Suzie has a line in the final issue of Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s “Sex Criminals”: “And after a while, you stop asking about someone, you stop thinking about someone. Doesn’t mean I stopped caring.” Jon, equally preoccupied with the thought of seeing his fellow series lead after some time apart, narrates: “Now I know what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid it’s going to hurt.” Their personal thoughts betray a nearly universal experience – that fear, rational or otherwise, of running into an ex at a wedding.
The thing about “Sex Criminals” was it was always the sneakiest bastard. It was a bunch of dick jokes behind which lay a throbbing, veiny heart and something much more emotionally investing. It was about the complexities of relationships and the spectrum of sexual politics but also dick jokes and puns and sight gags and Comic Sans font.
And all that reached its tantric climax with this week’s issue #69 (again, nice), which jumps 39 issues into the future and centers on the wedding of Bud and Dewey, two supporting players who started out as antagonists for our leads but over time, like the rest of the cast, realized how lonely they were and, with Jon, Suzie and the others, formed a sex-powers Justice League that was ill-equipped to tackle its Lex Luthor, the power-obsessed sociopath Kuber Badal.
The issue is a lesson in the way other people’s stories continue out of our sight, as people whose bonds were forged in the fires of narrative conflict lose touch, reconnect briefly and then peel away, one by one or two by two, back to their own lives. We’ve already had the big payoff of the main plot of the book – and the ridiculousness of the “Sexual Gary Special” – so, for 24 more pages, we just get to live with these characters and share their joy, their contentment and their open bar.
Metatextually, the end of “Sex Criminals” is another nail in the coffin of the Peak Image era, that period in the early to mid-2010s that gave us “The Walking Dead” and “Saga” and “Wicked + the Divine.” And though the series was shorter than all of those, it’s ending now because we discovered a thing about Zdarsky during the making of it that we knew about Fraction going in:
He’s really good at writing comics.
Since “Sex Crims” started in 2013, Zdarsky has given us “Howard the Duck,” “Marvel Two-in-One,” “Spectacular Spider-Man,” “Daredevil,” “The White Trees,” “Afterlift” and his new creator-owned project, the small-town-with-a-dark-secret series “Stillwater” from Image. Like a Pokemon, he has evolved before our very eyes from a dick-joke Bulbasaur to a pathos-laden Venusaur.
Zdarsky the cartoonist became a treat we got only once in a while, like on “Spectacular” #310 and his recent short with Fraction in “Detective Comics” #1,027.
But the final issue shows how far Zdarsky’s come as an artist as well, as he finds subtle ways to indicate how his characters have aged a few years. Some have gained weight, some have gotten new haircuts, one has a bit of a prison body. All of them sport faces a little wearier from their adventures of just a few years ago. They’re tired, but they’re also happy, in this moment, this small bit of joy stolen from a world that abused them not so long ago.
And as the reader closes the book or the comiXology tab or whatever, and returns to a world riddled with coronavirus and political uncertainty and social unrest and economic anxiety, they can smile just a little, knowing these characters they spent seven years with got a happy ending.
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…
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I regret nothing.
Post-coital notes
- Bud and Dewey describe each other the way I describe comics sometimes: A lot of “dude” and “awesome” and “dang” punctuated by brief moments of eloquence. Not everyone is a goddamn wordsmith, OK?
- We talked a lot about Zdarsky in this, but Fraction wrote one of my favorite bits of comics this year in “Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen” when Jimmy takes off his wetsuit to reveal a tuxedo underneath and later takes off the tuxedo to reveal another wetsuit underneath.
- Raiden and Oberta Rainbow are great pun names, and I will fight you if you say otherwise.
- Bud Rivers was a bus driver. Do you see? DO YOU SEE?
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
