Raunchy 'Sex Criminals' comic steals readers' hearts

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Along the way to writing a raunchy comic-book sex comedy, writer Matt Fraction and artist Chip Zdarsky ended up writing an honest, heartfelt story about relationships that was more John Hughes than John Holmes.

Fraction and Zdarsky are just as shocked as anybody.

Debuting Sept. 25 from Image Comics, Sex Criminals stars Suzie and Jon, who utilize their shared secret power — being able to stop time and create neato light effects when they have sex — to rob banks and get into other hijinks.

The sex-comedy genre is often repeated and quite successful in film and TV with things such as American Pie and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but very rarely in comics, according to Fraction.

"Sex is funny and the thing that most of us tend to have in common in some capacity," he says. "Actual sex, and not just what a 13-year-old boy thinks sexy is, is so rare in comics, let alone comics about relationships and love and sex played for laughs.

"I love Billy Wilder (movies) and it's wanting to do something that would fit on that shelf and that realm."

The first issue focuses on Suzie and her childhood growing up estranged from her widowed single mom and discovering her sexuality — and the abilities that come with it — before later on meeting Jon and finding out he has similar traits.

Zdarsky based Suzie on a friend of his — "I don't want to sully her too much," he says — but found Fraction's script to Sex Criminals No. 1 to be sweeter than he thought it would be.

"He actually told a great story. It's not just a bunch of jokes and pure comedy. Strangely, I wasn't expecting that," says Zdarsky, a journalist and illustrator making his major debut in comics with Sex Criminals.

"We didn't help ourselves with the press releases and the single entendres," Fraction adds, laughing.

"Yeah, I totally bought into the hype," the artist replies, "and you delivered this heartwarming touching story, goddamn it!"

This isn't a mature-readers comic, though, so it can be dirty.

When developing the book during late-night phone calls, Fraction and Zdarsky came clean on their own individual sexual histories plus shared their friends' more adventurous stories, too.

In one of the first issue's more hilarious sequences, teenage Suzie is rife with hormones and goes to Rachelle — a girl who comes off as, shall we say, experienced in matters of between-the-sheets intimacy — for advice. The girl, who later is Suzie's roommate, takes her into the girls' bathroom for a sex-ed lesson and shares a variety of increasingly perverse positions to scare her back into being a good girl.

In putting together their own comic-book kama sutra, Fraction and Zdarsky came up with a giant list of things that sounded like sex moves, and then Zdarsky was tasked with coming up with stuff such as "Three-Second Rule Taco" and "E.T. The Sex Move."

"It was funny to write the word 'brimping' but now I have to figure out what brimping means," he says. "The hardest one was 'The User Agreement.' That one I didn't know what I was going to do. Originally it was just like a handshake." (The final version involves a laptop, a human desk and feet. Go ahead and let your mind wander into the gutter for that one.)

The second issue of Sex Criminals focuses on John's sexual awakening, which is "way raunchier," Fraction says. "Part of that is just wanting to make fun of dudes and dudes' sexuality and dude sex.

"Male sex is different. It's an external experience — it's much more demonstrative. It let us get into pre-pubescent to pubescent teenage boy stuff, like fights and kiss-and-makeup and porn in the woods."

The creators had toyed with doing John's story as the first issue, but there was a danger in "a couple of straight white dudes doing the story about the straight white dude as a protagonist," Zdarsky says.

"It's the magic pixie dream-girl thing, right?" Fraction adds. "It's about the guy who just needs to find the right wacky girl to help him get his head on straight in this crazy work-a-day world. It played into all the bad versions of the story.

"We were very protective of (Suzie) very quickly and didn't want it to be trashy or sleazy. It's not visually prurient — it was becoming suddenly protective of her almost in a paternal way. It let us do a much more emotionally true and real and generous book than 'guy meets pretty girl who fixes him' cliché."

The first three issues focus on John and Suzie and the rush of those first three weeks of being in love together, according to Fraction. And in addition to Rachelle, the supporting cast includes a couple of antagonists, including John's boss and one of the cops hot on their trail, plus a Morrissey analogue called Esteban.

"We figured if we actually put Morrisey in the comic, he'd sue us," the writer says. "I got my 'V card' punched to a Morrisey record, and I worked this into one of the issues — as John is losing his virginity, Esteban is in the room singing and it's horribly distracting."

One of the reasons that sex comedy is not done more in comics is that sex over the years has tended to be straight-pornography in comics, Zdarsky says. "You'll go into comic shops and there's the X-rated stuff over there and the superhero stuff over here, and there's the guy who goes in and buys them in the brown paper bags. There doesn't seem to be a lot of crossover with that."

Another factor is that comics were "lobotomized" in the 1950s by Frederic Wertham's work to curb sex and violence in the medium that ultimately led to the Comics Code Authority.

That made sure comics wouldn't be under the purview of adults for about 30 years, Fraction says. "We just stunted their growth from birth, and because of that it's never dealt with sex — it's dealt with what boys think is sexy. It deals with prepubescent juvenile power fantasies. Sex and sexuality is often equated with power, so you see a lot of chainmail-bikini (stuff) in comics that has passed for sex.

"We're doing a story about sex and it's funny, just point blank," he adds. "The relationship is there, but its about a relationship that's rooted in sex and becomes about love. That's tough to do all over. There's not a lot of Batarangs."

Fraction reveals that readers will see the seeds of Jon's criminal nature in the second Sex Criminals issue, though it's fairly victimless as it sucks Suzie in. "This is not True Romance. It grows in 3, and by 4 they're like, 'Let's break a law and see what happens.'

"I'm having a thing where I like them too much. I don't want to put them in too much danger."

Plus, Fraction's goal is to keep Jon and Suzie around for a while. And so far, so good — he and Zdarsky are having a launch party Sept. 25 for the book at a Toronto sex club where they'll be signing comic books in a hot tub ("It's like all of our dreams are coming true," the writer says) while preorders for the book in more staid comic shops are "startlingly strong."

The writer feels that if a book like Image's Chew can last, remain fresh and still have the outrageous premise of a law-enforcement type with cannibalistic powers, "there's room for us to do the same," he says.

"We're going to go until it stops being fun, or people start losing money. Much like sex."