Deep Sequencing: Sex Talk

Or a look at some of the interesting dialogue choices in Sex Criminals: Vol. 2
by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky; Image Comics

Sex Criminals is a fun comic. I mean, it's a comic about people who stop time with their orgasms and rob banks for charity. So it's pretty great. As you might expect, the comic is filled with a pretty delightful amount of sexy hijinks, sex acts, and hilarious crimes. But Sex Criminals is also a heartfelt examination of relationships and grown up sexuality and life in general. So for all the boner jokes and sexy adventures there is also a lot of introspection and meaningful conversation happening on panel. Fortunately, Sex Criminals does a really, really great job presenting narration and dialogue in visually interesting and dynamic ways.

So I thought I'd maybe try and showcase some of the smart comics happening in Sex Criminals Vol. 2

There will be *SPOILERS* below.

Sex Criminals is a characterization machine. As much as I love all of the boner jokes (and who doesn't love boner jokes?), the real motor of the comic for me is the amazing character work in the comic. A big part of this is the quality of the character acting: Sex Criminals is filled with the tiny nuances of body language and facial expression really bring the characters to life. Add in a great ear for dialogue and an amazing sense of pacing that gives everything a moment to breathe and there is a consistent foundation to make every moment of narration or conversation highly immersive. 

This page here is a perfect example of what makes Sex Criminals such an effective comic. The story of the page is that Suzie is discussing her semi-breakup with Jon while laying on an examination table before a pelvic exam. It's a pretty great sequence that plays with the juxtaposition of the awkwardness of gynaecology with the breezy narration of Suzy to create a comic absurdity and then contrasts this humour with the pretty serious situation of relationship problems. It's a pretty fun and engrossing page.

The effectiveness of this sequence is all compositional comics magic. The foundation is, of course, the solid character acting and pacing which lends every word the necessary emotional weight and personality to give the words meaning. But upon this foundation is a page that flows really well in a deceptively simple way built on a really structured layout. The most obvious and clever choice is to intersperse upside down Suzie with the flashback panels. This creates the juxtaposition that drives the humour of the page and provides the first visual signifier to split present narration from flashbacks. This present/flashback divide is also built into the layout in panel size, with flashback panels being double wide, predominantly brown (as opposed to the present panels' green), and do not contain dialogue. It's a combination of small choices that makes a fairly complicated page and gag seem effortless and funny and interesting. Which is pretty great comics.

This sequence is another great example of why dialogue is so interesting and well done in Sex Criminals. In this sequence Suzie and Jon have a fight and say awful terrible things to each other while a omniscient-type narrator comments on their words. What I love about this sequence is how well it captures the truth of a certain kind of fight. Most fights are based on some underlying truth or hurt. Sometimes this hurt comes out in a way that is deeply petty and deeply hurtful while still adhering to the most toxic version of the truth. These fights are the worst. Part of why these fights are the worst is that when looked at rationally, outside the heat of the moment, the participants are kind of being total assholes and usually not even saying what they mean or what they want. That viewed from a cooler position there is a voice of de-escalation that just wants to defuse the situation and let people say what they need to in an empathetic way. This sequence builds that voice into the page and it instantly turns the shitty fight in the other panels into a *really* shitty fight. It's such an emotionally charged and effective choice.

Which is all just great evidence of the way Team Sex Criminals turn what could be simple, visually dull dialogue sections into emotionally evocative and visually interesting narratives. Which makes Sex Criminals great boner jokes comics.

Previously:
So I Read Sex Criminals Vol. 1
So I Read Sex Criminals Vol. 2
Just The Tips Is A Good Book

Sex Criminals Party Flow
Deep Sequencing: Grown Up Sex Portrayals
A Scientific Look At Just The Tips

Sound Advice: Sex Criminals

So I Read Sex Criminals: Two Worlds, One Cop

A 250 word (or less) review of Sex Criminals Vol. 2
by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarskey; Image Comics

Sex Criminals is an ongoing comic. To read a review of Volume One go here.

