I recently sat down to watch The Maxx cartoon from 1995. I recall being vaguely aware of the comic and the cartoon back in the day, but never bothered pursuing it at the time because it was presented poorly. By that, I mean, it superficially looks very unlike something that I'd have any interest in.

See, take a look at this cover at the right. Sam Kieth's character design is a very hulking, brutish looking figure with claws that are clearly drawn to make it look like he's flipping the bird to the readers. Lots of testosterone and attitude. In fact, it looks like it's ALL testosterone and attitude. The fact that it was published by Image in 1993 further serves to reinforce this presentation. (For those who weren't around at the time, the early days of Image were largely defined by this attitude. They were saying -- literally, IIRC -- "fuck you" to Marvel and DC.) It very much looks like a comic that is primarily, if not exclusively, about a big purple guy unrepentantly beating the snot out bad guys.

I had (and still have) no interest in that kind of thing.

But, over the ensuing decades, I've picked up enough to understand that that wasn't in fact what the book was about. So when I came across the cartoon, I figured I could sit through the two-ish hours of the entire series to get a nominal understanding of the idea. What I saw was a more existential exploration of one's self, in particular how our perception of our own past informs our understanding of our present. It was intriguing enough that I tracked down the original comic series to see how much of that really comes across in the book.

I was surprised to discover just how closely the cartoon follows the comic. Many of the visuals are pulled directly from Kieth's art, and the dialogue is largely lifted verbaitum. The biggest differences were that the cartoon lacked the cameos from Savage Dragon and The Pitt (for obvious legal reasons) and the ending was new since the comic would continue to run as an ongoing serial for another two dozen issues or so.

What I found particularly interesting in the comic was that, as it continued, it further explored the notion of childhood trauma specifically. Elements that we consciously forget but carry through to adulthood nonetheless, masked by layers of distorted symbolism. And how that gets passed down generationally, even if the generations aren't necessarily genetically related.

I get the impression the series ended in large part because Kieth said everything he wanted to say on the topic. Indeed, the comic's story shifts pretty significantly a couple of times because he reached a conclusion of one avenue of the topic and wanted to explore a slightly different one. Similar themes, but still different enough that he couldn't adequately cover them in how he had set the book up initially.

The series asks a lot of questions about who we are as individuals and what makes us us, but Kieth doesn't propose to have all the answers. Or even most of them, really. Narratively, the book's ending is a bit unsatisfying to me personally, not because it doesn't wrap up the storylines but because Kieth doesn't even seem to have answers for himself. At least not complete ones.

Which, ultimately, is kind of the point. We like to have stories that offer up some answers and tie things up in a nice bow. We like them because, in real life, we almost never get that. "Happily ever after" only works because the story ends, and the prince and princess don't have to wake up the next morning to deal with whatever new bullshit is dropped on their plates. The story freezes at "the end" and there are no more possibilities for conflict. In real life, the only time we're able to stop dealing with conflict is when we're dead and even then, that's only our own conflict -- all your friends and loved ones will carry on dealing with their conflicts.

I get annoyed with a lot of the fiction I see these days, in which the resolution centers on familial harmony. The young whipper-snapper learns that their grandparents' "outdated" wisdom still applies after all. The parent that learns that suppressing their generational trauma doesn't make it go away. The siblings that have to make peace with how badly they were raised because their parents were in fact protecting them from some massive external threat. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those stories, but they're approached in the same way so frequently that they become trite. Not unlike the nature of existentialism itself, with The Maxx the reader has to answer their own questions and assign their own meaning to the whole thing. And I really like that Kieth did that.

The notion of creators taking a real life historical figure and having them fight the supernatural is hardly new. Off the top of my head, I can recall Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Harriet Tubman: Demon Slayer, and Necronauts which featured Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, and Charles Fort facing off against the "Sleepers in the Void" on the spiritual plane. The most recent title to run with the idea is Pancho Villa: Monster Hunter by Hector Rodriguez III and Ariel Medel.

