Pretentious High Schooler Talks About Art : Sam Kieth

Sam Kieth

I am a huge fan of Sam Kieth and his work. I first learned about him from The Maxx which has been described as a deconstruction of the edgy 90s comic book trend of the time. Sam Kieth is a man whose art can range from dream like to wonderfully insane. His way of drawing has a very imaginative and alien feel. Something like Dr. Suess combined with Frank Frazetta and Gerald Scarfe gone mad.This is also seen in his characters who have a very exaggerated and caricature feel to them. Such as The Maxx despite being in a human like setting has very cartoonish proportions or his take on Wolverine being hunched over with hilariously lumpy muscle arms. My personal favorite is his take on Venom having a hilariously massive upper body and a grin that laughs in the face of anatomy.

Born: 1963,(52)
Sam Kieth has been drawing since he was about 8 years old. According to him he drew on 3x5 index cards and made his own little stories. He discovered comics when he was about 12. Even when he got them he never got them in order but found them enjoyable as a child. This eventually lead to him discovering underground comics. Sam Kieth met his future wife at an unusually young age. When he met her he was 15 and she was 30 at the time. They never started dating until he was 18 and moved out. Which was also the time when he started his career in comics.

He was initially a failure as an inker when he worked under Roy Thomas. He got his first professional job when he was an inker to Matt Wagner's Mage and it got bigger when he got to pencil the Sandman book. Sam Kieth got his big break when he was doing Terry Kavanaugh's Wolverine comic. He loved doing it. However his bizarre art style was both a gift and a curse. Because of his controversially different art style many kids wrote letters to him saying they loved the absurdity and embraced the new, or that they hated it and their world is falling from the sky. It got so bad he was walking the edge of being fired, but wasn't because Terry backed him up. Terry was the man who kept him going and had it not been for him Sam's career would've been way different

Sam Kieth's very exaggerated art style has made him very recognizable and very inspiring. One of Sam's best and most works is his comic The Maxx. A comic that is a deconstruction of the gritty and dark comics of the 90s by subverting many tropes and giving the characters more human problems.