Mister Gone
Encyclopedia
Mr. Gone is a fictional character in Sam Kieth
and William Messner-Loebs
' comic book
series The Maxx
.
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.
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.
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 dimension
al 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.
animated series based upon the first 11 issues of the comic book, Mr. Gone was voiced by Barry Stigler
.
Sam Kieth
Sam Kieth is a New York Times best-selling American comic book writer and illustrator, best known as the creator of The Maxx and Zero Girl.-Comics career:...
and William Messner-Loebs
William Messner-Loebs
William Messner-Loebs is an American comic book writer and artist from Michigan, also known as Bill Loebs and Bill Messner-Loebs...
' comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
series The Maxx
The Maxx
The Maxx is an American comic book series created by Sam Kieth and published originally monthly by Image Comics and now collected in trade paperback collections from DC Comic's Wildstorm imprint. The comic book, which stars a character of the same name, spawned an animated series that aired on the...
.
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 as a serial killerSerial killer
A serial killer, as typically defined, is an individual who has murdered three or more people over a period of more than a month, with down time between the murders, and whose motivation for killing is usually based on psychological gratification...
and rapist
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
of young women with supernatural
Supernatural
The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...
powers: He is telepathic, can assume other forms, and is apparently immortal
Immortality
Immortality is the ability to live forever. It is unknown whether human physical immortality is an achievable condition. Biological forms have inherent limitations which may or may not be able to be overcome through medical interventions or engineering...
. Most importantly, he can enter and control "the Outback," an alternate dimension
Dimension
In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a space or object is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus a line has a dimension of one because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it...
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
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
to study ancient aboriginal
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
religions. There, he learns many forms of magic
Magic (paranormal)
Magic is the claimed art of manipulating aspects of reality either by supernatural means or through knowledge of occult laws unknown to science. It is in contrast to science, in that science does not accept anything not subject to either direct or indirect observation, and subject to logical...
and uses the Outback to control and manipulate people's minds for his own twisted amusement.
Role in the comics
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 homelessHomelessness
Homelessness describes the condition of people without a regular dwelling. People who are homeless are unable or unwilling to acquire and maintain regular, safe, and adequate housing, or lack "fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence." The legal definition of "homeless" varies from country...
man who believes himself to be a superhero
Superhero
A superhero is a type of stock character, possessing "extraordinary or superhuman powers", dedicated to protecting the public. Since the debut of the prototypical superhero Superman in 1938, stories of superheroes — ranging from brief episodic adventures to continuing years-long sagas —...
. 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
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
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
Psychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...
that nearly paralyzed her with depression
Clinical depression
Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
. 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
Totem
A totem is a stipulated ancestor of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe.Totems support larger groups than the individual person. In kinship and descent, if the apical ancestor of a clan is nonhuman, it is called a totem...
, a horse
Horse
The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...
. 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
Alter ego
An alter ego is a second self, which is believe to be distinct from a person's normal or original personality. The term was coined in the early nineteenth century when dissociative identity disorder was first described by psychologists...
, and drifts away.
Character evolution
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
Child sexual abuse
Child sexual abuse is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent uses a child for sexual stimulation. Forms of child sexual abuse include asking or pressuring a child to engage in sexual activities , indecent exposure with intent to gratify their own sexual desires or to...
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
Domestic violence
Domestic violence, also known as domestic abuse, spousal abuse, battering, family violence, and intimate partner violence , is broadly defined as a pattern of abusive behaviors by one or both partners in an intimate relationship such as marriage, dating, family, or cohabitation...
his wife as a form of revenge
Revenge
Revenge is a harmful action against a person or group in response to a grievance, be it real or perceived. It is also called payback, retribution, retaliation or vengeance; it may be characterized, justly or unjustly, as a form of justice.-Function in society:Some societies believe that the...
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 dimension
Dimension
In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a space or object is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus a line has a dimension of one because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it...
al wormhole
Wormhole
In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that would be, fundamentally, a "shortcut" through spacetime. For a simple visual explanation of a wormhole, consider spacetime visualized as a two-dimensional surface. If this surface is folded along a third dimension, it...
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
In the MTVMTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
animated series based upon the first 11 issues of the comic book, Mr. Gone was voiced by Barry Stigler
Barry Stigler
Barry Stigler was an American voice actor. In his anime voice work, he often used the pseudonym Gil Starberry, which is an anagram of his name. Little is known about his personal life, including his cause of death....
.