Portland, OREGON – “I don’t know if you know this,” says comic book writer Matt Fraction, sitting in a largely empty sandwich shop in Portland, “but lady orgasms are totally nuts.” For his latest project, Sex Criminals, the Eisner Award-winning writer of books like Invincible Iron Man and Hawkeye has been consulting with an OB/GYN, and he’s come away with a wealth of information about female sexuality. “Remember the G-spot?” he says. “A myth.”
The elusive mechanics of female pleasure are key to the plot of Sex Criminals, Fraction’s ongoing comic with artist Chip Zdarsky, which comes out in its first collected edition this week. It’s the story of a young woman named Suzie, whose awkward sexual encounters come with a unique twist: she stops time whenever she climaxes. Sex becomes a bit of a lonely experience until she meets—and falls for—Jon, a man who happens to have the exact same sexual superpower.
There’s an oddly sweet moment when they realize that the other person is still there after sex, which also serves as a metaphor for what it’s like to finally meet the right person who makes sex something besides awkward and lonely. After that, their next step is clear. “They do what any young, fun, sex-having sexy persons would do after discovering their sex-having freezes time and space,” says Fraction. “They start robbing banks.”
But if you’re expecting soft-core titillation from Sex Criminals, then prepare for disappointment: This isn’t a book designed to get you off. It’s a comedy that deals with how embarrassing, scary, and awesome sex can be for both men and women—as told through the eyes of a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde with a Masters-and-Johnson getaway tactic. And in the comics industry, where sex is primarily deployed as fodder for juvenile titillation, a comic about sex that manages to be both mature and funny is something of an anomaly—and an important one.
Then again, so is Fraction: an A-list superhero comic book writer whose work transcends the typical creative ouroboros of the genre. While the biggest influence on most Iron Man comics, for example, is other Iron Man comics, Fraction’s work feels both interdisciplinary and scalable; his comics can be read and enjoyed as simple, superpowered pop confections that require little to no prior knowledge, or as intricately patterned narratives infused with the aesthetics of decades of film, music—and yes, comics—that are both literate and literary. And Sex Criminals is the culmination of a much longer meta-critique that has threaded through Fraction’s work—both answer and antidote to mainstream comics’ long history of treating sex as something you exploit, not something you talk about.
When we start talking about Sex Criminals, I mention that there are a lot of comics about sex, and Fraction raises an eyebrow.
“Are there? Respectfully, I reject the premise. There’s a lot of comics that peddle in titillation and sensationalism but are there comics capital-A about sex? Not that I can think of. Which was part of what drew me to the idea of the project. I don’t think of a drawing that gazes surreptitiously up at the pudendum of a woman as she kicks another woman in the face so hard we see both her tits and her ass in the same pose as being about sex, I guess.”
What he is means is what anyone who’s ever walked into a comic shop knows: that women in comics, particularly superhero comics, look like sex, or at least a very specific and unrealistic version of it: costumes that seem more like swimsuits, breasts that are almost uniformly double-D and sometimes bigger than a human head. While male characters tend to be beefy and muscular, it is the women who get stripped to thongs and bras and bent into sexually provocative positions, even in the midst of life-or-death battles. Sex in comics is like a bell factory; after a while, the constant background radiation of T&A becomes so omnipresent that you stop noticing it. What bells?
“For a long time superhero comics were stuck in childhood, and for a while they’ve been stuck in adolescence, with notable exceptions,” says Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. “Then Matt comes along with his incredible critical acuity and ironic stance, but still provides all of the satisfactions that you expect: to move you and make you laugh and have it be exciting and well-plotted and reward your attention on many levels… All a comic would have to do is say ‘Matt Fraction’ on the front for me to pick it up and feel excited about what was inside.”
Chabon sent Fraction a fan letter nearly seven years ago about Casanova, the cult-favorite transdimensional espionage comic that first put Fraction on the map. The two have since become friends, and Chabon is currently writing back-up stories for the upcoming fourth volume of Casanova.
Early on in Casanova, there’s a story where the urbane super-spy hero finds himself on an island where a reactor powered by orgone, Wilhelm Reich’s famed “sex energy,” is in a perpetual state of meltdown. The chemical incites a frenzied sexual madness in the inhabitants of the island, a dream-like bacchanalia of carnivale dancing and robot orgies that never ends. This, too, is a larger metaphor. “It’s about women in comics,” Fraction says. “It’s always about women.”
“The only way you can explain the behavior of women in most mainstream comics is that there has to be some sort of orgone accumulator that’s broken and driving everybody crazy. Whey else would you be presenting your labia?” laughs Fraction. “Comics have done a lot of fucking wrong to its representations of women, let alone women’s sexuality.”
