Kieth, Sam 1963–

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Kieth, Sam 1963–

PERSONAL:

Born 1963; married.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Albert Moy Original Art, 36-07 162nd St., Flushing, NY 11358.

CAREER:

Film director and comic book author and artist. Marvel Comics, artist for Wolverine/Hulk series; Image Comics, creator of The Maxx series, 1993-98; DC Comics, New York, NY, creator of the Zero Girl and the Four Women series; writer for Popbot, illustrated by Ashley Wood. Director of film Take It to the Limit, New Horizons Home Video, 2000.

WRITINGS:

(Illustrator) William Messner-Loebs, Epicurus the Sage, Piranha Press (New York, NY), Volume One: Visiting Hades, 1989, Volume Two: The Many Loves of Zeus, 1991, published in one volume, WildStorm Productions (Los Angeles, CA), 2003.

(Illustrator) Mark Verheiden, Aliens, Female War, Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1996.

(And illustrator) Zero Girl (graphic novel; collection), DC Comics (La Jolla, CA), 2001.

Four Women (graphic novel; collection), DC Comics/Homage (New York, NY), 2002.

(With Ashley Wood) Dos Fanta: More Art of Ashley Wood, Idea + Design Works (San Diego, CA), 2002.

(With Ashley Wood) Popbot Collection One, Idea + Design Works (San Diego, CA), 2003.

The Maxx, Book One (collection of numbers 1-6), Cliffhanger, 2003.

The Art of Sam Kieth, Idea + Design Works (San Diego, CA), 2003.

(And illustrator, with others) Ojo, Oni Press (Portland, OR), 2005.

Contributor to volumes of collected strips, including The Sandman Presents Thessaly: Witch for Hire, by Bill Willingham, DC Comics (New York, NY), 2005; contributor to comic book series, including Sandman, Venom, Wolverine/Hulk, Peter Parker, and Lucifer.

ADAPTATIONS:

Kieth's The Maxx comic book series was adapted as a cartoon series on MTV; trading cards, toys, and figurines have been adapted from his artwork.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sam Kieth is a comic book author and artist who has contributed to a number of strips in addition to creating several of his own. While freelancing for DC Comics in the late 1980s, he contributed artwork to author Neil Gaiman's popular Sandman and also created his own comics. His popular The Maxx series, which was published from 1993 to 1998, features a down-and-out vagrant who soon suspects that his supposed amnesia actually is a sign that he is from an alien land. When his dreams of mysterious creatures begin to meld with a series of brutal murders near the cityscape he inhabits, Kieth's antihero teams with a social worker friend to solve the crimes. The Maxx was adapted as a television series that aired on MTV in the summer of 1995. Kieth, who has also directed films, has had his artwork collected in the retrospective volume The Art of Sam Kieth, published in 2003.

Kieth began to draw comics as a boy, and after graduating from high school in the early 1980s began penning black-and-white strips and subsequently freelancing for Marvel and DC, illustrating book series and comic-book covers. The Maxx, his first solo comic-book effort, captured a large following, and subsequent series, such as Zero Girl and Four Women, have proved equally popular, showing Kieth to be an engaging, if offbeat, storyteller as well as a talented graphic artist. In 2002 Marvel began publishing Kieth's Wolverine/Hulk comic-book miniseries, a unique project for Kieth because he was able to use two of his favorite comic-book characters in stories of his own creation. As a way of supporting his colleagues in the comic-book industry, Kieth donated the monies gained from the sale of his original artwork for the Wolverine/Hulk books to the Comic Book Legal Defense fund and ACTOR—A Commitment to Our Roots, an organization that supports retired comic-book creators in need.

Kieth's comic-book miniseries Four Women begins as Donna sits with her psychologist, trying to fill in some blank spots in her recent past. As memories are unlocked, Donna recalls a harrowing night when she and three of her friends were assaulted by two men after their car stalled, then exacted a brutal revenge on their attackers.

Commenting on this series in a Suicide Girls interview with Daniel Robert Epstein, Kieth commented that Four Women is "based on something that happened to my wife. A guy did pull a knife on her once. I was trying to take the focus off the book from being about the horror of rape and be more about the horror of how women turn against each other or the question of being loyal to a friend. The trick was how to do that without being sentimental or maudlin."

"Kieth makes the grim tale gripping throughout," noted Booklist contributor Ray Olson. Noting that author/illustrator Kieth's sometimes "photorealistic" technique balances with his more stylized renderings to effectively delineate Donna's memories from her present situation and provide the strip with "dramatic composition," Olson praised the book-length publication of all four installments in "Four Women" as "the graphic novel equivalent of an outstanding Twilight Zone episode."

Kieth told Epstein that he is more interested in the story. "The stories I'm doing now are more creatively fulfilling in terms of me as a writer. But The Maxx was the very first thing I wanted to write. It was the beginning of me doing whatever I want, discovering how well that could go and painting myself into a corner because I was making it up as I went along. So it was creatively fulfilling but I did figure that it is better to know in advance what you want to do."