Prime Cuts #1 - Fantagraphics

Even Fantagraphics got into the b/w magazine act!

I vaguely remember this magazine being around at the time, and even though I was rapidly expanding my comic book reading subject matter I never went near this--I think the cover(by Alec Stevens) just sort of scared me off.

I guess it was sort of designed to do exactly that--if you'd be scared off by this image, this isn't the magazine for you in the first place.

On the inside covers are reprints of the 1927 comic strip "Dot and Dash" by Cliff Sterrett, and then there's an introduction by publisher Gary Groth. Of course, Gary Groth isn't going to give you a Stan Lee-style "Hey, kids! This new magazine is the most pulse-pounding collection of stories you'll ever read! Excelsior!" intro; no, he welcomes you right off the bat with this:

Well, gee, Gary, thanks. I'm so in the mood to read a comic book now. I think it was stuff like this that kept me away from most stuff Groth was involved in--it seemed so purposely downbeat, straining to sound cool and/or detached or angry, that it just kind of made me go "whatever" and pick up the nearest Marvel Team-Up. But I digress.

First up is Alec Steven's all b/w adaptation of H.P.Lovecraft's "The Outsider", six pages of paranoia and madness. Well done and visually arresting.

Next is R.Crumb with a cute(for him) two-pager called "Troubles with Cute Old Refrigerators", and then Eddie Campbell's untitled piece, about, among other things, a man entranced by a woman he meets named Georgette. I didn't totally understand all that was going on here, but Campbell's art perfectly captures the hazy, brief snippets of memory that remain after a transformative experience.

I love this panel, where our hero sees Georgette at a party, and she literally is different from everyone else. I've had experiences like this, and this is a great visual interpretation of that feeling.

Next is Susan Catherine's "Overheard at America's Lunch Counters" which reads sort of like a bit Jay Leno would do on the Tonight Show; and then is a text piece called "Mr.Hamadryad", featuring a frontpiece by Kenneth Smith.

Following that is more "Dot and Dash", and then is Dori Seda's "The Confidante", featuring three people who don't ever say what they really mean.

Next is Richard Sala's creepy "The Thirteen Fingers", a story about one man finding out about a mysterious group and wanting to see what's going on behind closed doors. I absolutely loved the story, and its unsettling, downbeat ending, but I couldn't get past Sala's gallery of grotesques populating the tale:

The story seems so wonderfully, creepily real, yet the art kept me at a distance from it. Hey, that's just me...

Next is Drew Friedman's "Tor Johnson in the Country" (Friedman and Johnson are the Scorsese and DeNiro of indy comics), and then is Justin Green's take on the classic comic book ad, "Hero of the Beach Revisited."

Mitch Manzer's "Rory Randall, The Singin' Cowboy" fills the rest of the mag up, with a fifteen page story, but there's room for just one more piece, a one-page feature called "Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas" with a spot illustration by one of my favorites, Rick Geary.

There is a lot of neat stuff here; Prime Cuts ran for ten issues and even though I couldn't find too much info on the series(the GCDB only shows two out of the ten covers) I'd definitely be into searching out more of them. I'll just skip any more Groth introductions.