Written by: Matt Fraction
Art by: Chip Zdarsky
Publisher: Image
It’s getting really hard to feel like I’m reading something the creators actually wanted to make every time I pick up an ever-more-infrequent issue of Sex Criminals. After the last installment ended with an overly-meta conversation between writer Matt Fraction and artist Chip Zdarsky talking about how they thought the culmination of the Ana-Suzie tension should go, one would reasonably expect some kind of aftermath, resolution, or recap. Instead, the rivalry that’s been growing as far back as the first few issues (when Ana was only in their lives as an old porn star in photos) has been conveniently worked through off-panel, and Ana and Suzie are the best of chums. There are a lot of reasons to read Sex Criminals, but if you’re the least bit interested in the interpersonal conflict angle of the book, this episode is just the period at the end of a disappointing sentence.
As if the meta-glossing-over of an important conversation in the last issue wasn’t enough, this issue features another (shorter, though) author commentary in place of another (less important, though) scene. Normally it’d be forgivable or even funny coming from this duo, but when every issue from the last six months has an example of this, it becomes a little tedious. It seems clear that, to some degree at least, Fraction’s become bored with the series and just doesn’t have the same love for it that he did around the time of its inception.
Despite how hard it appears to be for Fraction to go through writing the book, Sex Criminals is still easy to read. The story is always going to be worth following as long as the creative team’s humour is still around, and as of this issue, it still is. SexCrimz remains one of the few books that manages to bring the funny on both fronts, with Fractions dialogue and Zdarsky’s background art both eliciting laughs from me this issue (the Mantique store being the highlight).
Taking a step back, the main plot of the series continues to move at a near snail’s pace. We still don’t know exactly why the Sex Police do what they do, we still don’t know what they’re going to do next, and we still don’t know what type of role the other random sex-powered people will play. As the story progresses, however, Fraction has done a swell job with expanding the character lineup. The cast is becoming bigger and more colourful, and hopefully this will help propel the next stage of the story as this volume wraps up.
