Origin

Max was born on Sirius IV, then emigrated to Earth as a young child. Zot's mom and dad, one of whom is his sibling, came to Earth later.

Sarah Melpignano and Arthur Dekker, who are romantically connected, go to art school with Max. They are all great friends. Arthur sometimes uses Sarah as the muse or subject for his art, including a painting that Max keeps for many years.

Arthur finds out he has cancer and has to replace parts of his body with cybernetics. As he does, he becomes more emotionally remote and his art becomes more abstract and analytical. However, it also starts to sell for a lot of money.

Sarah breaks up with Arthur due to his emotional state and Max also stops associating with him. It is unclear what happens to Sarah after that but seemingly she dies. Dekko leaves and becomes a super-villain named Dekko.

Zot's parents were part of an underground movement to stop the King of Sirius from starting a war with Earth. They succeeded, but the King had the assassin 9-Jack-9 kill them for it while they were away on a mission. Their son, Zot, didn't learn what happened to them for years. Max also seems to not really know what happened to them, although it seems improbable that he didn't know their political leanings. Despite the fact that Zot is his nephew and has no other living relatives, Max does not take him in, although he visits frequently; Zot is raised by his robot butler, Peabody, in his own house. This leads Zot to have a deep-set complex about his parents, who he thinks abandoned him. Max seems to be weirdly unaware of this; Max didn't know Zot thought his parents abandoned him until Jenny tells him years later.

Max does, however, teach Zot about many fields, helping him become a high-achieving young man. After Zot helped save someone who was drowning, Max outfitted him with technology to make him a superhero--flying boot jets, a blaster, and more. Zot becomes a celebrity.

Creation

Uncle Max was created by Scott McCloud for the first color volume of Zot!, in issue 2.

Major Story Arcs

The Sirius IV Conspiracy

Max lives in an expansive, creatively-designed estate. The house, which he built, mixes multiple forms of architecture from classic Greek to futurist. It has a giant built-in musical organ. Birds (including a penguin) and cats live throughout the house and it is surrounded by gardens that he designed.

Max is very eccentric and highly prefers creativity to conformity, making statements like, "It's so dull around here I've had to resort to adults for company!" Zot is one of his favorite companions. He is a classic "suck the marrow out of life" character, diving into all kinds of pursuits with his extensive energy. He has idiosyncratic musical tastes, including the Siriusian Flute, an important musical instrument from Sirius. He believes "there isn't one type of music that I can't get to like...I can try to make my world grow bigger, or I can let it get smaller--and if I don't do the one then the other's gonna happen in time." He enjoys painting and wrote a book on nursery rhymes.

Max helps Zot predict the appearance of a group of rampaging robots so Zot can stop them. The robots are looking for the Golden Key, which was stolen from Sirius. Zot ends up going to the parallel universe where Jenny lives and brings her and her brother Butch back to his universe.

When the De-Evolutionists turn Butch and some others in to a monkey, Zot is able to reverse the de-evolutionary ray guy to cure almost everyone, but unfortunately the gun breaks before he can turn Butch human again. They decide to see if Max can fix the ray gun, since he is a scientific genius.

He welcomes them and tries to work on a way to help Butch. In the meantime he generally helps Zot out with his attempts to get the Golden Key, which they later learn was stolen by Zot's friend Vic.

Butch complains about Max's tastes in music, leading him to go on a manic exposition about how his musical tastes are "non-wimpy," blasting away on his organ. He is happy to meet Jenny, who he thinks is good for Zot.

Some of Dekko's robots (the same ones Zot tried to stop when he met Jenny) attack Max's house. The friends defeat some of the 'bots but then Dekko shows up with more.

While monologuing to the heroes, Dekko, who is not very mentally stable, sees Max's painting of Sarah. He starts hallucinating that she is talking to him. Ever his moral compass, she tells him to stop his violence. Dekko submits to "her" plea and leaves.

The heroes go to Dekko's base in Antarctica to get the Key back. They split into two groups. Dekko captures Max, Jenny, Butch, and some others. Dekko again begins to hallucinate, this time thinking that Jenny is Sarah. Max has Jenny further this delusion by reminding Dekko of their love, and of his love for nature. These memories frustrate Dekko and eventually break his programming. He has one last sane moment of recognition before Vic turns him off. Vic takes the Key and leaves.

Max and the others follow Vic to Sirius. They hear a crowd play the Siriusan Flute, and Max joins in.

Now that Dekko is captured, there is another reason to find the Key. A conspiracy, comprised of General Schrapp, Grand Inquisitor Luther Von Clokmann, palace advisor Weevis Swimbler, and bureaucrat Sam Twik, want to take over the leadership of the planet and to start a war with Earth.

