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I think this is one of a handful of "Must Read" American comic books. If you grew up reading comics, if you fantasized about super powers as a child. If you like having long held preconceptions challenged, and being stolen down a very horrific rabbit hole amidst your own begrudging laughter, then this comic will surely please since it does all those things well. It also serves as a very readable study of postmodernity and nostalgia ... and guano. Imagine if Joseph Campbell and George Lucas were
****1/2
This review is in response to the announcement of Rick Veitch returning to the King Hell Heroica after a 20-year absence. Which stands as an ambitious, five-volume series examining both the comic book industry and the superhero concept. He announced on Monday, that "Boy Maximortal" (Book 2) will be coming out soon. To put it bluntly--comics were a medium born from pornographers, gamblers, smugglers and gangsters. Yet the cradled within their four-colored pages one of the most beautiful concepts
A disappointing mishmash of "superman but dark and edgy", heavily fictionalized events related to the early history of comic books in America, and scatology. The first element has been done better (or at least, coherently), by later authors, the second's righteous fury is an odd bedfellow with the comic's caricatural nature, and the third doesn't really add anything to the milieu other than some low-grade gross-out humour. It's not that I have anything against gross-out jokes, but I have high st...
Not perfect, but definitely ambitious examination of the impact of the concept of "The Superman" and "Superman" on the unconscious of the world. Thus, all aspects of the Superman myth (here "True-Man") are touched on - his creators being screwed over, his impact on comics history in general, Hollywood legends about actors who take the role, Nietzsche's concept that predates the whole thing, the public's reaction, everything. Mixed in with this are lurid and grotesque details (I'm still left wond...
I realize this the more I read Rick Veitch , that his stories tend to veer towards the abstract and transendental. This is no exception. The art of course, his usual standard fare. The story however intermingles many different stories in US history. It helps to know how Superman was created, and the players in the development of the atom bomb. Veitch does include an afterword to this edition which will steer readers to those stories alluded to, if they are not already familiar wiht them.You
I love Veitch's art.
I read this because someone brought it up when "Brightburn" came out. It shares the basic premise: what if Superman turned out to be an evil superhero. "The Maximortal" though is more than that, it is many things at once: a thinly-veiled story of how Superman's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster get screwed by a publisher/mogul similar to Walt Disney by owning the rights to their works and getting filthy rich off it; it is a pointed satire featuring Truman, Oppenheimer, and the Manhattan Proj...
Mixing history with a retelling of the Superman mythology. Veith's Maximortal was not at all what i was expecting and seems to focus more on the curse of superman which refers to a series of misfortunes that have plagued creatives involved in adaptations of Superman over the years. Having said that it's certainly one of the most original takes on Superman i've ever read.
This review originally appeared on my blog, Shared Universe Reviews. Rick Veitch is very underrated in my opinion. For nearly two decades he was at the forefront of comic book experimentation, creator rights and intelligent deconstruction of the superhero myth. Even his comics didn’t exist in a vacuum (nothing does), he played a pretty important part in the development and the deconstruction of superheroes. I won’t really say much more on the matter since I don’t feel I have the appropriate bac...
I liked this a bit more than Brat Pack. The first scene is one of the oddest superhero origin stories I've ever seen, and it doesn't get any less weird from there. There's a mystical guy called El Guano who walks around playing with shit. It also bizarrely weaves in the story of Siegel and Shuster's exploitation by DC, and Oppenheimer, Einstein and the atomic bomb. Also Sherlock Holmes makes a memorable cameo as a beekeeping morphine addict. I like the art a bit better here as well, but it could...
Rick Veitch nos ofrece una laberíntica historia nietzscheneana sobre la creación del Superhéroe, el nacionalismo y la industria del cómic, donde el nihilismo, el "eterno retorno" y, por supuesto, el "Superhombre" ocupan un papel protagonista. Atrapa, confunde y finalmente deja una escalofriante sensación de vacío existencial... Lo recomendaría una y mil veces.
4.5 really
Wow. I'd heard that this was good, but I wasn't expecting it to be THIS good. Part fictionalized biography of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster and part treatise on the relationship between fiction and reality, The Maximortal tackles some pretty out-there themes. It's intelligent, well drawn and offers a powerful (if not entirely uplifting) message about the corruption of ideas, the exploitability of men, and the impermanence of it all. But a truly great idea will never die, Veitch tells us, and thi...
So mad at myself for just now discovering the works of Rick Veitch.
OK now I get it: this is a bizarro-world history of Superman as if he were conceived by his actual creator, Friedrich Nietzsche! (Watch for Fred's cameo as a mustachioed Cossack spit-roasting a mammoth at the beginning.) Blending fantastical weirdness with thinly disguised fact, it's both an indictment of the back-biting comic book industry and a mythical world-historical excursion on Apollonian/Dionysian lines, complete with cameo appearances from Albert Einstein, "Robert Uppenheimer", and Sher...
I just re-read this for the third (?) time. I love the way Veitch combines underground comic sensibilities, meditations on the nature of creativity, superheroes, and b-movie horror movie tropes into something uniquely his own. I don't have much to add that other reviewers haven't already talked about, but people looking for something completely different that the usual comics mainstream would do well to check out Veitch's work, and MAXIMORTAL is a great place to start.
a shit-worshipping, time-bending rumination on the nature of creativity and superheroes and people stepping on each other to get ahead.
This is a somewhat confusing story of a super powered baby coming to Earth (sort of) and being adopted by Earth parents, before being scooped up by the US military. Sound familiar? Of course, it does. A redone origin of a character who might morph into the Superman analogue, True Man.The clever irony here being that Superman is a mythological ideal, while True Man reveals a darker nature to humanity, the yin and yang in concordance, which prevents the better angels of our nature from taking flig...
An extremely bizarre story blending the history of the Superman character with a psychedelic religion and a mad, often juvenile but always passionate philosophy. Quite well written, if extreme in every possible way.