Created by William Byrne
MAX BURGER is a private investigator based in Canada’s capital, Ottawa. But he’s not your average private investigator. He’s also a, uh, mutant hamburger?
The rest of him seems pretty normal though. Except for the pickled feet, lettuce arms and meat patty lips he’s just another tall, thin man wearing a trenchcoat and the obligatory fedora.
Max (and his evil brother, The Mad Burger) were created by a “microwave explosion,” and Max was rescued and raised by a friendly police officer, Charles Fries. He then went on to run his own detective agency in Ottawa, although he wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire. I guess it didn’t help that Max was consumed by an existentialist crisis of sorts. “Trapped in his own mind,” is how the his creator, William Byrne put it. Max’s greatest fear? That somebody will eat him.
The two art-heavy, dialogue-light comic books were put out in 1989 by Graphic Image, a Kitchener, Ontario publisher whose only output, as far as I can tell, were the those two issues of Max Burger, P.I. (1989-90), suggesting it was a vanity project. A few years later, Byrne ended up sending a load of unsold copies to Canadian troops stationed in the Persian Gulf.
Maybe his mom demanded Max clean up his room. There’s something decidedly and almost charmingly amateurish and compellingly adolescent about the two books.
A sequel of sorts, The Mad 2992, featuring the adventures of Max’s evil brother, was attempted in 1995. Set in the future, it followed Mad, accidentally frozen and recently defrosted centuries later, and his schemes to take over the world, with a little help from his new criminal friends. The comic only appeared as a limited edition, black and white “trash can” edition, given out at the 1995 Chicago Comicon. Only fifty copies were printed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Canadian William Byrne is listed on his various web sites and social media outlets (he has a lot of them) as, alternately, a photographer, a comics writer and artist, a digital creator, and a YouTube Podcaster.. His chief claim to fame, though, still seems to be his Max Burger, P.I. comic book, and his subsequent attempts to get another comic, The North Shield, published. Featuring a Canadian superhero obviously inspired by mid-seventies superhero Captain Canuck, so far two Kickstarter campaigns, the most recent in 2017, have withered and died. Curiously, most of William’s output these days seems to be an endless stream of Facebook re-posts of other peoples’s posts. You want daily blasts of racism, misogyny, anti-vax screeds, dubious data, suspicious stats, Liberal bashing, Maple MAGA rallying cries, outright lies and Canada-bashing? Willie’s your man. He lives in Cambridge, Ontario.
In Canada.
COMICS
- MAX BURGER, P.I.
(1989, Graphic Image)
2 issues
Colour cover, B&W interiors
Written and drawn by William Byrne
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- “Oh mama I got dem cosmic anthropomorphic P.I. blues again…”
Going to the dogs, the cats and worse.
- Ontario-ari-ari-o Eyes
Eyes from Canada’s Second Largest Province.
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Suggested by a friend.
