Chances are, if you’re reading this website you’ve heard of Matt Fraction. From “Immortal Iron Fist” to “Invincible Iron Man”, Fraction is a prolific creator who has been creating popular and cult comics since 2003. But as 2013 passes its halfway point and a burgeoning dive back into the world of the creator-owned becomes ever more apparent, things are different. In Fraction’s own words, in fact, “In 2012 I didn’t think anybody would hire me in 2013.”
With that in mind, next month sees the launch of “Sex Criminals”, a new book from Image Comics by Fraction and Chip Zdarsky (who we talked to earlier today). In it, Jon and Suzie meet, only to find that they both have the power to stop time when they have sex — so what better to do with this newfound connection than to go on a crime spree? “It’s about a weird girl meeting a weird boy and they hook up and go on an adventure together,” Fraction said in an interview with myself. “It could not be MORE steeped in sex comedy tropes if it featured Eddie Deezen.”
True enough, the first issue of “Sex Criminals” is a bit of a riot. It starts off just as you’d imagine a book called “Sex Criminals” would (honestly — just give it a go) and quickly grows from there, at times even getting a bit hard around the edges. And what’s nice about the book is that the more you read and the faster and faster you turn the pages as you anticipate the finale, you’ll find that it all manages to coalesce wonderfully in the end with a bursting climax that unleashes upon your eyes, creating quite an enjoyable first experience in this new world that’ll leave you satisfied and ready to come back for more. It’s charming, quite funny and a great coming-out party for Fraction and Zdarsky to the world.
Part of the reason that it’s so easy to enjoy is that it’s clear that this is a book full of just what Fraction and Zdarsky want to do. For Fraction, the question of what itches it satisfies is quite simple. “Wanting to work with Chip, wanting to write a sex comedy, wanting to write a dirty Billy Wilder story, wanting to do something I’d never done before, loving time travel stories and stories with time-gimmicks in them, wanting to find a way to do something I’d never seen or read before… I wish comics had more comics that were funny, about sex, and that comics had more female characters that weren’t sexy lamps.” It’s a solid list of creative wants and needs that the book manages to appease in its entertaining first outing, and a sharp outline of what the book has in store for whats to come.
What I find most impressive about the first issue is how it manages to predict expectations and inevitably exceed them. It’s probably fair to say that a book called “Sex Criminals” with creative names on the cover like Fraction and Zdarsky create certain levels of expectations based on their careers to date, but the book manages to both deliver and move past any ostensible limitations you might assume it to have. In fact, there are quite a few jokes in there that are surprising just in how off the cuff they are, or even downright filthy. It’s a fun, sweaty mix.
But what will probably surprise a lot of people is that, despite the otherwise raunchy humor you’d assume the book would have, the book is actually quite heartfelt. In fact, the book’s really like a more explicit (500) Days of Summer than it is a quirky Penthouse Forum letter. The first issue of the series spends a lot of time developing the female lead Suzie, and its a mix of a character study and a teen sex comedy, consciously but aptly straddling the line between the two ideals. It’s actually that aspect of “Sex Criminals” that makes the first issue that much more endearing overall; the mix of comedy and really personable storytelling allows you to get into Suzie’s state of mind for the otherwise ludicrous events of the book’s central concept — and, as Fraction puts it, it’s “not just tits and dick jokes.”
Continued below“I don’t think that’s somber, necessarily,” Fraction said. “I think that’s a whiff of gravity. It’s got to be grounded in something otherwise it’s, like, a shitty rejected story from MAD, y’know? Look at, like, Some Like It Hot or The Apartment or The To-Do List or The 40-Year Old Virgin — no matter how off-the-rails funny and weird they go, there’s gravity somewhere to keep it all from flying off into Not Another Teen Movie territory or whatever the fuck that thing was called.”
“There’s a lot of me and Chip for real in the story but there’s a lot of fiction too.”
Truly, a lot of the book’s mentality in the writing can be found in the work of Billy Wilder. “I saw The Apartment and Some Like It Hot in college and just fell in love. That encoded stuff, that whole era — post-Hayes, pre-seventies thing. Whether it’s Miracle at Morgan’s Creek and Betty Hutton dancing with all those soldiers, or A Foreign Affair and that mattress… something about attacking filth with charm and wit delights me on some level. Add that to a very current mode of emotional honesty and graphic embarrassment and you really have something.”
“I like Wilder as a director but I love him as a writer. The most formative bit of advice I ever got came from his rules of storytelling — let the audience add up two plus two and they’ll love you forever. My whole thing about wanting co-conspirators instead of consumers, everything about the way I tell my stories, the whole wait and see and read the fucking book of it all — I can trace right back to Wilder.”