This first issue is set in 1913, shortly after Mexican President Francisco Madero was assassinated in a coup led by General Victoriano Huerta. The story starts in the midst of a battle between Huerta's army and Villa's band of freedom fighters, but Pancho leaves very soon into the battle as he hears some unnamed monsters howling nearby. He's able to dispatch several of them, but not without receiving a few mystically infected wounds himself. Pancho makes his way to Sabía, his friend and healer who not only patches him up but warns him that the demon appearances are increasing and seemingly aimed at him. Pancho returns to his cadre and effectively enlists them in his fight against these monsters. But while he's doing that, a Dr. Nyarla in Coahuila is creating more demons to flood Mexico "in blood and madness" and in Mexico City, Huerta himself is meeting with Dr. Frankenstein and his latest creation...

As the first issue, there's a fair amount of setup happening here, of course. Not only establishing the characters but also putting them into a very specific context. This is in a very specific part of Mexico's history, and Villa was in a very particular place in his life at that time. Which makes for a significant part of the setup here that I haven't seen in other famous-person-turned-monster-hunter stories: namely, that monster hunting takes time away from his actual pursuits. Pancho is castigated by multiple people here for leaving a battle against Huerta's men in favor of what's viewed as a side quest by virtually everyone else. It's not simply that we have a famous character who happens to hunt monsters in his "free time;" no, he has to actively balance leading his group and fighting these monsters. One has to give way to make room for the other, forcing Pancho to assess his priorities. That's an intriguing aspect that I don't think I've really seen addressed in other similar stories.

The storytelling is solid, both verbally and visually. Rodriguez and Medel deliver not only an engaging story with a great set-up, they do so with a very careful cultural eye. What I mean by that is that the real Pancho Villa is a large part of the basis for the Mexican bandito stereotype. I mean, look at him -- sombrero, bushy mustache, two chest-crossing bandoliers... You'd swear from his photo that he would sound exactly like Mel Blanc doing a cartoonishly gravely Mexican accent. So doing a comic book about him fighting demons has the potential to slide into pastiche really quickly. But Rodriguez and Medel, presumably in part by virtue of their own heritages, make the character of Pancho Villa still seem authentic. The sombrero feels practical, not something donned for effect; the occassional dips into Spanish dialogue feels casual and natural, not like someone pulled out the one or two phrases they recalled from a high school Spanish class a couple decades ago.

So far, the book is fun and exciting. A freshing change in the real-hero-fighting-the-supernatural genre. Pancho Villa: Monster Hunter #1 debuted last month from AMP Comics, and #2 came out just last week. (I haven't gotten my copy yet, though; hence, I'm only talking about #1 here.) The third and final issue should drop on November 11, so you should have time to get caught up before then! I haven't heard yet if there are any plans to collect the series, so be sure to check it out before it's gone off the shelves.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Existentialism
https://ift.tt/BkMoZ8p

Kleefeld on Comics: Existentialism, Part 2
https://ift.tt/quXD2Um

Kleefeld on Comics: Steve Canyon: The Statue
https://ift.tt/QgpPSEM

Kleefeld on Comics: Radio Silence
https://ift.tt/36Kkcu5

I've been online in varying capacities since around 1986. And one thing that I've learned time and time again is that, by and large, no one cares what I write about. I'd leave questions on active BBSes that sat there unanswered. I could stop flame wars on message boards just by responding to the original post. Over the past tweny years, I have made over 6,000 posts on this blog and they collectively have fewer than 4,000 comments -- and half of those are from me saying thank you for responding at all. (And the vast majority of the remainder of those comments are from a single person -- a good friend who passed away in 2022.)

I don't say that to try to drum up engagement or elicit sympathy or anything; I just provide it as background to say that I looooooong ago stopped writing for anyone but myself. Writing for me isn't really about what I can relay to you, the reader; writing is about putting structure around my thoughts. By having to put together my ideas in sentence and paragraph form, I have to string together whatever's floating around in my head into a cohesive fashion. I'm forced to organize my thoughts and ideas. That I share them with publicly with anyone else is somewhat ancillary.