Sex Criminals is a comic about a pair of people who literally stop time when they orgasm, who meet each other and decide to rob banks for a good cause. A plan that brings them to the attention of the Sex Police, a vigilante band who can also stop time with their junk. Altercations ensue and now our heroes Suzie and Jon are convinced to give up the bank robbing game and go legit. Sex Criminals: Two Worlds, One Cop is what comes after and details the pairs struggle to turn their sexual connection into a relationship while trying to stay one step ahead of the Sex Police. It's a boner joke comic that is also a deeply heartfelt and deeply honest comic about what it takes to keep a relationship going and mental health. It's the kind of comic that makes me want to simultaneously make Frank Herbert's Dune porn jokes in this review ("You cannot resheath that knife unwetted!"; "The "spice" must flow!") or tell you about the time I realized I probably have very real social anxiety problems (a panic attack alone in the woods during a coworker camping trip without my support network). Sex Criminals: Two Worlds, One Cop is the comic that maybe best captures the hilarious sexy fun of falling in love and the viscerally real struggle of staying in love and being alive. And so many boner jokes.  

Word count: 235

Post by Michael Bround

Previously:

Sex Criminals: One Weird Trick (vol. 1)

Investigating Sex Criminals #1

Deep Sequencing: Sex Criminals and mature portrayals of sex

Sound Advice: Sex Criminals

Just The Tips: On Heart Testicles 

Just The Tips Is A... I Want To Say Good Book

Or why you could read Just The Tips,
by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky; Image Comics

Just The Tips is a sex advice book from the creators of the Sex Criminals comic. It answers some questions about sex, I guess. I mean not very effectively; I wouldn't give Just The Tips to like, a curious teenager looking for information to make informed decisions about doing it. But if you want to read some hilarious not-very-helpful and, yeah, sometimes terrible sex advice, dirty talk suggestions, and pick up lines mixed with some amusing sex anecdotes and porn-in-the-woods stories from Brimpers, the unofficial official fanclub of Sex Criminals, this is a pretty enjoyable little book. 

Also, book design, excellent book design. Seriously you guys look at the book design. This has to be the best looking inane sex advice ever printed. Easily. 

I would recommend Just The Tips for sexually active adults who have a sense of humour about sex stuff. It's obviously not for minors, the prudish, or my parents. So uh, enjoy responsibly.

Post by Michael Bround

Previously:
Scientific Errors in Just The Tips
So I Read Sex Criminals Vol. 1
Deep Sequencing: Sex Criminals and adult sex portrayals
Sound Advice: Sex Criminals

Just The Facts

A cardiac physiologist's opinion about the heart-testicles proposed in Just The Tips,
by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky; Image Comics

Just The Tips is a book of sex advice from the creators of the comic Sex Criminals. It is pretty funny and insightful in a warped and not particularly helpful way. It is an all around good time if you are a mature reader who has a sense of humour about human sexuality. (If not, please do not read this book.)

The thing is, as a professional heart Scientist I feel like the writers of Just The Tips are misleading the public, and I feel that it is my duty to debunk their ideas before someone's testicles are injured!

There will be *SPOILERS* for Just The Tips in this post.

My specific grief is with the Genitals of the Future (Probably) feature of Just The Tips. In it, the authors suggest that Balls should be inside the human body to avoid soccer injuries and like, sitting on them. Now, as sex advisers, Mr. Fraction and Mr. Zdarsky are above reproach; Mr. Fraction has two children so statistically has to have done it at least a couple times and Mr. Zdarsky, being Canadian, likely survives the winter on a hardy diet of maple syrup, bannock, and heat giving intercourse. So Sexperts. But clearly these visionaries don't know enough about scrotal physiology or cardiac biology to be ball transplant surgeons.

Problem 1: Intemperate Balls. On principle moving testicles inside the body makes a lot of sense; it seems like the natural solution to prevent slamming your drongles in doors. However, testicles exist outside of the body for a reason: spermatogenesis, the process of generating the male gamete, is super sensitive to temperature. For the most efficient results, balls need to be kept ~2 degrees celsius below body temperature and maintained there. The temperature regulation is so critical that scrotums have the ability to sag and contract at different temperatures. Moreover, the wrinkles on the skin of the scrotum exist to increase surface area to cool balls. There is literally a special layer of smooth muscle whose sole purpose is to control the wrinkliness of balls. (Corollary: some human almost certainly devoted decades of their life to understanding how the dartos fascia controls ball wrinkles.) So basically moving human balls inside the body cavity is bad for sperm making.