Of course, the biggest part of what makes “Sex Criminals” ultimately work is due to Fraction teaming up with the impossibly funny Chip Zdarsky (sometimes also known as Steve Murray) for the book. Fans of Zdarsky already know him for his raunchy and taboo-pushing sense of humor, whether randomly via his Twitter feed or at the National Post, and it feeds into the book perfectly. “I love to talk with him and kind of… feel him out, as it were. It’s been great. He’s one of the funniest guys I know and the REAL him of it, the Steve Murray of it all, is just as vital as the Chip Zdarsky of it all.”
What Zdarsky brings to the table is uncanny. Fraction is certainly known amongst his fans for his sense of humor, both clever and absurdist, but Zdarsky is like a whirlwind of unpredictable comedy. As such, the book very much feeds off of Zdarsky’s quirky sense of humor, packed to the brim with silly background jokes (“Sexual Gary” is probably my favorite so far) and on-point characterization and facial foibles that really sell the lines of the book. Zdarsky’s style is best described (perhaps) as cartoonish photo-realism, with the characters themselves able to take on a more lifelike quality due to his use of real life models (the male character of which, Jon, not being modeled after Fraction, which Zdarsky claims is an accident, and Fraction doesn’t see — though I did ask in both interviews). It allows the book to have it’s cake and eat it too, in a sense; Fraction writes his Wilder comedy, and Zdarsky really brings it to life; I’d wager that if Wilder were to make a modern comedy akin to Seven Year Itch or Some Like It Hot with a lot of the innuendo brought straight to the forefront, we’d get something like “Sex Criminals.”
And as this is Zdarsky’s first entry into the mainstream world of comics, he and Fraction work closely on the series to ensure that we get the best of both their worlds. While most people will note Fraction’s work both recent and in the past utilizing a more free form feel with execution — particularly “Hawkeye” and the Marvel-style scripts done with David Aja and other collaborators on the book — “Sex Criminals” is a bit more direct with Fraction writing a full script, “partially because he’d never worked with a writer before on something like this and partially because it’s a comedy and the timing is super-important. Not that my timing is better than his or anything but I needed to present a fleshed-out first draft, I thought, so we could improve upon it.”
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This allows Fraction and Zdarsky to keep a very collaborative process going on the book between the two of them. “Case in point, we struck a whole scene from the first issue and replaced it with one of the funnier ones, based on his notes back to me off the first script. We can, like, come up with “The Candle in the Wind” and a Princess Di joke playing off of a guy sticking his dick out of a window in one breath, then he’d find a read of that scene beyond what I’d intended that actually makes the character of Rachelle far richer and sweeter.” So you can be sure that both the intensely comedic minds of Fraction and Zdarsky are on display within the pages of the series.
But mostly it works because Fraction and Zdarsky have a great unspoken connection between the two of them. “One time I talked to him when I was pooping but I don’t think he knew.”
Fraction has another book at Image at the moment with slightly similar aspirations in terms of content, but the two books couldn’t be more diverse. “One’s comedy, one’s drama. It’s like apples and bicycles,” Fraction said of his other series “Satellite Sam” (with Howard Chaykin). Fans may be able to find some similar paths in terms of the adult content they deal with, but one thing inherently different with each book is it’s take on intimacy and whether or not it’s something sordid or celebratory. “It’s all written and.. it’s carefully considered,” Fraction notes. “We’re not making a book that’s prurient.” So where “Satellite Sam” is black, “Sex Criminals” bathes in a certain kind of white — one that’s perhaps a bit sticky, though they’ll both push boundaries of different degrees for different reasons. For “Sex Criminals,” it’s all in the name of humor. “In service of a joke nothing goes too far. That said it’s a sex comedy and not a sex- …sex. There’s nothing prurient here deliberately; nothing designed to titillate the way that an issue of BLOW JOB is designed.”
“There’s an internal barometer of taste and respect we apparently have that we’ll always obey,” Fraction notes. “But that’s more about creating, about writing, period — but no, there’s nowhere we won’t want to go if we feel we’ve earned it. I mean, our second cover shows a guy emerging from an ocean of cum… or, y’know, maybe it’s just highly contrasting graphics of a guy wading in water. U decide.”
“Sex Criminals” is ultimately the kind of book you probably didn’t even realize you wanted, but is definitely one you need. The world of creator-owned comics are seeing a resurgence as creators who cut their teeth on indie comics and made names at Marvel or DC come home, with new stories to tell and a revitalized love for the medium. “Sex Criminals” is certainly one of those books, one that comes from a need to tell fun, new and original stories with less rules; or perhaps even no rules at all. It’s a book that wallows in filth but also captures a real quality of the human spirit, somewhat in the way that all your favorite John Hughes movies or John Green novels are able to do. It fills a very specific void for you, one you perhaps didn’t even know existed but certainly enjoy having filled on your way down to Pleasure Town.
And don’t worry. Fraction and Zdarsky have plenty of stamina in them. “We’re going to go until they make us stop. We have years of stories in this world we could tell.”
“Sex Criminals” #1 goes on sale September 25th with a Diamond Order Code of JUL130403. An additional preview of the first issue can be found here.
