"Outback" Creatures from THE MAXX

Written by Jonathan Wojcik



I was exactly ten years old when Sam Kieth first published The Maxx in 1993, during a period when comic books were seeing a whole new surge of popularity and experimentation, not that I'd have really known that yet. I was an unbelievably wimpy ten year old, avoiding any media with more violence or sexuality than Power Rangers at the time, even with my own mother encouraging me to lighten up. And for whatever reason, I didn't really get into comic books at all, regardless of their appropriate demographic. I did, however, collect toys, read the occasional magazine about comic books, and had a few friends who more actively followed things as hardcore as McFarlane's Spawn.



Through these second-hand puzzle pieces, I actually became fascinated already with what I knew of The Maxx and his world, but I really haven't empathized just how wimpy we're talking about here, because I vividly recall my ten-year-old self actively daydreaming that maybe they would someday come out with a more kid-friendly Maxx in the same way that Swamp Thing got his own Saturday Morning treatment. Yeah. I missed out on a lot as a kid...and all on purpose.





Once I got the internet, I recall searching high and low for more information and artwork from The Maxx, and was thankful for the existence of a dedicated fan-made "bestiary" page, though only a handful of its entries came with any images, and with only a handful of pixels between them. I did eventually catch up with the fantastic Mtv animated series, somewhere around my mid-teens, and finally got around to reading the comic series from start to finish a decade or so before I'm writing this page, which I'm sad to say I had planned on for years before the news that, in early 2026, Kieth had passed away.

Whether you're already familiar with The Maxx, you have no idea what it's actually about other than a purple guy, or you're even another wimpy kid googling things a bit too Edgy for your delicate tastes, I hope you enjoy my own "outback bestiary," after checking out the very same one I read back in my teens, of course, because holy shit, that's still up! That's older than THIS website!

THE MAXX Himself

The central thrust of The Maxx is that everyone on Earth has their own personal dream realm, colloquially referred to in the series as one's "Outback," though this is due to a childhood misunderstanding by the series protagonist, Julie Winters, who used to imagine herself as a beautiful "Leopard Queen" in a fantastical exaggeration of Australia. One day, the border between Julie's own Outback and the real world is breached, the moment she hits a homeless man in her car and tries to hide the "body" under trash. One of these discarded objects, a purple lampshade, had actually originated from her Outback and attached itself to the man's face, becoming a strange living mask and costume that entwined his fate with the subconscious spirit-world of a woman he barely knew, but with whom he would soon develop a deeply dysfunctional codependent friendship.



...If you're one of those who didn't know the plot of this series until reading this page, you probably didn't expect almost any single word of that paragraph, and I'm delighted to tell you that The Maxx actually gets quite a bit stranger than that.

Every Outback supposedly has a "Maxx," too; a guardian spirit typically represented as an animal of personal significance to the associated mind. In Julie's case, this entity is associated with a horrifically mangled but still-living rabbit she attempted to rescue, and hide in her room, when she was far too young to understand what she was doing. When her parents found it, they were forced to put it out of its misery, and the form of Julie's Maxx coalesced in that instant. This "rabbit," or Brer Lapin, is devoted utterly to protecting its "queen" to the point of obsessive worship, or at least, that's the end result of the entity's will forcing itself into the mind of one sad, lonesome middle aged man, who neither remembers his original identity nor even cares to wonder. As his perception of reality oscillates uncontrollably between Julie's Outback and the city streets, the only thing he cares about is being her hero...and being welcome enough to crash on her couch to watch TV.

Needless to say, The Maxx is one of the weirdest characters ever loosely marketed as a spandex-wearing vigilante superhero, which he really really isn't, but that's just how you got people to try more new comic books in 1993. This roundish, purple chunk of a man with giant feet, claws for middle fingers and huge, jutting row of upper teeth - with no apparent lower jaw - is an unforgettable visual that barely looks like a human, and it most certainly shouldn't look as much like a "rabbit" as it somehow, inexplicably, actually kind of does? Truly bold of Kieth to pull that off on a character without any visible ears at all.

THE WHITE ISZ (singular: "IS")

I fell in love with this simple yet distinctive design at first sight, and it's still one of my favorite little critters from any media. Only able to say "MEEP,", an "Is" has a round, soft, gelatinous head, a simple squashed orb devoid of facial features other than a wide, usually grinning mouth packed full of thin Joker-esque teeth. Two thin, boneless arms project from either side of the head, ending with comical bulb-fingered hands. The "body," or possibly "leg," is a soft tubular trunk ending in two oversized, humanlike feet, and the whole creature is as springy and elastic as a rubber hose cartoon character.