Their goal is to use the Golden Key and the Doorway at the Edge of the Universe, which are important sacred objects to the people of Sirius. There is a prophecy that someone will use the Key to open the Doorway and then return with a Great Mission for the people of Sirius. The members of the conspiracy intend to use the Key to open the Doorway and then proclaim that the Great Mission is a Holy War on Earth, something they think will unify the populace, which they see as dumb and easy to fool.

The members of the conspiracy kill the King, his son Prince Drufus, and try to kill the Queen. The assassin, 9-Jack-9, tells Zot during their fight that he also killed Zot's parents. This is the first time Zot or Max finds out what happened to them.

Max and some others meet to talk about what they can do to stop the conspiracy. However the conspiracy sends soldiers to capture them, and shoot Peabody. Zot and Jenny save them, and they decide to hide out at the Sacred Cathedral on Shotaro island, run by Father Kimm. It would be blasphemous to attack it, so they are safe there.

Max figures out that there are underwater tunnels that lead outside, so Zot can run sorties against the conspiracy without them knowing. Zot gets the Key and he and Jenny go through the Doorway, where they meet many heroes of Sirius whose spirits have been implanted into robots in order to honor them and allow them to live fuller lives. Zot's parents are among them.

The conspiracy eventually decides to break into the cathedral anyway, and captures Max, Zot, and all the others. However, Butch and the De-Evolutionists counter-attack and free them. After various events, only General Schrapp is left from the conspiracy, but he declares himself the ruler of Sirius.

Max and Zot make a plan to stop him. Zot fights Schrapp and gets him to confess to his crimes while Max, who takes over the fortress's communications center, broadcasts his confessions to the rest of the planet, using Vic's robot remote, Floyd.

The people of Sirius want Zot to be their new leader, but he and Max recognize that they are just misplacing their religious devotion (caused by Zot fulfilling the prophecy of the Doorway). Zot says they should learn to lead themselves. Max does think it would help if Zot at least gives them some guidance now and then.

Max returns Jenny and Butch to their Earth, where Butch reverts to his human form.

Heroes and Villains

Zot fights Bellows, a steampunk mad scientist, and Max films it. Max keeps giving him directions, like move towards or away from the camera. Jenny doesn’t understand how Max and Zot’s friends can be so blasé about Zot being in a fight. They explain that Zot always wins if he’s confident. Later they bring Peabody, who they had turned off so they could have some freedom, back to Max so he can turn him back on.

Zot, Jenny, and Butch visit Max’s house later. Zot explains that Max is always busy. Recently he turned the kitchen into an iguana farm and has been working on both oil painting and t-shirts. Butch is angry that he still turns into a monkey when he’s in their dimension. Max explains that there’s nothing he can do about it, he is only cured when he goes home.

Max is playing with his band, a quintet. He plays sax. The group also includes Sir John Speers, which Zot later finds out is the secret identity of 9-Jack-9, an assassin who killed Zot’s parents (one of whom is Max’s sibling). Max is already aware of Jack’s identity. His ability to stay friends with Speers, while despising Jack, is an extremely difficult thing to understand about Max; he has an extreme ability to disassociate under certain conditions, or perhaps the better word is to be perfectly neutral or detached about certain things if he believes he can’t do anything about them. One of the other players, who joins them online from Brazil, is Ernie Cortez, who invented Zybox, a supercomputer robot who helps coordinate all kinds of information and infrastructure across the hemisphere.

Zybox goes rogue and captures Ernie. It shows up at Max’s house and goes through his portal to Jenny’s earth. Max tries to coordinate a police response to Zybox but Max, Jenny, and their friend Vic are captured by Zybox. Max, Peabody, and Butch go to Jenny’s earth with some of their police and travel across the country to find him, instead of appearing next to him, because Zybox was jamming any closer portals. Max realizes that Zybox is emitting hypnotic commands over the TV and radio. Butch is taken over, but Max manages to wake him up. They finally make it to Zybox’s location in New York, but he tells them he has the kids hostage and not to come any nearer.

Max realizes a lightning bolt might take Zybox out, but he’s shielded. He comes up with a plan for Floyd to sneak in from the top and Peabody from the bottom. The kids manage to escape and Zot is about to blast Zybox when a lightning bolt does by chance strike him and destroy him—at the same time that he has been caught in a logic trap by Ernie. Max finds Ernie inside. He threw himself into Zybox’s power core to trap him in an anti-murder command. He dies, telling Max he knows someone else who can play marimba in his band. The ticking of Ernie’s watch accidentally plays over Zybox’s outgoing speaker, which is communicated to the whole world. Everyone dances to the beat of the watch in a release of tension.

