Sex Criminals #4

"Sex Police"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

The doves have nested in the Cumworld sign, and they line their nests with condom wrappers.  It's poetic.  Of a sort.  For the most part, Sex Criminals has traded in this kind of gleeful wit, one that celebrates sex in all its awkward, ridiculous glory.  It can do this, though, because sex has been mediated by Suzie and Jon, two protagonists with healthy perspectives on sexual relationships, respect for their lovers, and generous sexual dispositions.  They want to please one another, but they acknowledge boundaries and are both shown to reciprocate.  The hormonal bliss of their sex life has (so far, at least) rendered them so charismatic and likable that their sometimes juvenile Robin-Hood mission has evaded much moral scrutiny.  When the white-clad woman with sharp cheekbones and even sharper eyebrows interrupts their bank robbery in earlier issues, she arrives as a villain to Suzie and Jon's Bonnie and Clyde.

Where there is sex, there are sex police.  Here, literally.  Part of what made Suzie and Jon's affair so magical was the (temporary) absence of regulation, of forces trying to control and manipulate their sexual experiences.  They were, to a significant extent, free from judgment, each others' and the outside world's.  And perhaps, if they'd avoided trouble-making—like robbing banks and rearranging the displays at Cumworld—the duo would never have raised alarms, but they didn't and they did.  It puts the heroes of Sex Criminals in a precarious moral position.  Jon's seething bitterness at his employer often verges on petulance, and Suzie's moral rage at institutionalized injustice occasionally totters into revenge.  Corporate prosperity at the expense of individual hardship is morally troubling and socially detrimental if legally defensible, but it does little to ameliorate the illegality of the lovers' crimes, which the narrator Suzie already realizes.  Geoff's rape of Rachel is contemptible, and though the authorities' dismissal of Suzie's complaint is legally responsible, since Suzie couldn't convince the traumatized Rachel to file with the police, the misogynistic justification of Geoff's actions by the officer she spoke with is shameful and cruel.

The titular "sex police," however, continue to be enigmatic, and the failure to advance their contribution in the series for four issues now is perhaps the only weakness in Fraction and Zdarsky's story.  They might have been exposed as frauds—though their leader seems to be a police dispatcher—but their actual after-hours jobs as regulators of sexually gifted time-stoppers remains unexplained.  The cliffhanger ending, though, promises explanations shortly and a more comprehensive shuffling of the story structure.