Posted on June 27, 2025

Max Steel: Makino’s Revenge, 2011

As the year 2010 blended into 2011, I had Max Steel on my mind again, and this was going to be our last tango. It was my fourth movie in a row (one per year) in addition to the countless Turbo Mission shorts, and I sorta felt like I’d gotten enough of it.

It was the luxury of full employment that allowed me to make that choice. I was getting plenty of work from WB (Batman: the Brave and the Bold) and Marvel (Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes) along with a handful of other projects. They were fun and inventive, whereas Max Steel had become an exercise in recycling.

I explained this in a previous article; the budgets were not generous, so CG models had to be reused as much as possible with a strict limit on new assets that could be created for any new project. Couple that with a storytelling pattern that maintained status quo (villain rises/villain falls) and it put my emotional investment in decline.

Nevertheless, I was asked by Producer Audu Paden to be his solo storyboard artist again, and I never liked to turn him down. (We’ve since worked on other projects, most recently a complete season of Magic The Gathering that was canceled after my part was done. But that’s another story.) Audu and I sync quite well and I always learn something from it, so I hope another reunion lies ahead.

I don’t have much to say about Makino’s Revenge that I haven’t already said about the previous outings. The boarding came pretty easily and the revision pass was minimal. In addition to Audu, Vincent Edwards and Greg Richardson were credited as directors. I’d worked with them both on previous projects, but most of their labor was in supervising the transition of storyboards into footage, a task that began after I departed.

Of course, changes were made during the animation process, so you’ll see differences between the storyboard and the finished film. Everything I saved is here to be studied and compared. Keep in mind that most of what drives those decisions is economic. For example, every new camera angle requires its own setup, and setups consume both time and money. If a director can find ways to reduce the number of setups, storyboards get revised (by revisionists). Because storyboards are a lot cheaper than animation.

I was briefly involved in the movie that came after this one, titled Monstrous Alliance. When I was asked to work on it in 2011, my schedule was full with Marvel projects, but they kept after me and eventually I agreed to help with revisions. It wasn’t enough to earn another article, so this one will be my last word on Max Steel.

It was fun at the time. The checks cleared, I earned screen credits, and it allowed me to live a lifestyle where I could afford to keep drawing comics in my spare time. That’s really all I could ask for.