Mister Gone
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"Mr. Gone" is also a 1980s record by jazz fusion ensemble Weather Report.
Mr. Gone is a fictional character in Sam Keith and William Messner-Loebs' comic book series The Maxx. In the short-lived animated series based upon the comic book, he was voiced by Barry Stigler.
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[edit] Character overview
Mr. Gone is shrouded in mystery, and his history and identity are never fully revealed until very late in the series. He is introduced into the series as a serial killer of young women who has supernatural powers and abilities: 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.
[edit] Character history
As revealed in issue #26, Mr. Gone was born Artemus Pender. His early life was extremely traumatic: He was emotionally and sexually abused as a child by his aunt as a form of "punishment," instilling in him lifelong guilt and hatred of women. His first wife, meanwhile, was a drug addict who killed their son before dying of an overdose. He remarried, but it was a brief and dysfunctional union; he abused his wife as a form of revenge for the way his aunt and first wife treated him. After she left him, he began a rape and murder spree that lasted for many years.
He discovered the Outback on a government-funded trip to Australia to study ancient aboriginal religions. There, he learned many forms of magic and used the Outback to control and manipulate people's minds for his own twisted amusement.
[edit] Role in the comics
The Outback is known only to three other characters in the series. He has past relationships with two of these characters, Julie and Sarah, 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. With every call, Julie hangs up and dismisses the messages as the product of a diseased mind.
In issue #2, Mr. Gone kidnaps Julie, ties her up, and begins to tell her about her past and her Outback. Thinking that he will kill her, Julie overpowers and beheads him. While his corporeal form dies, however, his malignant spirit lives on through his telepathic abilities and his connection to the Outback. It is mostly 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.
Issue #10 reveals that Mr. Gone is an old family friend to Julie, who is disturbed by her ability to see into a world she isn't sure is real; 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 inadvertently 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 was granted the power to see and enter the dimension. Years later, the man, now claiming to be a superhero called the Maxx, befriended Julie; she does not know he is the same man she thought she had killed.
His relationship with Julie is one of the focal points of the series. He taunts her with vague, riddling information about her past and connection to the Outback, designed as much to help her as torture her; he is both amused by her suffering and genuinely concerned for her welfare. Everytime he comes close to revealing the painful truth, however, she becomes enraged and destroys his physical form.
Mr. Gone has a teenage daughter named Sarah, a product of his third marriage. She believes her father had killed himself 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.
Seeing his daughter again awakens in him long-dormant feelings, however, and he begins trying to help guide her through her Outback and find her spirit animal, a horse. When he finally contacts her and reveals his true identity, however, she recoils from him in horror, and severs all ties between them.
With help from the Isz, Mr. Gone returns to life, and retrieves and reattaches his head. He then disappears to hide from the police, contenting himself with occasionally communicating with Sarah and Julie telepathically (by this point, Maxx has escaped "reality" and gone to live permanently in the Outback.) Eventually, however, Julie left the city to confront her own personal demons, and Sarah disavowed any relationship (psychic or otherwise) to her father.
[edit] Character evolution
In issue #21, set in 2005, Sarah, now an adult, finds him again 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. She learns of his abuse-ridden childhood, the origins of his connection to the Outback, and of his reasons for leaving his family; despite herself, Sarah begins to understand and forgive her father.