Max piles his paintings outside and takes a flamethrower to them as Jenny screams at him to stop. She can’t stand to see art destroyed. Zot, meanwhile, stands by smiling, entertained by the spectacle. He knows Max destroys half of his art—what he considers failures—every year. He doesn’t believe in being overly attached to things.

Max soon takes Zot and Jenny on a plein air painting trip. Zot loops around in the sky while Jenny tries faithfully but frustratedly to draw alongside Max. He has her throw an empty frame on the ground and explains that nothing is better to draw than anything else—the pebbles inside the frame are just as interesting as the landscape. And she doesn’t have to worry about representing it all in perfect detail; she can just follow her own vision about what is worth seeing and making into art.

Later, they throw a birthday party for Zot at Max’s. Everyone from the whole series is there. Max plays with his band, which now seems to be a quartet, including Sir John Speers. Dekko shows up at the door; he has manipulated his way into being released. Max can tell he isn’t really cured. Dekko says only he can see what “truly is,” in a way echoing Max’s advice to Jenny about art. However, even though he says he’ll destroy the world after they finish eating a box of chocolates, they decide to let him stay since he generally seems harmless.

Jenny talks about Dekko with Zot, explaining what Max told her earlier, which Zot apparently didn’t know all the details to: that Dekko was a student of Max’s, and that he slowly went insane as he got cancer and replaced his body parts with technology. She also notes that Max has a lot of paintings of Dekko’s girlfriend, Sarah, and that they both loved her, but that something seems to have happened to her.

This story is slightly different than the way it was originally presented in the first color volume. There, it seemed like Max, Dekko, and Sarah were all the same age and students together. Here, it is a bit creepier that Max loved Sarah, the girlfriend of a student, and presumably much younger than him.

Butch complains about Max’s music and wishes he had something newer; Jenny says that Max likes everything. Max finds Dekko admiring his photos of nature, which are very geometrically-oriented—photos of nautiluses and snowflakes. (McCloud, who often identifies with Max, has a similar interest in geometric patterns.) Max says photography is a hobby and Dekko exclaims that Max is just like him—he has a succession of obsessions. He says that art starts as perfect ideas but ends in compromise, which is the enemy of art. Max agrees.

Dekko’s doctor shows up and says that the mental health hospital has burned down, with Dekko’s initials burned into the grass. Still, they let him stay. Max plays piano, but the beauty of the music isn’t enough to convince Dekko of the value of existence. (The music is Bach, once again a very structured form of art.) Max respects that Dekko can make his own decisions about whether to accept or reject life. His hands-off acceptance of others’ decisions, even those he doesn’t agree with, presages his difficult-to-accept explanation of his relationship to Sir John Speers, which he describes a few issues later. Dekko then has a breakdown, thinking he destroys reality, but really he just shuts down again.

Jenny sees 9-Jack-9’s reflection in a microwave in her world. They turn off all the power so he can’t appear there, and go to Zot’s world. Max has them meet with a friend from Antares-3. He explains that the planet was taken over by a military coup. The military has hired Jack to kill the remaining daughter of the old President. They want Zot to help protect the girl, Susan Gallo. Max explains to Jenny that they don’t know much about Jack, just that he was first seen 50 years ago. However, this is a lie, or at least a partial truth; Max knows that his bandmate, Sir John Speers, is Jack. The fact that he knows this, and yet otherwise acts as if he is doing everything possible to stop this most-dangerous foe, is hard to square. Zot gets Susan, who is suicidal and doesn’t want to come. Jack appears and pulls her through a portal to Antares. Zot and Jenny follow. Zot rescues her temporarily, but Jack eventually kills Susan. This murder makes Jenny and Zot both incredibly distraught.

Zot finally shows up at Max’s, saying he’ll do whatever it takes to stop Jack. Max explains that he hasn’t told Zot what he knows about Jack because he wasn’t “ready” before, but now he is. Even now, he doesn’t explain about Speers. He says the only way Zot can find Jack is to get someone to hire Jack to kill Zot, and then to chase him to his home. But this is, again, a lie, because Max knows where Speers lives. Zot goes to Antares and helps the resistance fight against the dictators. Zot hates having to help in such a bloody war, since he doesn’t believe in killing, but he does it because it will end the war more quickly. Max knows of Zot’s quandary but puts him in the situation anyway. The dictators finally hire Jack to kill Zot.