And maybe that’s what sets Fraction apart—and what makes Sex Criminals his most daring book yet. It’s not just that he realizes that there’s a serious sex problem in comics, or that he knows how to discuss it in incredibly nuanced ways, or even that his work often functions as counterprogramming. It’s that it so obviously pisses him the hell off. And in an industry that often seems trapped in a reductive and inane conversation about whether or not sex in comics is “good” or “bad,” Fraction loves both sex and comics, and loves talking about both in equal proportion to how much sex in most mainstream comics makes him want to facepalm.
So how is Sex Criminals different? Rather than turning its female lead, Suzie, into an object of lust, at least half the story is told from her perspective, exploring her sexuality and making her a subject instead of an object. In one scene, an adolescent Suzie goes to talk to the “bad girls,” who explain sex to her with a series of stick-figure drawings on a bathroom wall. “I sent [artist] Chip [Zdarsky] a list of like, eighty sex moves.” says Fraction. “I especially like ‘queeps,’ which is where you go down on a girl while she holds a gun to your head. We also named one after [artist] Jamie McKelvie, the Chocolate McKitten.”
The joke, of course, is that none of them are real, and that so many of the people who seemed experienced and knowing in those early, awkward years of misinformation didn’t really know much more than you did. Fraction describes his own early confusion about sex in similar terms. “It was like I had all the ingredients to make a cake, but didn’t understand the cake,” he laughs.
Through the course of the interview, sex comes up a lot; the topics include but are not limited to: his childhood exposure to a comic with confusing scene of hate-sex between a Jewish hero and a Nazi; why anal sex shouldn’t be used as a lazy metaphor for fears about masculinity; a comics artist who specialized in making custom pornography for mobsters; and the time Fraction lost his virginity while listening to a Morrissey record he hated but couldn’t turn off. (“Now every time I hear ‘Every Day Like Sunday’ I think, ‘Ah, I’m just never going to come.'”) The conversation is often very personal, and always very funny—and the two are not unrelated, especially when it comes to Sex Criminals.
It’s the sort of honesty that tends to beget more honesty, which is probably why so many of the book’s readers, both male and female, have written to Fraction and Zdarsky to share their own stories of sexual confusion and hilarity. The letters page (titled “Letter Daddies”) rings with something akin to relief. Sex Criminals isn’t just a comic that actually talks about sex, but one that invites readers to do the same thing.
“Thank you for exposing women as the masturbation fiends we are (and are often ashamed to admit), a fact that the opposite sex always seems surprised to learn,” writes one reader on the letters page of a recent issue. “I’m really happy about the pervading theme of ‘sex is not an evil bad thing we must never, ever talk about ever,'” says another. One admits that she was a late bloomer who didn’t lose her virginity till later in life, “but like Suzie and Jon, I’ve realized that there are people out there who make it feel ok, no matter how weird and/or new your sexual history is. So yeah… thank you.”
The letters column itself has become both a confessional and a form of community for some readers, with one man writing that “I am mostly grateful to know that I am not the only one who found porn in the woods. Like Suzie finding John, I feel connected to the people in your letters column in a way I thought I would never know… I wish I had found this comic in the woods when I was 12.”
Far more than any comic that purports to titillate, Fraction’s sex comedy has become the true “mature readers” book, one that prefers honest, human stories about sex to silently bombarding readers with T&A in the middle of unrelated action tales.
“There’s never been this sort of comic book,” says Fraction. “It’s funny and dirty and sweet and sad, with super-earnest jokes about sex. How do I convey that it’s naughty, but it’s not really dirty? It’s not really sexual at all, especially in comparison.”
If most superhero comics look at sex with the distant, voyeuristic eye of an erotic magazine, Sex Criminals looks at it through the lens of someone who’s actually having sex, and feels comfortable enough to joke about what makes it weird and wonderful. And where so much media—and erotica—tends to be as humorless about sex as a gym teacher in health class, Sex Criminals does something very different, and refreshing: It turns to look sex in the eye—and laughs.
Because a successful comedy has to be funny, Sex Criminals is—in theory—a comic that gives Fraction added incentive to make his ambitions work in the service of his genre; to use big ideas that put over the jokes. When Fraction’s writing on Sex Criminals works, it works well. And in cartoonist Chip Zdarksy, he has a collaborator willing to ignore most notions of propriety and good taste. Yes, some bad jokes have crept into the comic along with the good. But Sex Criminals also features a robust, versatile guiding metaphor that makes up for some of the comic’s shortcomings.
Namely: the world literally stops for Suzie and Jon when either of them has an orgasm. These characters can temporarily move around while everything around them remains frozen in time. In One Weird Trick, the two find each other. Not long after Suzie and Jon hook up, the couple decides to rob banks during this post-orgasm “Quiet” time. But even before the robbery scenes, Fraction and Zdarsky use their conceit to examine the different roles sex plays in the lives of ordinary people. In the story’s first installment, Suzie tells readers how alone she used to feel when the rest of the world froze—a sideways depiction of the failure of sex alone to complete a person. And an anecdote in which Jon describes his orgasm-power learning curve reads like a true account of puberty writ large. Even if genre comics have used the emergence of superpowers as a stand-in for adolescence since 1962 or so, the mix of excitement and confusion in these scenes is recognizable and vivid.
