<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Artist Sam Kieth has had a healthy career in the comics industry, balancing work from Marvel and DC with creator-owned projects like Ojo, Zero Girl and The Maxx, his best-known work due to an animated adaptation on MTV in the mid &amp;#039;90s. We caught up with the illustrator to talk about My Inner Bimbo, a loosely autobiographical work about a middle-aged man who reconciles with his psyche with the help of an apparitional bimbo.  A lot of your work, from The Maxxto My Inner Bimbo takes place inside the human mind. Why is that? &amp;quot;I think it\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s because I think too much. It\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s surprising how many of these stories don\u00E2\u20AC\u2122t start with such a cerebral focus. Often they\u00E2\u20AC\u2122ll start with images, really random and non-linear in thinking and in plot. I\u00E2\u20AC\u2122ll start out with a monster in a drain pipe. I\u00E2\u20AC\u2122ll come back to it years later and asked my friends, \u00E2\u20AC\u02DCWhat if there is this little girl who lost her mother?\u00E2\u20AC\u2122 and they say, \u00E2\u20AC\u02DCNo, don\u00E2\u20AC\u2122t f**k it up. It\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s just perfect as a monster in a drain pipe. Don\u00E2\u20AC\u2122t stick in all that psychological s**t again.\u00E2\u20AC\u2122 Inevitably, I screw it up. A part of me realises I\u00E2\u20AC\u2122m my own worst enemy and going to dilute it, but some people say, \u00E2\u20AC\u02DCOh no, you\u00E2\u20AC\u2122re enriching it. Every once in awhile, the stories get really convoluted and complex, so I go back and do something simpler like Ojo. Then they start to get all complex and convoluted again like Bimbo.&amp;quot; Do you have your own &amp;#039;inner bimbo&amp;#039;? &amp;quot;I think everybody has different aspects of their personality. The more interesting question to me is why would you think, &amp;#039;Well, part of me I&amp;#039;m going to label ineffective, feminine and a bimbo&amp;#039;? Later in the book [the main character] challenges the idea that he would dice himself up into that. A lot of guys will do that. Whether they do it with a part of themselves, or just project [hidden aspects of their personality] onto the women around them. For Lo, all of the misogyny he projects onto the bimbo he\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s really projecting onto himself. When I hear guys talk about women, there\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s always this clue that leads back to how they feel about themselves.&amp;quot;  How do you see the growth of the main character? &amp;quot;I wanted to be careful it wasn\u00E2\u20AC\u2122t turning into growth in a healthy way. I may\u00E2\u20AC\u2122ve been guilty of that, but I didn\u00E2\u20AC\u2122t want him to be an idealised character. He\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s almost morphing into something and we\u00E2\u20AC\u2122re not sure what it is, which is why the story takes such a dark turn. In the original draft the Bimbo was idealised, but it was making me sick. I just didn\u00E2\u20AC\u2122t want the story to take itself too seriously. It\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s a lot more complex than Ojo. In this one, when you have a guy who is looking at a part of himself, you have the potential to be too ponderous, arty and pretentious. The danger is I\u00E2\u20AC\u2122m a bad version of Neil Gaiman.&amp;quot; Would you ever go back to The Maxx? &amp;quot;I don\u00E2\u20AC\u2122t think there\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s any The Maxx to go back to. I\u00E2\u20AC\u2122d like to leave it the way it is. I was in a unique place at the time where I could pull ideas out of my ass and they would actually get credit. With the help of Bill Loebs, I was able to learn what it was like to write, and eventually did so. I was able to shift from just being an artist, to plotting the book, to eventually fumbling my way into learning how to write. I got to make the book better than I could ever imagine. There\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s talk of people wanting to make a Maxx movie and my feeling is, go ahead. Worse case scenario, it\u00E2\u20AC\u2122ll be awful, but maybe it\u00E2\u20AC\u2122ll be good. I feel like I did what I wanted to do with the cartoon. There\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s no movie version of The Maxx, and there is no me coming back to it, because I\u00E2\u20AC\u2122m not the same guy. If I did Maxx now, it would look like Bimbo and people would say, \u00E2\u20AC\u02DCThat\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s not the Maxx I remember.\u00E2\u20AC\u2122&amp;quot;  Finally, what was it like working with Scott Ian on Lobo: Highway to Hell? &amp;quot;I\u00E2\u20AC\u2122d never worked with him before and he wanted to write Lobo because he\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s a huge Lobo fan. There\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s always going to people who look at his celebrity and say, \u00E2\u20AC\u02DCWhy does this guy get a break?\u00E2\u20AC\u2122 I actually think he did a really good job. It\u00E2\u20AC\u2122s funny because I think somebody like that should be writing Lobo instead of somebody like me that thinks everything to death. Lobo is such a spatial character and I tend to over-think everything. I agonize over making school girls in space plausible. I do some good art and I throw some goofy s**t into this one, so people who know me will get it.&amp;quot; Lobo: Highway to Hell (DC) and My Inner Bimbo(Oni Press) are both available now at comic stores everywhere. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/comics/news/a191404/sam-kieth-my-inner-bimbo/>