Well, Yom-Kippur (aka The Day of Atonement) is finally over. This year is was mostly about taking naps and reading Sam Kieth's Zero Girl - Full Circle, the second Zero Girl book. The Zero Girl books are all about how circles are good, squares are bad, and 15 year old girls shouldn't fall in love with grownups, and this one was really really really good, just like the first one. Thank Jebus for teenage lesbos. Sam Kieth is my all time favorite comic book writer/artist, and has been so since I first watched The Maxx TV serial on MTV's Oddities (MTV used to be so cool in the '90s, wasn't it? There was Beavis and Butthead, Æon Flux, The Head, Daria, Liquid Television... not to mention some actual music. It sure has come a long way since then, into the wasteland of nothingness it is today), based of the first 13 issues of The Maxx, way before I had even read one page. The Maxx tells the story of a big purple homeless guy and the social worker who looks after him, but it's also about the other world, Pangea, where Maxx is a superhero who protects his jungle queen, while the evil Mr. Gone is being a total asshole. The TV show absolutely blew my mind. Absolutely nothing on TV or anywhere else was better than or as good as The Maxx. The Maxx was a god to me. The problem was, it was the mid-'90s, and the whole internet thing was just getting started over here, not to mention any actual comic book stores. So I did what I could and ordered issue #1 of Friends of Maxx (a spin-off of The Maxx) from this weird catalog-based operation in Jerusalem, I think, and then forgot about the whole thing for a couple of years, until the entire series came out in TPB format and the first comic book store was opened in Tel-Aviv. I couldn't be more excited to be the proud daddy of all five Maxx TPBs. The Maxx is truely the awesomest comic book series ever. Kieth's art is extremely original, mixing several styles and techniques flawlessly, never lacking that unique Kiethian magic I'm so in love with. And the stories are absolutely fantastic, almost like a very emotional version of Philip K. Dick on LSD (PKD was never that big a druggy, in contrast to popular belief). Then there were the Zero Girl books, and Four Women, and Ojo, and a couple of Batman serials, and more recently My Inner Bimbo, all truely great stuff. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
The sounds in my head have started again. Good.
And here's a fun fact: David Feiss (creator of Cow and Chicken) and Sam Kieth are cousins! Feiss even did a weird little story (in rhymes!) in one of the first Maxx issues. Now if someone could please just put the Maxx TV show of DVD (it was animated digitally, so no remastering is needed) then I could finally die happy.
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