Problem 2: Paradoxical Perfusion. But maybe you don't care about the sperm killing effects of body heat. Maybe that's a perk for you. Well, the heart is still a bad place for the balls! And the first reason is kind of counter-intuitive. The heart's job is to pump nutrient rich blood through the lungs to oxygenate it and then pump it everywhere else in the body. The ultimate goal here is to maintain a constant flow of blood through the tissues to give cells the nutrients and gasses they need as metabolic fuel and to clear away all of the toxic waste products of producing energy. A well perfused tissue, one that has a steady, consistent flow of blood, will be able to do this effectively. Here's the problem: the heart is one of the worst perfused tissues in the body, it has terrible blood flow. Which is crazy, right?! While the heart has first crack at the most-oxygentaed and most-nutrient rich blood (the cardiac arteries branch off the base of the aorta right where it leaves the heart), blood has a really hard time getting into the heart. This is because every time the heart contracts it actually crushes all of its blood vessels which cuts off the flow of blood into itself. So every time your heart beats to send blood everywhere else in the body, it's cutting off its own supply. So, the harder your heart works, the more it starves itself of oxygen and fuel. Which, as you can imagine, is pretty tough on your heart. Now imagine if your balls (if you are a ball-haver) are attached to your heart like in Just The Tips, sharing that terrible blood supply! It would be really bad for testicles!

Problem 3: The Heart Of Darkness. Okay, so maybe you think saving your balls from a non-consensual walloping is worth low sperm counts and oxygen starved balls. Well, the trouble is that balls attached to the heart, like what is portrayed in Just The Tips, wouldn't protect you from sacking your balls (again if you are a ball-haver). We all like to think of organs as modules plugged into the body like components in a high end robot. But the truth is that organs aren't really welded in place and have some freedom to move around inside the body cavity. It's pretty disgusting if you think about it. This is especially true of the organs in the chest cavity, which all kind of hang in the open space of the chest. Both the lungs and the heart are attached to the top of the chest cavity where the airway and aorta leave the space. They literally hang in your chest. Now, normally the lungs are pretty inflated, and fill most of the chest cavity with the heart beating inside their cushiony embrace. That said, the heart is pumping, contracting, and shaking in there, bumping against the lungs. Which, you know, is fine for a tough muscley heart. But for a pair of balls hanging off the outside of the heart this would be constant shaking, jostling, and squishing against the lungs. Basically, the balls would be permanently sacked at an average rate of once every second if they were on the heart. Which seems a poor solution to potential exterior sackage.

So, despite Mr. Fraction and Mr. Zdarsky's expertise as sex advisors, their proposal to mount testicles to the outside of the heart is a poor one.

Post by Michael Bround, PhD Candidate

Previously:
Just The Tips Is A Good Book, I Guess
So I Read Sex Criminals Vol. 1
Deep Sequencing: Sex Criminals and adult sex portrayals
Sound Advice: Sex Criminals

Sound Advice: Sex Criminals Vol. 1

Advisement on Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trip

by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky; Image Comics

First, a disclaimer: If you have found this review through googling my name because you are a student or former student of mine, do me a huge solid and take my advice right here: while Sex Criminals is a fantastic comic, it is also not for you, at least, not without your parents reading it first and giving you the okay to read it and then having what I can only imaging are going to be awkward discussions about the content of the book. If you and your parents have not yet handled talks about safe sex, consent, intimacy, and how sex is only one aspect of an adult relationship, just trust me and know you’re not quite ready for this book yet. Check back in a few years.

If you are my parents? Sorry, Mom and Dad. Maybe go check out my tag and read another of the reviews I’ve written?

Also, *SPOILERS* ahead so proceed at your own risk.

------------------------------

To level with you, I had trouble writing this review. There are so many things I absolutely adore about this book that figuring out a cohesive way to express my feelings about Sex Criminals took far more time and introspection than I wanted it to. I wrote and trashed multiple versions of this piece before I could even articulate why that was happening.

Sex Criminals has a simple premise, one that could be reduced so much that at first glance it’s a complete gimmick: Our Hero and Heroine stop time when the orgasm, and decide to use this power to rob banks. From the moment I heard about this book, I knew it was going on my pull list just because I wanted to read what I was sure would be a hilarious book by Matt Fraction resplendent with dick jokes. I expected that I would laugh, and keep the digital copies on my kindle for days I needed some levity, and not mention to my mom that this was a book I was reading.

Sex Criminals is so funny and witty and just silly. The dialogue and story makes me smile consistently – Suzie’s pool table musical number comes to mind. Fraction and Zdarsky have built a book that is full of jokes – on every reread I catch something I didn’t see before in the background of a scene.

 (A couple of examples of excellent jokes created in the background art.)

