Read This Now: Sex Criminals Volume One
Look, I’m not much for comic books or graphic novels or comic strips or anything. I don’t know why but I never have been. I’ve read and liked the classics, Maus, Persepolis, etc. but generally I go in for a lot of words crammed together on a page, no pictures just the movie machine of my brain. I don’t need illustrations and I don’t need word bubbles mainly because they seem distracting and gimmicky and like, a way to mask just stupid writing.
There is however one circumstance when most humans can agree that pictures help: sex. Sex Criminals, as the name suggests, is very much totally about sex and so the graphic element works and is necessary really. Sex Criminals the novel would be boring and stupid, maybe even like who cares and how ridiculous; two people stop time when they have orgasms? And so they get together and rob banks? What? But drawn and colored you get to see the sex, the magical orgasm auras, the moments of silence, and it seems…not feasibly obviously but relatable. Anyone who’s had sex knows it can have a magical quality to it and something about it always feels slightly dangerous, like what if we get caught?
Maybe this is the thing that a graphic novel can accurately depict that a just-words novel can’t, that I’ve never really considered before: things that happen in silence or beyond words, that need space. There are so many things you witness in Sex Criminals that happen without explanation and that would just lose their power if they had to be described. For example, a dude pooping in a potted plant. Just typing that out I had think of how it would be possible for me to use words to describe it without telling you how to feel. “Pooping” already seems too childish but “defecating” is too technical, scientific and removed and “shitting” seems unnecessarily angry and also like something a frat boy might say. The drawing of this instance though gives you a feeling different from those words–a feeling that doesn’t have a verb that goes with it.
Look, I’m describing this book in a really square way, like the goddamn English Major I am, that I will probably always be. But the truth is, it’s just great. It’s fun to read, it’s sexy, it’s pretty and it isn’t stupid, by which I mean: it isn’t mindless or offensive. It’s sex positive. It’s feminist. I can’t wait for Volume Two. Read it now you, dirty, dangerous sex lovers!
The Tusk 
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