The Maxx
A purple-clad hero who is a homeless man in the real world and the Leopard Queen's protector in another, with much of the animation drawn straight from Sam Kieth's comic panels. MTV aired it in 1995 under its Oddities label, in 13 short episodes.
The Maxx began as a comic book. Sam Kieth created it in 1993, the title character first appeared in Darker Image #1 that March, and Image Comics published the series monthly until 1998, for 35 issues. Its hero wears purple and lives in two worlds. In the real one he is a homeless man living in a box, and a freelance social worker named Julie Winters often bails him out of jail. In the other, an alternate reality called the Outback, he is the powerful protector of the Leopard Queen, who is Julie, though she doesn't know the place exists. The villain, Mr. Gone, has access to both, and the Outback's main predators are creatures called the Isz.
MTV adapted it in 1995 under its Oddities label, which had already aired Eric Fogel's The Head. The Maxx ran from April to June of that year in 13 episodes of 11 to 13 minutes each. It was produced by MTV Animation and Rough Draft Studios and directed by Gregg Vanzo, with Michael Haley as the voice of the Maxx and Glynnis Talken as Julie. The series covered the character's Darker Image debut and the first eleven issues of the regular comic. Much of the animation was based directly on Kieth's panels, and the style kept changing. Characters drawn in detail in one scene became simplified cartoons in the next, and computer graphics and live-action footage were mixed in with the hand-drawn work.
The complete series came out on VHS in 1996, running about two hours. In 2009 it was available to stream on MTV.com, and that December it arrived on DVD through Amazon's manufacture-on-demand program, with commentary on every episode and interviews with Kieth and Vanzo. IDW republished the comic from 2013 to 2016 as The Maxx: Maxximized, with new colors, and in 2019 Channing Tatum and Roy Lee announced plans to produce a film.
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