RIP SAM KIETH (1963-2026)
Extremely saddened to hear of the death of Sam Kieth from Bleeding Cool. Sam Kieth's art was monumental to me, and really so many people of my generation: The first time we saw comics art that was recognizably fucked-up and weird, in a way where he also all, instinctively, loved it. Noel Freibert wrote about the experience of seeing his art in issues of Marvel Comics Presents for Bubbles, I had a similar experience to the same issues. I think it can be hard to articulate how we both loved comics but also recognized the art style of them, even the stuff we liked, as "normal" in a way where Kieth's art registered as a deviation that we responded even more strongly to. This is happening to us when we're, in my case, eight years old. Seeing a Marvel Universe trading card Sam Kieth did of Nightcrawler IMMEDIATELY made Nightcrawler my favorite X-Man, just the way Kieth's art registered with that design.
And then after that is The Maxx, which was an Image comic so unlike the other Image comics, and got made into an MTV cartoon, and it was again, so recognizably WEIRD, but on such a huge platform, that it CONNECTED not just with kids getting into comics but kids who were going through adolescence and having a tough time of it, just a part of the same alternative culture as Nine Inch Nails and grunge, and articulating these concerns in a way that registered to the adolescent mind as ART. The letters pages of The Maxx are littered with teenage survivors of sexual assault, writing to Kieth to tell him his work helped them. All these kids, feeling understood by this comic book which is in many ways pretty goofy, a mix of some Frazetta fantasy imagery, a character who's a massive shape, a strong desire to just draw whatever, and then this sort of Jungian processing metaphor trying to make sense of all these impulses.
And he kept going, he kept making work. Zero Girl is in part a processing of another aspect of Kieth's death which is so so sad to me - the wife that survives him, Kathy, after 43 years of marriage (the woman who worked on the letters pages and all the classified ads and personals in the back of The Maxx issues) was a generation OLDER than him, having met him shortly after he graduated from high school. I can't imagine marrying someone that much younger than you, with all the likely subsequent difficulties of sexual incompatibility I'm sure there would've been at many points, and then having to take care of them through an awful-sounding disease and lose them as they die so young. Kieth's series My Inner Bimbo is also partially about the difficulties of such an age gap relationship, and also some gender stuff. My friend James claims he once read an interview with Kieth where Sam basically came out as trans at one point, but the interviewer did not want to process it or get into at all, and just wanted to talk about Batman or whatever, but I don't know where exactly this interview ran or if it even exists. The sense of sympathy and empathy Sam had for women does run as a thread throughout all his work.
And this is all downplaying or avoiding discussing the fact that Sam also penciled the first half-dozen issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, another hugely influential comic book to the youth of the nineties alt-culture, and while Neil has been revealed a huge piece of shit, Sam was not, Sam was dedicating the trade of those issues to everyone in jail. He did some work which afforded him something almost no one in American comics gets - actual money, which presumably is one part of why he was able to not disclose his illness and essentially beg for money publicly. William Messner-Loebs, the scripter of The Maxx, ended up homeless a few years ago, but presumably it is the perennially in-print and generating royalties Preludes And Nocturnes trade (and also maybe getting a cut of profits from Knightfall, the Batman arc he provided some covers for) that was able to take care of him. He was someone who likely knew how beloved he was, and we should all be so lucky. And to me what's great is that such wasn't always the case, you can see in the letters pages to the Aliens miniseries he did people writing in to complain about the cartooniness of his art, which of course work that's so idiosyncratic is going to piss people off. That's what makes it art. We wouldn't have loved it if it were immediately palatable to the squares.
In time I will likely assemble a gallery of some of my favorite images of Sam's. If I don't it will be because I can't, because there are simply too many of them, and that their impact is truly judged by how unlike every other comic around. I know I redrew a cover he did for part 4 of Knightfall as a show flyer probably fifteen years ago. It had stuck with me for so long, that image of Bane squared off against Killer Croc, Robin in the middle, tied up in the sewers. That and the Nightcrawler card: inscribed on my memory. I wish I had torn out and saved the black and white preview art from Zero Girl that ran in Previews, that was also so beautiful to me in a way that the color diminished. I've loved his work for practically my entire life. What a force. Rest in peace, rest in power.