In fact, in many cases, I'm really only sharing them with myself. I can't tell you the number of times I've searched for something online, only to have one of my posts as a top result. Stuff I'd put in the effort to research previously, but I'd completely forgotten about. Or unique particulars about a story that I found intriguing, but since fell by the wayside for whatever reason(s).

I largely use social media the same way. I've never gotten strong engagement with anything I've posted on any platform, so it acts as microblog of one-liners and short non-comics related pieces that I might want to recall later.

But apparently, I've been doing that wrong.

Certainly not everything, but many of the things I post on social media that I have gotten responses to were criticisms. Not of the content itself -- not that the person thought my opinion was wrong -- but that I didn't post it properly. It's too frequent. Or not frequent enough. It's got the wrong hashtag. Or the right hashtag used incorrectly. It's too spammy... but why don't I promote my material more? Whatever Goldilocks zone social media posts are supposed to be in, I'm always missing it.

I seem to have gotten even more of those comments than usual lately, so I'm going to step back a bit from being online. No blogs, no social media, no attempts at engagment. Now, for anyone who might be thinking, "Fuck them, man! Post how you want!" I will no doubt get back to that -- maybe in a few days, maybe a week, maybe a month... -- but I wanted to post something brief here on the off chance that anyone is wondering why I've gone radio silent. I dunno. Maybe I'll wind up writing a bunch anyway, and have tons of already-completed blogs ready for the rest of the year!

Founded by prospectors in 1859, Idaho Springs, Colorado the center of the region's mining district throughout the late nineteenth century. In 1947, the town of one square mile (with a current population under 2,000) decided to rename a nearby mountain canyon after one Milton Canniff's comic strip characters, Steve Canyon. I can't seem to find a solid reason why; the only explanation I can find at all is a snarky comment about being "awash in post-WWII patriotism."

Two years later, they paid $12,000 to have a ten-foot tall, limestone statue of the character carved for the center of town. It was officially dedicated on July 8, 1950 and Milton Canniff was in attendance, although he had had nothing to do with the statue's inception and/or creation. Also in attendance were Walter W. Johnson, (Governor, Colorado), L.P. Giles (Mayor, Idaho Springs), William Riley (President, Indiana Limestone Company), and Vernon Clark (U.S. Treasury Deptartment). The plaque mounted on the base reads, in part, "The United States Treasury salutes Steve Canyon and through him, all American cartoon characters who serve the Nation."

In 1959, Canniff visited the state one more time along with Dean Fredericks, who portrayed Steve Canyon on the television show of the same name. Presumably, this was done as a marketing push for the show, which debuted in late 1958.

The statue appears to be maintained well; however, I can't find any reference to it at all on Idaho Springs' web site. Which suggests that perhaps it's not as significant a point of pride now as it used to be. Which isn't surprising given that the strip ended in 1988 when Canniff died. The statue was moved a tenth of a mile up the road to a park in 2017, but still stands.

The curious notion about free will, here in the real world, is that it is ultimately a question of faith. There simply is no way I can prove or disprove that my actions were or weren't preordained in some fashion. Even if I try to continue making last second decisions of, for example, what flavor milkshake to get, there's no way I can show that I wasn't always going to make that exact decision at that exact time. Regardless of what I normally would do, and regardless of what I felt at the exact moment of making the decision, it still amounts to a matter of whether or not I believe that I was fully in control of that decision. Was I making that decision for myself, or was some unseen force guiding my thought processes for some reason?

The problem we have, as mere mortals, is a lack of omniscience. We simply can't know anything beyond our immediate realm of experience. Even our learning from the experience of others is something that we have to undertake ourselves, whether by reading or listening or some other method of knowledge transfer. And even then, there's still the matter of interpretation -- the original experience is recounted to us in some manner by someone(s) who will invariably leave out some level of detail and we, in the process of absorbing the information, will process and filter it based on our own personal experiences. We cannot know, with any accuracy, what it's like to walk on the moon unless we actually go there ourselves.