For much of One Weird Trick, Suzie acts as a guide to the reader, relaying the story’s events in the first person. If the comic’s overarching metaphor is strong, the line-by-line narration of Sex Criminals is the book at its weakest. Although Suzie isn’t likely to wind up in Avengers Tower before Sex Criminals ends, her narration resembles the self-conscious quippiness of Fraction comics like Marvel’s Hawkeye. In lines like the following, Fraction writes Suzie as if she’s fiction’s first self-aware narrator: “That [question] was rhetorical. You don’t need to answer. We couldn’t hear you anyway, this is a book and you are a person and that’s not how it works.” This performed cleverness is a feature of Fraction’s writing across his body of work, and here as in elsewhere, it distracts from the actually clever moments throughout the story
The demonstrative-smartass narrative mode of Sex Criminals becomes somewhat more troubling in scenes involving the character of Rachel. Rachel appears first in a flashback, as a sexually astute girl who adolescent Suzie plies for information. In the book’s present, Rachel appears again as Suzie’s roommate—though Suzie still makes time for an aside about Rachel’s promiscuity: “Basically, there’s no one left in our circle…that hasn’t at least fingerblasted her.” Later, Suzie tells readers that Rachel was also the survivor of a sexual assault in college. A few pages after that, Rachel informs the authorities of her suspicions about Jon and Suzie’s robbery plans. Sex Criminals, then, features a character who readers learn was assaulted after encountering multiple jokes about her level of sexual activity; a character who also exists largely as an obstacle for the story’s protagonists.
Sex Criminals does not suggest that Rachel earned a sexual assault through her busy sex life—let’s establish that outright—but even in the scenes concerning the assault, Rachel’s experience is presented mainly as a reason for Suzie to spring into action against the rapist. Sex Criminals didn’t have to address the dangers implicit in the sex lives of women—as a caper comedy, the story could have easily worked around them—and perhaps Fraction and Zdarsky deserve credit for acknowledging this aspect of sex and the attendant gender imbalance. Even so, the comic’s Rachel scenes pair uneasily with one another. A character that Fraction and Zdarsky ought to treat with sensitivity sometimes reads as if she’s inhabiting whatever role the story requires of her on a given page.
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Chip Zdarsky, like Fraction, is in many ways an ideal creator for a humor comic, and likewise has a few traits as a cartoonist that hamper this particular comic. Not only does Zdarsky draw expressive faces, he has a knack for choosing expressions that sell the humor of a scene. The frozen face of Suzie’s partner after she loses her virginity is particularly great-slash-mortifying, and Zdarsky stages Jon and Suzie’s first meeting in “the Quiet” with a lively physicality. But if emotions are legible when Zdarsky draws a face, a character’s age is less so. During scenes in which an adult Suzie discusses the sexual mishaps of her youth, this is a problem—Suzie’s face changes so little through the years that readers may find the telling of her story hard to follow. A moment in which Suzie transitions from addressing characters in-panel to addressing the reader is similarly muddled, a basic failure of clarity.
The most polarizing aspect of Zdarksy’s work in Sex Criminals may be its computer enhancements. Whenever Suzie or Jon enters “the Quiet,” swirling lines move across panels at partial opacity, sometimes dividing single-color objects into multiple shades; specs of light ornament a scene; a software filter blurs the contours of a bed sheet or of someone’s butt. One Weird Trick credits Becka Kinzie and Christopher Sebela with the book’s color flatting. The credits don’t establish their involvement with the computer effects relative to Zdarsky, though we can reasonably assume Zdarsky’s oversight if not his active participation. As for the effects themselves, they read like aesthetic shortcuts.
The enhancements of Sex Criminals may look prescient or dated a decade from now, depending on how these technologies evolve and how artists come to use them. What they are not are instances of creative cartooning. Compared to something like the environments of a Steve Ditko Doctor Strange story or a Brendan McCarthy comic, the “Quiet” scenes in Sex Criminals look, well, inadequate. This is not to suggest that a Ditko pastiche would have been the answer—only that Sex Criminals misses the opportunity to follow in the tradition of great psychedelic comics past.
Because Sex Criminals is an ongoing series, its flaws are harder to weigh or contextualize than they would be if One Weird Trick were a self-contained story. With the comic’s continued publication is the continued potential for Fraction and Zdarksky to further explore sexual mores, their smart guiding metaphor, and—one hopes—the comics form. The portrayal(s) of Rachel, the garish computer effects—it’s possible these elements will read as early missteps by the end of the comic’s run. When Sex Criminals is at its best, the comic examines sex from a position and in a manner that no other contemporary genre comic can claim. Let’s hope One Weird Trick’s failings are the simply the results of an awkward first outing.
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