The Maxx

Besides insecure adolescents, the Maxx and Julie, the two principals in artist-creator Kieth and dialogue-writer Messner-Loebs' disorienting superhero parody, are, respectively, client and psychiatric social worker. In both pairs of roles, they fall in and out of the Outback, the desert alternate world that is also, somehow, the Maxx's home. That's where volume 2 of the collected edition of this comic-book masterpiece finds them, though only after a first page on which a dead mugger-rapist the Maxx interrupted in volume 1 [BKL D 1 03] morphs, during an attempted autopsy, into an isz, one of the nearly all-teeth critters from the Outback who harry the Maxx in this world. The Maxx and Julie's adventures are many and mind-boggling thereafter, as are those of the other characters from volume 1 and some newcomers. Perhaps the most important development is Julie's packing up and leaving town, though, as with everything else in The Maxx, it's hard to say.