its legacy.

Before The Maxx, Kieth had already made a major impact helping launch The Sandman alongside Neil Gaiman. As the artist on the first five issues, he established much of the book’s shadowy, gothic tone, laying visual groundwork for what would become one of the most acclaimed comic series ever published.

Sigh. It's already old news that the disgraced Gaiman was a bad choice for whom to work with, so what's the use of bringing this up? If anything, it's not a great landmark on Keith's resume. Although there's also a few other examples from his portfolio that're questionable by today's standards, and which I may as well write about here, if only because who knows if they'd be published so easily today. But how interesting they admit Keith dealt with the surreal, because there's only so many other instances where the press insists on being "realistic", at the expense of surrealism. Presumably, Keith gets a pass because what he dealt with was more violent, among other issues questionable in nature.

For example, according to Tubewad's description of The Maxx's adaptation on MTV:

MTV’s version of The Maxx follows the plot of the comics so faithfully that you could watch the entire series and not have missed anything in books 1-11 While it did not always move sequentially—for example, The Maxx .5 is featured in episode 6, and the Darker Image preview is in another—it hits every major plot point. MTV’s version is able to draw all of the anger, betrayal, pain and repression from the comics and portray that in a way that is faithful to Keith’s vision. While it never explains that Julie was raped by Mr. Gone, or that she hit Maxx with her car (as it shouldn’t, since these are post-book 11 events), it does give a good idea of the emotional intensity that exists between the characters. It shows how much Julie and Maxx care for each other, and how that love serves as a bond that has to be severed in order to allow growth for either of them.

So the Maxx comic is something involving sexual violence. And we're supposed to be impressed, just like that? If anything, the following GN he published in the early 2000s, Zero Girl, is certainly embarrassing, if we were to go by what's told on GoodReads:

This is an odd book, as everything Sam Kieth does typically is. This is the story of a 15 year old social outcast. She sees squares as trying to get her and circles save her. The shapes shift to and fro monsters. That's the interesting part. The skeevy part is the relationship she has with her guidance counselor. She constantly flirts with him and he's more than tempted. It's icky to put it mildly. It's ultimately why I can't recommend the book. Keith's art is it's usual great, highly stylized self.

I vaguely recall this being spoken about in some comics circles at the time it first came out (and there was a sequel published at least 2 years later), and it did sound dismaying even then. If the girl, who bears the absurdly cartoonish last name "Smootster", had been 16, the age gap might've been less an issue. But Keith had to run the risk of making this into some statutorily inappropriate affair. Was that really necessary? Today, the chances this kind of story would be published without arguement by most publishers are much lower, and for all we know, Keith himself probably would've been more hesitant about crafting such a tale where a girl who's under the legal consenting age in most western countries would be portrayed this way. There's more about the premises of these GNs on Gizmodo that's even more stupefying, along with the premise of a GN titled Four Women:

And in his other stories, the traditional roles are reversed in unexpected ways. The villain Mr. Gone in The Maxx is a victim of his aunt’s sexual abuse, Zero Girl protagonist Amy Smootster is in such intense sexual pursuit of her guidance counselor that it kind of feels predatorial. Maybe this inversion is colored by Kieth’s own life -– he met his wife when he was 15 and she was 35. Or maybe they’re just his own “inner bimbo” (though his is more like “inner crazy lady in the public park who wears tinfoil on her head and screams about the Bay Of Pigs”). But whatever, because I’m into it!

Though there are conventional battles of good vs. evil, the final terrors in Kieth’s comics are emotional. In his most realistic piece, Four Women, we double back on a horrible sexual assault on four women during a car ride –- while the event itself was the catalyst, it’s the tensions and moral dilemmas the women now face with each other and themselves for throwing each other under the bus, basically, that drives the narrative. Rape also figures prominently into Julie’s alternate-universe reign as the Jungle Queen in her Outback in The Maxx, which I’m aware sounds totally insane if you haven’t read these comics. So read them, (and also this interview on Sequential Tart.)

What's irritating about the description is that it sounds like Keith wrote the Maxx that way to water down the seriousness of Mr. Gone's own actions. And he even made Amy in Zero Girl look like an aggressor if that's what it took to justify that too? I'm not impressed. Though at least we know French president Emmanuel Macron and his much older wife Brigitte Trogneux aren't the only ones of their sort. The Gizmodo item was written 14 years ago, and one can only wonder if their writers would back such a GN today as they did before. And if they don't condone an affair where the man's older while the girl's under legal statutory threshold, would they apply the same standards to an older woman-younger boy affair? If not, that just demonstrates how stunningly inconsistent PC advocates can be with their beliefs.

Now, Keith's gone, and he's left behind a portfolio that, while the MSM may not make anything clear, really is in questionable taste, topped off by how some of the women in his stories are made to look absurdly, questionably bad themselves. And is that the kind of stuff we ever needed? Not really.