Jack finds Zot, but Zot returns to Max’s house. Jack follows him there, but Zot then uses some special goggles to see the energy beam that lets Jack project himself across the world. He follows it back to its source, which is Sir John Speer’s house. It’s unclear why Max makes Zot go through this whole process, including getting involved in a bloody war, when Max knows where Speers lives and that he is 9-Jack-9. Max tells Jenny that Speers is “a fairly nice fellow…all things considered.” Max’s equanimity about Speers—who killed his sibling, Zot’s parent—is nearly impossible to truly understand, other than that Max has a truly extreme ability to divorce other people from their actions, and to take them as-is. McCloud says, in a later commentary, “I think I understand where Max is coming from, but I’m not sure I could explain it to anyone else. Both Max and Zot are nonjudgmental in their dealings with others, but at times, like in this story, that quality may be hard to relate to.”

Max explains that Jack killed the original Speers and took on his likeness. He says Jack was too dangerous for Max to defeat and that Zot couldn’t do it until he was as motivated as he is now. Again, Zot’s motivation only exists because Susan was killed, which to a degree happened because Max wasn’t straight with Zot about what he knew about Jack. He essentially manipulated Zot into a traumatic state so he could defeat Jack. Zot fights Jack and Jack ends up accidentally killing his own body with one of his energy bolts. It is hard to see how this is the result of Zot being “ready.” It turns out Jack isn’t dead anyway; his mind now just lives on as an electric impulse.

Later, they hold a New Year’s party at Max’s. As with Zot’s birthday, everyone in the series attends. Max ends up hearing from the not-dead Jack, who says he’s coming, as is Dekko—again. Max has agreed to take Dekko into his custody for his health. Various other villains show up and there is chaos, but nothing Zot can’t handle. Max shows Dekko to his room with grace. At midnight, they go outside to see the countdown, which looks like a clock projected onto the face of the moon. The locals all celebrate the end of the year 1965 and welcome in…1965. They somehow don’t realize it’s the same year, but Jenny and her friends from her Earth do.

They discuss this with Max, who wonders if his theory that Jenny’s Earth is an imperfect version of their utopian Earth is wrong. Jenny’s friend Woody explores their Earth trying to figure out which one is the “original.” A few days later, the party is still going. Woody explains that it seems like Jenny’s Earth came first. There are too many random things in Zot and Max’s world that don’t make sense except as imperfect copies of the “real” world, like songs about the Vietnam War, even though there was no Vietnam War in this world.

Max explains that the Federation of planets found out about his portal to Jenny’s Earth and they don’t like it. They’re coming to Max’s house and Max has to hide the fact that they have the coordinates to Jenny’s Earth. Jenny, Woody, and Zot go to Jenny’s Earth to avoid the inspectors, but in so doing, they take the control to the portal with them—meanwhile only Max has the coordinates to get back. Now Max can’t find them, and they can’t get back.

The Earth Stories

Zot is stuck on Jenny’s Earth for a year. He learns a lot about life there. Jenny becomes more distraught because she desperately wanted to move to Zot’s Earth. Zot ends up trying to stop crime in the city and is severely injured. Jenny thinks he may die. However, Max finally figures out a way to travel to Jenny’s Earth again, finds Zot, and brings him back to his home. There, he heals Zot over a period of weeks. Because of the way time works differently in the two dimensions, they come back the next day on Jenny’s Earth.

They explain that the Science Council has now approved interdimensional travel, so they can visit Zot’s Earth again. Zot shows Max what Jenny’s big city is like. Then they gather all of Jenny’s Earth’s friends and bring them all to Zot’s dimension. They have all had a hard time recently, and Zot’s world promises to give them a respite from the challenges of their normal lives.

In one final moment of fully giving people their own decisions, Max says he won’t stop Jenny from moving permanently to their world, even though he doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Zot eventually persuades her to not give up on her world, and to just come temporarily. They all go to Zot’s, and presumably have a wonderful time.

Hearts and Minds

After a fight with some Devoes and Dekko, Zot is injured, and is shocked to see that his arm is robotic.

They go to Max’s house and do some scans and discover that Zot’s entire body is robotic. Max theorizes that Zot’s brain and body are elsewhere and are remote-controlling the robot body. They also guess that Dekko, who seemed to die in the fight with Zot, wasn’t the real one. The hospital reports that a group of hostages that Dekko had taken are all remote-controlled robots too.

While Max fixes Zot’s arm, Zot has a dream about Dekko. Dekko explains that he has given the gift of eternal life to Zot and the hostages. Now that they’re robots, they’ll never die, just like Dekko.

Dekko explains that he now understands that he can’t destroy reality. But he can create order. He sees humanity as the best chance to help bring order to the universe. But to do so, they need to be improved—by, for instance, having eternal robotic life.

