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Mr. Gone is a fictional character in Sam Kieth and William Messner-Loebs' comic book series The Maxx.

Character overview [link]

Mr. Gone is introduced as a serial killer and rapist of young women with supernatural powers. He is telepathic, can assume other forms, and is apparently immortal. Most importantly, he can enter and control "the Outback," an alternate dimension that resembles prehistoric Australia. The Isz, the Outback's main predators, serve as his henchmen.

He discovers the Outback on a government-funded trip to Australia to study ancient aboriginal religions. There, he learns many forms of magic and uses the Outback to control and manipulate people's minds for his own twisted amusement.

Character history [link]

Role in the comics [link]

The Outback is known only to three other characters in the series. Mr. Gone has past relationships with two of these characters, Julie Winters and Sarah James, and wants to control the third, the Maxx, a homeless man who believes himself to be a superhero. Over the first 13 issues, he enters and manipulates their versions of the Outback (how one sees the Outback is entirely subjective and colored by one's own mental state and past experiences). During his murder spree, he makes several anonymous phone calls to Julie, a freelance social worker, claiming to have killed for her as a form of courtship. Julie hangs up on him every time, dismissing him as an obscene phone caller.

Sarah, meanwhile, is eventually revealed to be Mr. Gone's daughter, the product of his third marriage. She believes her father had committed suicide after going on a shooting rampage at his job. (He had in fact left his family because he feared he would hurt them.) Sarah's mother sends her to Julie for counseling, and the troubled girl eventually befriends her and Maxx. Mr. Gone is delighted, as he can now watch all three of them closer.

In issue #2, Mr. Gone kidnaps Julie, ties her up, and begins to tell her about her past and her Outback. Before he reveals anything, however, Julie overpowers and beheads him. While his corporeal form dies, however, his malignant spirit lives on in the Outback. It is from there that he is able to manipulate and torment Maxx, Sarah, and Julie; he knows everything about the place and their connection to it, while they themselves possess only pieces of information, which in turn lead to more unanswered questions. He takes great pleasure in selectively withholding and revealing this information from them.

The Isz eventually retrieve Gone's severed head and bring it into the real world. Masquerading as a piece of magical clay, he manipulates Sarah into bringing his head into Julie's apartment, where he plans to return to life. He and the Isz hold a mortician hostage and force him to sew the head back onto the body, fastening it with a neck brace. He then manipulates a neighborhood boy into delivering to Sarah a mysterious series of audio tapes that reveal his true identity and shed light on his past.

Issue #10 reveals that Mr. Gone is an old family friend to Julie; as a child, she knew him as "Uncle Artie," a friend of her father's. Only he knew that both Julie and her mother could see the Outback, and that it distressed them both terribly. Years later, Julie was attacked and raped by a hitch-hiker, a trauma that nearly paralyzed her with depression. She snapped out of it when she accidentally struck a homeless man with her car. Mr. Gone, who was watching from the Outback, unintentionally charged a random piece of trash with the energies of the Outback before Julie used the trash to cover up the body. As a result, the victim, a man named Dave, was granted the power to see and enter the dimension. Years later, Dave, now claiming to be a superhero called the Maxx, befriends Julie; she does not know he is the same man she hit with her car.

Mr. Gone taunts Julie with vague, riddling information about her past and connection to the Outback, designed as much to help her as torment her. Every time he comes close to revealing the painful truth, however, she becomes enraged and destroys his physical form.

Seeing his daughter again awakens in him long-dormant feelings, and he begins trying to help guide her through her Outback and find her spirit animal, a horse. When she learns of his true relationship to her, however, she recoils from him in horror, and severs all ties between them.

With help from the Isz, Mr. Gone disappears to hide from the police, contenting himself with occasionally communicating with Sarah and Julie telepathically. In issue #15, he transports his essence into a now-pregnant Julie's bathroom and reveals her true connection to Maxx. Soon afterward, Maxx discovers his true identity, sheds his heroic alter ego, and drifts away.

Character evolution [link]

In issue #21, set in 2005, Sarah, now an adult, tracks Mr. Gone down and contacts him so she can profit from a welfare program that only gives money to poor children with living fathers. He is now married and working as a farmer. She demands information from him about the events of 10 years before.

He explains that he has been through a kind of spiritual transformation, in which he acknowledged his crimes and began to regret the pain he has caused. He pleads for her forgiveness, saying that his entire plan, murders and all, was simply a ploy to get in touch with her; he says he chose the name "Mr. Gone" because he was gone from her life. Disgusted and confused, Sarah rejects him and leaves.

That night, Sarah dreams that the welfare program is a scam concocted by a group of CIA agents who want to use Sarah to find and apprehend Mr. Gone. She dreams further that the CIA agents find and kill him, and that she does nothing to stop it. When she wakes up, she is briefly convinced it was real and that she should try and save him, but changes her mind, reasoning that he doesn't deserve her mercy. It is eventually revealed that, while the assassination attempt really happened, Mr. Gone foiled it and planted the dream in her mind to see whether he could manipulate her. He is sad, but somehow relieved, to know that he can't.

In issue #26, Sarah finds one of his old journals. From the journals and the tapes he had given her years earlier, Sarah discovers that he was born Artemus Pender, and that he was emotionally and sexually abused as a child by his aunt. His first wife was a drug addict who killed their son before dying of an overdose. He remarried, but he abused his wife as a form of revenge for the way his aunt and first wife treated him. After she left him, he adopted his "Mr. Gone" persona, and began his rape and murder spree.

Despite herself, Sarah begins to understand and forgive her father.

Over the next few issues, Gone reappears in the main characters' lives, claiming to have discovered a dimensional wormhole that will erase the events of 10 years before and give them all a chance at a fresh start. Sarah ventures into the wormhole, switching places with a giant Isz. Gone, determined to be reunited with his daughter, makes amends with one of his surviving victims and resolves never to hurt anyone again. Just as he is about to enter the wormhole, however, the CIA agents — one of whom had been the boy Gone had manipulated years earlier — storm in and shoot him dead.

His spiritual form survives, however, and duplicates. His physical form is projected back into the real world as a college professor who befriends the alternate version of Maxx; his spiritual self, meanwhile, is projected into the Outback, where he lives happily ever after with Sarah.

In other media [link]

In the MTV animated series based upon the first 11 issues of the comic book, Mr. Gone was voiced by Barry Stigler.

External links [link]

• Unofficial The Maxx Homepage
• The Maxx's Cardboard Box