The eternal bane of The Maxx (and basically everyone else who gets caught up in this nonsense), Isz infest the Outback in such enormous numbers that we see what may as well be udulating seas and tidal waves of them, with Kieth stating at one point that they represent all the little everyday irritations and worries of day to day life. Things that might seem trivial individually, but can too easily build until they eat you alive.

The "good" news, on paper, is that Isz are "herbivores" in their natural Outback environment, and their violence comes across more as ignorant, playful mischief. The bad news is that every living thing in an Outback is, for some reason, made out of "vegetable matter" regardless of appearances, and swarming Isz may attempt to eat a meat-based visitor just because they don't know the difference...or maybe because your body in the Outback has to manifest as plant material as well? This isn't really clarified, and ultimately doesn't matter.

THE BLACK ISZ

The main antagonist of the series, for most of it at least, is an enigmatic figure who calls himself Mr. Gone, and is one of the reasons I didn't feel like I should be reading (or watching) when I was just a first-grader. Seen here during his stint as a decomposing severed head, Mr. Gone is a warlock-like mystic, a brutal serial killer and a sexual predator driven by a lust for holding any conceivable power over others, a mad obsession with the nature of the Outback, a sadistic hatred of virtually everyone and especially, especially a sadistic hatred of all women. We won't get into his backstory here, which takes a lot of complex, uncomfortable, sometimes confusing turns in a comic series that, it should be mentioned, was ultimately rushed into a premature and still divisive finale.

Mr. Gone is however the firmest proof we have that the existence of the Outback isn't just a delusion of Julie or Maxx, because he has his own mysterious means of drawing Isz into the physical world as his obedient minions. Literally yanked from a fantasy land to face a more bitter reality, the transition taints them an inky blue-black, makes their teeth even sharper and hones their chubby fingers into claws. They now crave the taste of raw flesh, have no fear of death or injury, and thrill at any opportunity to inflict unnecessary pain or destruction. Misery and death are hilarious to corrupted Isz, who carry out Gone's orders to kidnap, torture and maim for no known reason other than malevolent glee.

More alarmingly, most humans are automatically fooled by a Black Is wearing anything as a "disguise." Give an Is no more than a police hat, and everyone will see a policeman for as long as the hat stays on. The illusion can even speak, or at least, witnesses imagine it to be speaking...though still interspersed with inappropriate giggles and the occasional meep.

...Isz really are perfect designs though, aren't they? Even stripped of their extremely cool context and meaning, they feel as visually iconic as a creature ever gets. Almost as simple as a stick figure, barely more than a ball with limbs, but arranged in just such an odd way that there's truly nothing else quite like them. Cute, menacing, comical and alien, all at once. I feel like I've been chasing that formula with designs of my own ever since, always trying to come up with "my" Isz for my own fiction. Maybe the closest I've ever gotten are the Wutzat I added to my Mortasheen setting, which don't really come close to the flawless recipe of the Isz, but I did find them almost as fun to doodle in various poses:



THE OUTBACK SLUG (or "GBH'TYT)

A number of other "animals" (plants?) inhabit Julie's Outback, though none are as useful to our villain as the Isz, or anywhere near as dangerous in either world. The Outback Slug, shown only once, is an adorably bulbous little green gastropod that can leap incredibly high when startled, but tends to burst and die instantly when it lands. This isn't as terrible a strategy as it sounds, of course; like any real animal that tastes bad or carries a defensive poison, predators would eventually learn to leave it be if they find the splattered remains either too unappetizing as a meal or just too annoying to locate after a far enough leap. Its "stupidity" may very well be why it isn't really eaten by anything.

THE GREAT NORTHERN CRABBIT

A cartoonish rabbit with the pincers and eyestalks of a crab, Crabbits are apparently a favorite food of Isz. We even see some black Isz in the real world using a makeshift catapult to launch a crabbit into a wall for laughs, which is also our first sign that other creatures can make the same journey but don't automatically "corrupt" in the same fashion.

