Prime Cuts

 

By Howard Stangroom & Stephen Lowther (Bruno Gmünder)
ISBN: 3-8618-7723-6

It’s sometimes easy to forget that comic books aren’t the only venue for comic strip material, nor are the mainstream’s mores necessarily the only motive for reading them. Many of Britain’s greatest artists and writers worked in the much more lucrative adult magazine market whenever they could. Hunt Emerson, Brian Lewis, Ron Embleton, John Bolton, Brian Bolland and a veritable host of others have produced superb work that has nothing whatever to do with who’s strongest although often the costumes could be as outlandish.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s Howard Stangroom and Stephen Lowther produced gay-themed “adults only” material initially for the US publication Gay Comix, then for UK magazines like Heartbreak Hotel, Buddies and Meatmen.

Despite, if not because of, specifically dealing with sexual content, adult strips can become pretty tedious very quickly. The merit of the material collected here by German publisher Bruno Gmünder is not only the intricate artwork of Lowther, but the writers’ concentration on humour, pastiche and parody –not to mention some plain old autobiography.

With tips of the hat to Tharg’s Future Shocks, Archie Comics and Millie the Model, blockbuster superhero movies, sci-fi super teams and even the bedrock principles of heroic fiction (you know, the hero always gets the girl…only “Real Men” can fight…) the creators greatest desire is always to entertain first and gratify after.

Also it’s always a pleasure to see Margaret Thatcher and her band of cut-throats get one more well-deserved kicking – literary or otherwise – but that’s just my personal kink…

Prime Cuts delivers a lot of comic enjoyment for the open-minded adult and it’s always a pleasure to see any book that might increase the overall comic reading population.

© 2005 Bruno Gmünder Verlag GMBH. Text © 2005 Will Morgan (“Howard Stangroom”). Art © 2005 Stephen Lowther All Rights Reserved.