Some remember The Maxx from MTV, others from Sam Kieth’s Image Comics series. I remember him from my college roommate’s comic collection, and also this very strange black and white book from 1983. Your Major Spoilers Retro Review of Primer #5 awaits!
PRIMER #5
Writer: Sam Kieth
Penciler: Sam Kieth
Inker: Sam Kieth
Letterer: Sam Kieth
Editor: Matt Wagner
Publisher: Comico The Comic Company
Cover Price: $1.50
Current Near-Mint Pricing:
Release Date: October 18, 1983
Previously in Primer: Sam Kieth’s career really took off as an inker, working with Matt Wagner on Mage: The Hero Discovered, as well as less-remembered comic oddity Fish Police. In 1988, he drew the first issue of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman for DC Comics, which made him a known quantity in the comic book field and got him a recurring gig as a cover artist at Marvel Comics. When the Image Comics revolution kicked off in ’93, Sam wrote and drew The Maxx, a hallucinatory story of a guy with a lampshade for a head who protects a social worker who dresses like Britney Spears from evil monsters from the proverbial id. It wasn’t the first iteration of The Maxx, though.
That came a decade earlier, in Kieth’s first published comics work.
We open with a guy who kinda looks like one of The Mindless Ones of Marvel Comics, patrolling a section of a corridor for reasons unknown. It’s a really exciting image, heavy on the blacks and full of foreboding. My first worry is that the story will be a series of such splash panels, as was common in this sort of arty indy comic, but instead, we get a well-crafted action sequence.
You may be wondering what the eye-head guys are, why an anthropomorphic rabbit exists, much less gets work as an assassin, or what sort of mad alternate world this is.
That question will not be answered in these pages.
The story, such as it is, is a bare-bones affair, but I’m really impressed at what a barely-twenty-year-old Sam has to offer, including a remarkably broad range of emotional expressions out of character’s whose face is just an eye stalk. The three panels above are both dramatic and funny as heck, ending with the punchline of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The leader of the eye-heads (who looks a bit like The Abomination from the pages of The Incredible Hulk) finds Max’s little bunny footprints in the blood of his loyal foot soldiers and rages that someone would dare invade his citadel…
…and then dies at Max’s hand!
The sequence featuring the confused guards fumbling about, trying to find the source of the BLAM! is impressive, too, leading to the best single image, not just in this story, but in the entire anthology issue.
I think that the smokestacks are done with screentone effects (sometimes known by the no-longer-in-existence trademark of Zip-A-Tone), but the perspective of the shot is incredible, as is the number of shades and textures on display on the page. Primer #5 also features several other stories, the most memorable of which is Victor by Andrew Murphy, as well as a very cool woodcut cover, earning 3.5 out of 5 stars overall. Even the fact that there’s almost no story to be had doesn’t diminish how good this proto-Maxx story is, and it’s easy to see the beginnings of Kieth’s mature trademark style in the inspired layouts and high-contrast inks.
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PRIMER #5
Like so many books of the era, there's more focus on wild artistic flights of fancy than there is at a traditional comic book narrative, which makes for a trippy read.
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Writing4
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Art9
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Greytones9