In comics, however, many characters are granted a level of omniscience that is impossible for us to truly fathom. There's a certainty in Ignatz's or Sluggo's or She-Hulk's knowledge that they are, at the end of the day, drawings on a piece of paper. We don't have that luxury. For as much as you may know that God exists or doesn't, your certainty in that "fact" is just an act of faith. We don't have the actual knowledge because our creator/s (if indeed we even have them in the larger context -- I'm not talking about your parents here) have not imbued us with it in the way Windsor McCay might have done with Little Nemo. The act of creating a character -- a paper doll to pick up on Roeg's metaphor -- gives the creator the right to implant as much or as little knowledge into him/her as is appropriate. Reed Richards is a genius because Stan Lee said he was. Dr. Manhattan was omniscient because Alan Moore wanted him to be.

This, of course, can lead to what is considered bad writing. Can you imagine the uproar among fans if, for example, Commissioner Gordon asked Batman about how Alfred the butler was doing? The relationship between Batman and Alfred is one that Gordon should have no knowledge of because his character has never been given that information within the context of continuity. But a writer, being the unseen force behind that exchange, does have omniscience of that world and can give that specialized piece of knowledge to any character at any time. It wouldn't make sense within how the story is presented, in all likelihood, but it's still the creator's prerogative.

Of course, there's the rub. For any story that presents free will and/or existentialism as "correct" the characters in the story are following a prescribed destiny. For any knowledge that a character might possess about the nature of free will -- for that matter, any knowledge the character possesses at all -- they are inherently bound by the will of their creator(s). The paper dolls simply cannot exist, much less have any meaning, without someone to create them. You can say Kang chose to defy Destiny itself in Avengers Forever but Kang really didn't have any say in the matter; his course of actions were laid down by writers Kurt Busiek and Roger Stern. "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Where does that leave us? That free will simply cannot exist because nothing we humans create is capable of it? Of course not. As noted earlier, we humans are stuck with limitations that make us decidedly less than all-powerful. Once upon a time, we couldn't create apples that tasted like grapes, either, but look where we are now. Who's to say that creating independent, free will characters is that far off? Wasn't that part of the reason why Phineas Horton created the original Human Torch? Why Noonien Soong created Data? Why Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai created HAL 9000?

(As a curious aside, all those characters I just cited were used, in part, to explore the very notion of self. Is a being's own quest for life's meaning sufficient to consider it "alive"? Is life and a sense of self strictly limited to biological organisms? Does the origin of one's existence truly impact whether or not one can have free will?)

Man's quest for life's meaning is, for all intents and purposes, perpetual. Every day, we wake up and try to muddle our way through life, acting on a nearly infinite number of judgment calls. The next day, we do the same thing. Comics -- and, indeed, any media -- can show us possible alternatives that other people have considered; they can pass along messages about what other people think life means. They can go so far as to give us a taste of omniscience, seeing events through the eyes of any number of characters. But, again, the ultimate irony of the situation is that the very mouthpieces that we see as proponents of self-direction and choice are they themselves shackled to the will of others.

For as long as I can recall thinking about such things, I've been a big proponent of free will. The notion that I, and I alone, control my actions and that any consequences of those actions are mine to bear. As near as I can determine, it was this firm belief in free will that has guided/directed my thinking towards religion, politics, entertainment, and just about everything else. After college, I began mentally exploring that notion further and have come to think of myself as something of an existentialist. While there are any number of variations of existentialist philosophy, the basic premise takes free will a step further by stating that the meaning(s) of our very existence is entirely up to the individual.

I seem to recall seeing/reading an article some years back discussing Krazy Kat in an existentialist (instead of the more typical surrealist) light, but I can't seem to find that at the moment. This particular strip (from December 25, 1919) speaks directly to the two characters' differing approaches to what is or isn't their respective realities. But it's certainly not the only comic that brings up the notion of existentialism.

