Maxwell's Demons was a four-issue miniseries from Vault Comics.

[thanekos]

Issue #1 opened on Maxwell Maas, ten years old.

He stood in another realm against the Leviathan, his loyal creations by his side.

The beast spat at them, and they spat back.

" MAX! " came his father's voice from his home.





Later in his room, his door to other worlds opened from the other side.

" I am First Captain Corvus, first among equals of the science heroes of Lugh! We have been drawn here by the door, and the one who built it.

" Where might I find this miracle maker? "



Corvus explained himself and his people: " We have been known as fire-bringers and death-dealers.

" But we call ourselves explorers and adventurers. And what we call ourselves, little builder, is all that really matters.



Max followed Corvus and his fellows on their exploits.

' [Corvus] pushed me to open the doors inside myself, taught me that if they weren't already there then I had to take a hammer to the walls and make them.

' Until then I didn't realize how small I had been thinking. '



' .. and wrote my name across the earthward face of heaven (or a heaven, anyway). '

Encounters with the Leviathan occurred throughout those adventures.

' The days went along normally. '

One day at home, his father looked up from the TV, hand still wrapped around his beer.

" Goddamnit, what is with the damn flock of crows that's settled around the house?! Bastards have destroyed the yard. "

" Murder. "



Later, Corvus came to Max again: " It is time, little builder. "

" Time for what? "

" The final door. "

Corvus opened Max's door and threw him in.

Max's friends followed: " We're coming, commander!

" Hold on, we're coming! "

They landed somewhere the Leviathan was coming.

" Help me! " Max shouted to Corvus. " I don't have.. I don't have anything. "

" You have everything you need. You only have to take it.

" Take it, Max. "

So it was that Max made a gun from his friends, and shot the Leviathan with it.



(The " dead things " are his friends that he spent.)



Max turned his gaze outwards.



Out of the remains of his friends, he made a way home.



That ending was followed by " Epilogue: Fathers and Sons ", a prologue diving into Max's father, who yelled at his son and then drunkenly brushed it off.



" I sit up at night sometimes, trying to imagine what kind of man he'll be..

" But I can't even imagine what kind of boy he is, sleeping twenty feet away.

" How small everything must look to him, and soft. Just a start, on the road to.. some place better. "

Max's father considered the bottle he was holding.



" I've failed you, and myself, and Max. God help me, how I've failed.

" I can still hear that joyless laugh'a his.

" Guess it's best I never turned out to be much of anything to anybody.

" Seems almost criminal..



As Max brought his new friend to life, his father continued unburdening himself to a picture of his dead wife, Max's mom.



" Most of all, I'm sorry I can't say it while you're awake. "

(Pagecount's 6 and ~3/10ths of 19 from the main story, and 1 and under 3/10ths of 5 from the epilogue.

Writing's Deniz Camp, art's Vittorio Astone, and letters're Aditya Bidikar.)

Comments

[silverhammerman]

I'm excited to see this posted here, having read the whole thing a couple of weeks back and been, frankly, pretty disappointed. I think I might either get more out of this through some discussion or at least get a better handle on why I disliked it beyond my first blush impression of "this isn't nearly so clever as it thinks and most of the individual issues boil down to extended monologues."

As to this issue specifically, I think it's easily the best of the lot, but the whole thing about the Leviathan being a part of him never makes a ton of sense and never gets resolved beyond this. Does everyone have a Leviathan? Has he been adventuring in his own mindscape? What's the deal?

[thanekos]

It reads like Max's been adventuring in a multiverse, and that the Leviathan is unique to him.

" I feel like I've been here before.. " suggests that at some pre-Corvus point in his adventures, he ended up in a position where his thoughts got into the " soft spaces " and made the Leviathan happen.

(Either that, or the Leviathan's existence is non-linear, and that panel with the dark mass forming is it being born - but nothing in the text suggests any non-linearity.)

As for the series overall, it's definitely one that shines more in individual details than as a whole (the sci-fi future in the next issue is very well-rendered).

Part of its lack of apparent overall cleverness might be in the fact that it's one of those non-Big Two comics purposefully evoking Big Two characters - there's those threads on Twitter where the writer discusses how Maxwell Maas, the morally complicated super-genius, is indeed meant to evoke a certain DC Comics morally complicated super-genius with an alliterative name.

[silverhammerman]

Yeah, the relationship between this and Lex Luthor is why I first picked it up, having seen some fans online talking it up as a really clever and inventive pseudo-take on the character. In that regard it actually reminded me quite a bit of the Boom Studios series Translucid which does a similar thing but for Batman, attempting to unravel what kind of deeply damaged individual would 1) become Batman, and 2) have an utterly codependent relationship with his mass murdering nemesis. I didn't love Translucid on the first read either but have warmed to it over time, and I wonder if I'll end up feeling the same way about Maxwell's Demons.

Going in with that understanding of the series might be part of why it never quite clicked for me. I hesitate to put it this way because it's such a shitty way to put down ambition, but the whole endeavor struck me as a bit pretentious in its execution. By the time it got to the final issue and "tic-tac-toe, nine panel grids, genre, makes you think, huh?" I found it hard to really engage with the ideas anymore because I'd been so put off by all of the previous meandering monologues.

Or it could just be as simple as me not liking how Deniz Camp writes. Which isn't, I rush to add, because I don't like *literary* things, but having done a lot of literary criticism it's maybe just not something that I'm looking for from comics.

[cainofdreaming]

Funnily enough this bit at least reminds me of another big brain, whose publisher was acquired by one of the Big Two. Namely Henry Bendix from Wildstorm. Monarchy version in particular where he adventured in the Bleed as a kid, while being mentored by mysterious aliens.