You would expect these to be more important to the Maxx and Julie, but they remain only a minor background creature when acknowledged at all. To be fair, it does seem like there's some degree of rabbit influence in most Outback creatures. Even the Isz vaguely give that impression; if you saw anything small and white hopping in and out of your peripheral vision, you would definitely assume it was some sort of lagomorph.

THE SEUSSODON

We never learn anything about this species, and we only see it silently lounging or loping about various shots of the Outback's vast grasslands, but I love its alien design. An ostrich-like body plan with a whiplike tail, a compact body, two legs with pawed feet, a looong spindly neck, and nothing but a single huge, glassy orb or eyeball for a head, surrounded by a comical shock of scraggly, drooping hair. They appear to be furred, with a giraffe-like color pattern, and lack any obvious mouth or other orifices. Maybe they just photosynthesize? A very cool design overall, one you might expect to see more in a work of speculative xenobiology than a fantasy realm.

THE AIR WHALE

Speaking of fantasy realms, they really just come in two kinds: the ones that have whales in the sky, and the ones that don't. Kieth's air whales are pretty straightforward, exactly resembling Earthly whales, and their presence seems is analagous to blimps or other aircraft when The Maxx is stuck between perceptions. We also get to see something like a deep-sea whalefall when the Maxx comes upon an enormous air whale skeleton, still gnawed upon by maggot-like masses of Isz!

THE DICANT

The original "bestiary of Outback Denizens" describes the Dicant as "something like a mobile venus fly-trap." That sounded especially interesting to me, and was the creature I most wanted to see for at least a couple years before I actually found the relevant issue. As it turned out, the Dicant looks little like a mobile plant and more like a stretchy cartoon tiger with no eyes, ears or nose. I remember being a little disappointed by this at the time, but in retrospect, the convergence of this "plant" with a big cat is pretty interesting, as are its subtle similarities to the anatomy of the Isz, the Seussadon and maybe even the Outback Slug. It may just be Kieth drawing what he finds fun to draw over and over, but it paints the suggestion of a logical taxonomy within what is otherwise an absurd dream realm.

As a plant-based creature with no vital organs, the only way to permanently kill a Dicant is evidently to pull it inside out and hurl it into the Outback's ocean.

MALACHI THE STALKER

Malachi is a giant, hundreds of feet tall, though Julie and the Maxx encounter him while they, too, are inexplicably massive, and Julie unceremoniously kills this widely feared "stalker" in one shot with a spear. He's a gangly, pot-bellied something or other, with a head reminiscent of an earless donkey with more exaggerated buck teeth. There's definitely a distorted rabbit-like quality to him, too.

THE DAVES

Julie's isn't the only Outback we ever get a glimpse of; one issue takes us right into the Maxx's own mind, or at least that of the human trapped beneath the mask. His Outback is a more crudely drawn cartoon-like world, featuring character designs by friend of Sam Kieth, David Feiss, who also created Cartoon Network's Cow & Chicken! There, Maxx is pursued by a horde of little monsters who are "all named Dave," somewhat resembling grouchy frogs with sharp teeth, clearly paralleling the Isz.

THE EMWITTABWAY

Maxx briefly encounters and flees from these so-called "walking mountains," burly humanoids with ears like flaring fish-fins. All we know is exactly what Maxx tells us on this single page, that their job is to watch over fields of growing Isz. There's mention of "The Seedbringers," possibly another species that actually spreads Is "seeds," and something called a festermole that feeds on Isz before they "ripen!"

THE DIRE FROGS

These bird-winged frogs apparently hibernate in mud for great lengths of time, but their habitat is seen buried under layers and countless Is skulls until they're freed by a storm of "acid lava," spoken of as if this is all part of a repeating cycle.

THE HOOLY

Eventually, the same acid that unleashes the frogs exposes The Hooly, a unique giant creature that apparently slumbered for a "billion years" in Outback-time. Described as a benevolent spirit, she unfortunately awakens in a violent mood the Maxx blames on Mr. Gone.

This is another design that strongly stood out to me, as one of the few with an accompanying image on the old digital bestiary. Hooly has a fat humanlike body with chunky, beefy arms, gigantic club feet on stick-thin legs, and a long tapering neck with a simple flattened pad for a head, possessing only a pair of nostrils. I remember sketching Hooly over and over when I saw her, and she's still just too fun to try and draw. A design comprised entirely of fun, satisfying shapes I think my mind still comes back to when I draw my own creatures.