Zot points out that they may not all want this gift, but Dekko is sure they will come to like it.

Zot wakes up and explains the dream to Max and Butch. Max has fixed Peabody and repaired his personality as well.

Jenny, Butch, Zot, Max, and Peabody fly to find Dekko.

They find him and Zot demands to have his body back. They show Dekko a video call where the hostages all want their bodies too. Dekko is shocked that they are turning down his gift.

Dekko blasts them, then runs off. Meanwhile, a horde of Devoes invades the beach. The robots and Devoes fight.

Zot tracks the hostages on infrared. When they arrive, Dekko flips a switch and says death is all that’s left. Zot assumes that means he did something to kill them, but in reality Dekko just let them go without his robotic gift of life.

Zot, Max, and the others believe that Dekko is destroyed in the fight with the Devoes but he actually escapes.

Alternate Versions

Within the world of "Dimension 10 1/2," the stick-figure alternate universe created by Matt Feazell and running in the back of the black-and-white issues of Zot!, Max shows Jenny and Zot two formulas—one makes you grow and one makes you shrink, like in Alice in Wonderland. Dekko and Dr. Pweent break in. They try to grab the formulas but accidentally spill some on Cynicalman, who has randomly shown up. Now a giant, he defeats the villains. Pweent is shrunk down to mini size and Max puts him in a bottle in his collection.

After various other hijinks involving Cynicalman and Antisocialman, Zot and Jenny’s friends end up at Max’s house. He was learning Lunar Polkas on the moon. They have a dance party but Antisocialman and all of Zot’s enemies attack. Max catches some De-Evolutionists in a cage after luring them there with cheese and the other friends stop the rest of the villains. Max thanks Cynicalman and his fan club for helping.

Max creates a Brainwave Amplifier and asks Zot to help test it. It switches his mind with Cynicalman’s. After many hijinks on the part of Zot and Cynicalman, Max fixes it and returns their minds to their normal places.

On a day when Zot has to stay home and work on schoolwork, he is constantly interrupted by friends who call for his help. Max is one of those, calling about Slime Creatures from the planet Glubon. Zot manages to deal with his homework and the various threats.

Max looks for his Molecular Destabilizer Unit. He realizes he loaned it to another scientist and goes to pick it up. However, that scientist just went to the past in a time machine and accidentally changed the past so everyone is now a dinosaur. Zot goes back into the past and fixes things. However the scientist friend decides to bring a dinosaur back as a pet. Max and Zot decide to not get involved and leave.

Max and Zot go to visit Dekko in his mental hospital. They bring him a plant which Dekko destroys since it’s organic. Then a penguin gives Dekko a bill for his Antarctic base, which Dekko ignores. They realize he needs help with money and get him an interview for a commercial art job. He creates chaos there and in several other jobs he tries. Then it turns out that Dekko has been getting money from selling his paintings, and he is actually rich. They leave him alone.

Max works on improving Zot’s jetcar. He adds an artificial intelligence voicebox, not knowing or caring that this model of car is not supposed to have that upgrade. Various hijinks ensue for Zot and Jenny in the jetcar. When they get home, Max wonders why the toaster won’t work, not remembering that he got the voicebox from the toaster.

Max gets a letter letting him know his 20^th high school reunion is coming up. He doesn’t want to go because he was bullied in high school for being smart and weird. Zot and Jenny tell him to go so he gets over it. However, when he goes, everyone puts him down, regardless of his scientific accomplishments and, apparently, multiple well-known affairs with Hollywood actresses. 9-Jack-9 shows up; in this dimension, he went to school with Max. He starts harassing and killing people. They try to stop him through various means and eventually bring in Jack’s parents to annoy him into leaving. Max leaves too, with Zot and Jenny finally understanding that his schoolmates just suck.

Zot and his friends go to a movie about Zot. Max explains that some of the profits will go to charity. Various hijinks occur, eventually including the arrival of multiple members of Dekko’s family, such as Zy Dekko. Max says Zy was in his band (and reinforces the idea that Dekko was Max’s student, not his college friend). Zy was a music genius in the same way Arthur was an art genius, and went through the same cancer/body replacement situation. The various Dekko family members are eventually lured away by the offer of merchandising profits.

Inventions

Some of Max's inventions include:

• a translator that helps Butch-the-monkey speak English.

• alternate software to help run Peabody

• a belt for Butch that has a heat ray, force field, and danger alert button

• a magnetic grenade

• boot jets

• a ray gun

• portals to alternate Earths

• a cure for Butch from being a money (while on his own Earth)

• a local jammer for Zybox's hypnotic signal

• a portal to other planets

• spectro-filter goggles to see 9-Jack-9's energy source