's Cardboard Box

Questions I Still Have about The Maxx

General questions

What is Mr. Gone's thing with cow bathrooms? (In the letters pages, readers have suggested that the cow may be Artie's spirit animal, but so far this remains merely a reader suggestion.)

Issue 3

Mr. Gone refers to the real world as the "fifth zone." Has somebody (Kieth or Messner-Loebs) been reading Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives?

Issue 4

Maxx says he knew Sara's dad. Is he talking about Artie/Mr. Gone? If so, how does he know Artie/Gone is Sara's dad? Perhaps he knows Artie, but doesn't know that Artie has become Mr. Gone. Perhaps Dave knew Artie before he became the Maxx. What's going on here?

Issue 5

Exactly what is that "scanner" that Mr. Gone is using to spy on Maxx, and why does it produce such an oddly-shaped image?

In the Crappon sequence, are the blue fears all named Dave a reflection of the dark Isz, and is the Crappon a reflection of Mr. Gone? Or are the fears named Dave the equivalent of Isz in Dave's Outback? Maybe the Crappon is a being from Dave's Outback who always tells the truth, like the Pumpkin/Cheshire Cat in Sara's Outback in #28.

What's a Crappon?

Why does the fish die, then turn into a skeleton?

The Crappon mentions a "man with no head" -- is that Mr. Gone? If so, in what way is Maxx's face a figment of Gone's? His rabbit face is a figment of Julie's, and his real-world face isn't a figment at all.

Issue 10

Why does Mr. Gone go to the trouble of having his head sewn back on, if he's only going to continue to rot? (This may be answered in #12-13, which I haven't read.)

Why does the building Julie's father is designing look a lot like the building she's living in now? Is Julie living in one of the buildings her father designed?

Issue 19

Where are Julie's parents now? Mr. Gone talks about them in #10 and #19, but he always talks about them in the past tense. If something happened to them, what was it?

Issue 21

Why are the CIA agents trying to kill Artie? Also, why have they waited until now?

Was the whole thing -- legislation, CIA agents, everything -- just a plan by Artie and/or Gaynor to find out whether Sara still loves Artie?

Issue 22

Why is Iago in the real world killing people? Why Iago? Why now, and not ten years ago, or last year, or next year?

Was Major Rosteval, the CIA agent whose ashes are supposedly in the urn, Sara's grandfather? Or was he a Shriner? Or was he both?

Does Steve really have telekinetic powers, or only occasional flashes of ESP?

Why doesn't Sara believe enough to see Maxx's true face?

What precisely is the extent of Sara's powers? How willing is she to use them?

Issue 24

Why does Iago want to kill Sara? Wouldn't that mean he would cease to exist? Or wouldn't it? Or doesn't he care? Or is that something he wants?

What does moonlight remind Sara of?

Issue 26

Was the aboriginal tribe Artie lived with real, or not? If not, did Artie actually visit his Outback and find them there? Are the eyeless children his equivalent of Isz? Are they eyeless because of his experience with Phred?

Why are the storage bins in that strange "crater-in-the-ground" arrangement? It seems very inefficient. Who built them that way, and why?

Issue 27

Why does Julie ask Dave what's going on inside her Outback? Does he know? Are they still soul-linked?

How is it that Artie just happened to have visited the Outbacks of the adults who had abused his victims? Doesn't that mean they had things stored in the bins? Isn't that a bit unlikely?

Why is it that one minute Dave can't remember Mr. Gone, saying "Mr. Something-Or-Other," and the next minute he's casually calling him "Gone?" Did Artie remind him off-camera? Did he just remember? Or does his memory still come and go, as it used to?

Issue 28

I thought the rubber factory had been built on top of the storage bins. Has it been torn down? If so, why are the bins in exactly the same shape they were in before the factory was built? And why are they seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with no buildings, no nothing, visible as far as the eye can see? The rubber factory was in the middle of a city. What's going on here? The visual is impressive, but it's illogical.

At one point the Princess says the "you should" and "I want" fairies never shut up. Later she says they sometimes sleep. Which is it? Was she exaggerating the first time?

Issue 29

That's it? That's all Maxx had to do? Get Iago back into Sara's Outback, so he could slice 'n' dice him? What about Sara's feelings, the ones that created Iago in the first place? Were they the reason why Artie was trying to help Sara become more comfortable with herself? To try to prevent it from happening again?

Where did Sara go?

Why did Sara's hand explode like that?

Issue 31

Why did the pink fairy pick that particular moment to get gigantic?

What connection does Megan have with Julie? Was she Julie, as Dave thinks? Or, as a reader suggested in the letters pages, was Julie the blonde that Megan got a crush on? Or is she, as Julie says, just someone she once knew?

What was "the event" of 1973, when Megan was 11?

If Megan is Julie, who "spent a whole summer with her grandparents once," according to Dave, then how could an "event" have happened to her three years before that?

What relevance does Megan's story have to the greater story? Again, I'm not knocking it; I liked Megan's story even more than the Flower and the Moose. I'm just wondering whether I'm missing something.

Issue 32

Who was Eddie, and why did Glorie let him get away with taking money?

Was Mac Glorie's father? It's obvious that he at least knew her father; he knew too much about her.

In Glorie's "dream within a flashback," why did Sara look like an Is? Was that really a dream she had at the time, or is this merely the way her memory is reconstructing the dream now?

Was Glorie's boss setting her up for a fall, assigning her to protect the safe? Was he perhaps working with "Eddie?"

What was Glorie's "tell?"

Will this story be continued in #33?

Page maintained by Tom Lee (flint@kiva.net).

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