THE BANANA SLUG

Later in the series, focus shifts away from Julie Winters to a teenage girl named Sarah, whose self-loathing is even more understandable than your average teen when we learn that her absentee father is none other than Mr. Gone. This is where the series starts to get even odder, some would say convoluted, as we jump fresh from the Maxx's encounter with Hooly to a single-page "bonus subplot" about a banana slug, with cute little arms, who escapes from Sarah's outback. The confused, frightened creature is immediately stepped on, deliberately, by a cruel human passerby, but its gooey remains are left by a discarded self-help tape, and this somehow results in the birth of...

IAGO

Replacing Mr. Gone as a main villain for several issues, Iago is a gigantic banana slug with obscenely muscular forearms, a mouthful of Is-like teeth and a long, trailing tail. Obviously a monstrous slug of any kind, let alone a banana slug, was another concept I fell in love with as soon as I caught wind of it. Still well before I dared peek at an actual page of such a scandalous work, but well worth the wait, because he's every bit as senselessly demented as you could expect from the hybrid manifestation of a teenager's rage, a mollusk's dying terror and a cassette full of feel-good psychobabble. His motivation is only to "help," but his idea of "helping" is to track down random people on his rather lengthy hit list, gruesomely dismember them, and feed their fingers to something that lurks in the water under a local pier...all while spouting an endless barrage of new-agey therapy-speak

I did, however, mention that The Maxx reaches a rushed conclusion. A dream-version of Iago is encountered and abruptly destroyed in a "wonderland"-themed Outback visit, but nothing in The Maxx ever seems to die in one world just because it died in the other, and the plotline appears to be dropped with no clear resolution as the series wanders elsewhere. I guess that means he's still out there, still pulling people apart while he asks them about their feelings. Good for him! And maybe this also means that he's still feeding fingers and toes to...

THE EXPLODING FAIRIES

These, too, are escapees from Sarah's Outback, but it's never clarified exactly when, how or why. All we know is that they dwell underwater, and Iago feeds them body parts like an old man feeds ducks. The bright pink "fairies" have heads like Isz, but with lumps of flesh evocative of eyes, pink "hair bows" growing directly from their scalps, and frilly little bodies as if they're wearing dresses. Besides the many weird-looking baby birds and rodents in my various nature books, I think it may have been these creatures specifically that gave me my love of embryonic, grown-over eyeballs in creature design.

Sarah's entire Outback has "breathable water" in place of air, so when brought to our world, the fairies seek a liquid environment. If they're out of water long enough to dry out completely, they uncontrollably float into the air before popping like balloons. Hence the name, and hence their most memorable moment in the series, when Sarah has to keep spritzing them with water while Maxx - who is also a horse guy, for the time being, long story - cuts them open to collect forensic evidence.

THE "FOOTBALL"

An important plot device to the series finale involves a single giant-sized Is...at least from Julie's perspective. To Sarah, it's a giant exploding fairy, to Maxx it's most likely an oversized "Dave," and to a young boy who's identity would be a spoiler, it resembles something like an armless Is with clawed feet and a football for a head, lacking arms or eyes but with the football stitching as its "mouth." We see it only for this single panel, but it happens to be the very, very last new Outback Creature ever shown in Maxx media. A bittersweet realization, especially now that Sam Kieth is no longer here. We don't know that he ever would have returned to the series and explored any more of the setting, no, but now we know that it can't happen. One panel of one "football with feet" will forever remain the last glimpse into Outback ecology he left us off with, but at least it stands as confirmation that everybody probably has an Outback, and everyone's Outback has its own unique ISZ.

Based on the Isz, the Daves, the Fairies and the Footballs, it's hard not to wonder what your own little blobby anxiety-ghouls might look like.

Looking at all these designs and concepts again, I realize what a bigger influence they were on my tastes in fiction, worldbuilding and character design than I ever really remembered, and still all going back to before I even actually experienced any version of this story. There are still things about that story that I'm not sure I mesh with (...he gets a character redemption arc?!) but I really regret not making a page like this years ago, when this website was newer, and still not as much as I regret the fact that I never once left a message or comment thanking Sam Kieth while he was still alive, something I realize I seldom do with any artists at all. I don't want to be annoying, you know? They all must hear it a hundred times a day, right? But, I don't know, even if they do, maybe they don't all always get sick of it? You have to give them space to breathe and all, but you never know if a nice word or two still means something...even the hundredth time that day.



WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT THIS SITE!