Time travel is a notion that comes up frequently in comics -- as well as other media, but I'm talking comics here. The two primary notions that tend to come up in some fashion are A) that anything a character does in his/her past is in fact already a part of his/her part and s/he was destined to carry out those actions, and B) history is mutable and subject to change -- a media-centric shortcut to explaining that position is Back to the Future. (There are variations on these ideas, obviously, with alternate timelines and such, but they still tend to generally follow one of those two premises.) It should be needless to say that I tend to favor stories that dismiss the notion of destiny or inevitability. Because of my fairly strong feelings on the matter, I tend to approach stories involving time travel with some trepidation, especially with properties that haven't previously taken a definitive stance on the issue of time travel. Both DC and marvel have wavered back and forth on the issue repeatedly, seemingly dependent on the whims of the writer and/or editor of any particular story.

That said, I can still appreciate a time travel story that holds to the notion of determinism, if it's done well. Steve Englehart, for example, did a fine job in West Coast Avengers #17-24. Technically, it holds together extremely well, keeping multiple storylines/timelines straight and still tying into established continuity on any number of points. I don't agree with the basic premise, but I have to admire the skill with which the story was executed. By contrast, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's Knights 4 #15-17 is fraught with plot holes stemming precisely from the time travel aspects of the story, and I disliked that story despite his holding up the notion of free will and some excellent artwork by Jim Muniz.

But that's only an obvious way to see existentialism in comics. Another issue that stands out for me is one that was never published: Captain America #14 by Mark Waid and Andy Kubert. The issue, as written by Waid, recounts a history of the Red Skull -- as told by the Red Skull himself. (Editor Bob Harras re-wrote much of the script before it was published, putting Red Skull in a more typical -- and safe -- role as the bad guy. I wrote about this all in more detail here.) The original narrative is insightful because it is that of a character who believes in what he himself is doing, regardless of the fact that most people would consider those actions "evil." He doesn't consider his actions anything less than justified because of his own goals and that Captain America is an obstacle to them. Although the Skull's thoughts themselves don't necessarily relay an existentialist message, the very notion that his perception of events differs from the title's usual protagonist speaks to the idea that each man is creating a reality based on his own thoughts and opinions.

I think that one of the (subconscious) reasons I took to the Fantastic Four early was that it readily exposed the difference in approaches with Mr. Fantastic and Dr. Doom. Doom's very character is based in large part on revenge against Reed Richards for a perceived slight back in college. Reed, by contrast, always takes the opinion that the error was Doom's himself and he has never acknowledged that fact -- Doom is, in effect, absolving himself of any responsibility for his situation. The difference in characters are further highlighted by Reed repeatedly taking responsibility for the accident that caused his friends' conditions -- most notably that of his best friend, Ben Grimm. And similarly, Ben does NOT blame Reed for his own state (at least, he didn't by the time I started reading the book; the first dozen or so issues, Ben very clearly and adamantly did blame Reed). Ben has accepted that he elected to take on the risk of piloting that fateful space flight, fully knowing that there was a great amount of risk. The Fantastic Four (the good guys) believe they created themselves, while Dr. Doom (the bad guy) believes he was created by others.

Now whether or not you agree with me on how much responsibility we have for our own actions is immaterial here. But I think it's an especially intriguing notion to examine how some of my core belief system ties in to what I like to read. As I write this, I am the product of every decision I've ever made, and so I'm left to wonder who would I be if I had made different choices? Would I have taken to the Fantastic Four -- or, indeed, comics in general -- if I was more determinist in nature? Would I be reacting differently to events in my personal life the way I am? Would I even need to be dealing with the same things with a different outlook? Certainly interesting, if ultimately unanswerable, questions.

But let me put the question to you: how do your personal philosophies impact your choice of comics reading? I don't expect answers here, mind you -- I can only address the issue now because of the insane amount of navel-gazing I've done on the topic -- but it might be something worth examining for your own personal edification.

Self-actualization through comic books! Who knew?