 The levity that oozes from every aspect of this book makes it easy to engage with – from the tips heading the letters column to the dedications in the collected volume, Fraction and Zdarsky bring the funny.

But Sex Criminals is also a great examination of a new relationship, about the magic of learning about another person and discovering what about them it is that you find attractive and connect with, about why they have taken up some precious residence in your heart.

Like sex itself, Sex Criminals is more complex than it’s pitch makes it seem. Sex is very rarely just sex; it’s not something that is simple, that occurs in a vacuum, or happens in the same timeline or situation for all people. Though a lot of media insist on portraying sex in a pretty simple view, it can fail to recognize that the only thing necessarily common across sexual experience is that we all have to figure out how (and even if) we want to interact with, talk about, and participate in such relationships.

Cue Suzie and Jon, our intrepid protagonists, who are willing to fully admit to one another that they struggle to figure relationships out. While they are building their relationship with one another, the readers get to see them—in present time and in flashbacks—struggle to understand sex, worry that their experiences maybe aren’t normal, lament failed relationships, explore their sexuality and desires, experience attraction and affection, and discover that this whole relationship thing may be more complex than they want it to be. Even Jon and Suzie’s experiences are quite different from one another’s. This is evident even in the way they use their stopped-time. For Suzie, The Quiet is about escaping and getting space to clear her head.

For Jon, it’s about “getting away with things,” and finding the freedom to act out what it later becomes clear are destructive impulses.

 When they find each other, it’s almost inevitable that they try to use their powers to get away with something that also helps them escape their troubles (robbing the bank Jon hates working for to save the library Suzie loves from destruction). Of course, it’s not as simple as they want it to be. Complications arise. Suzie’s friends worry about her, Jon’s mental health comes into question, and hey, apparently there are Sex Police?

 My experience is not the same as Jon or Suzie’s, but I can find much I relate to in their stories of sexual and romantic exploration – lack of information, curiosity, experimentation, shame, guilt, and emotional baggage.  Looking at the Sex Criminals letter column each issue, it seems I’m not the only one that relates so strongly to this book. Frankly, this comedy about sex has something real and relatable to say about our common experience of just trying to figure things out. By sharing these moments with the reader, Fraction and Zdarsky give us the opportunity to connect more with the characters.

We see a young Suzie unable to find information, going to all sorts of sources and not knowing what to do.

We see teenage Jon unsure about why sex is a big deal, and why he feels so strange about it.

We see Suzie’s rendition of a musical number in a pool hall (one of my favorite scenes) as the as Jon’s moment of realization about his deepening affection for her.

 We see, though the repetition of a single phrase of internal dialogue as the plot progresses, how her feelings about Jon grow and change over the course of the volume.

The willingness to explore all these moments makes Sex Criminals one of the most realistic portrayals of sex and relationships I’ve seen in contemporary media, aside from, you know, the stopping time with orgasms and the sex police. Really, this discovery just adds another layer of complexity to Suzie and Jon’s relationship, gives them another thing they need to consider and weigh and negotiate around. It’s another obstacle to overcome, and to consider if it is worth overcoming.

It took one issue of this book (bought digitally, I will fully admit, because I was not comfortable going to my comic book store full of mostly men and requesting I be put on the pre-order list for a book called Sex Criminals) for this to become a story that I was talking about with my friends and recommending to any friend that I thought would listen. The balance this book strikes between comedic and introspective continues to astound and impress me.

For me, the other truly remarkable thing about Sex Criminals is how much conversation it’s sparked in my life. After a friend read the first issue, she sent me a text absolutely floored about the remarkably realistic and grounded portrayal of female sexuality, and we agreed that it felt like a breath of fresh air.  At Emerald City Comicon 2014, it was clear that there was a rabid fanbase for the book—the lines to have Fraction and Zdarsky sign my freshly-purchased SEXclusive Convention HARDcover of Volume One was long all weekend.

(I did eventually get it signed, and uh, marked, by Fraction and Zdarsky—don’t worry, that’s whiteout)

 One of the advantages of reading Sex Criminals issue to issue was the letters column, where person after person related to the stories on the page, and shared their own experiences and questions. This book has sparked a conversation among readers, and that’s what I believe good media should do, not just entertain, but inspire us to seek some better understanding.  

The best thing about this book?

There’s so many more good things to talk about.  

Post by Jennifer DePrey

Previously:

Deep Sequencing: Positive portrayals of sex

Deep Sequencing: Colour use in the reprint of the fourth printing of Sex Criminals #1