Sex Criminals #6

"Coming On"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

"Honeymoon's over" (Sex Criminals #6: 6).

Following their thrilling escape from the Sex Police, Jon and Suzie return home jacked on adrenaline and ecstatic with relief.  One hot round of sex later, they discover just how the Sex Police were able to stalk them, a Quiet detector (or "cumpass").  This little piece of tech—looking remarkably like a cellphone but necessarily bankrolled by a financial titan—proves to the would-be criminal couple just how in over their heads they are.

Now it's Jon's turn to narrate their unlikely and adventurous romance.  After their bank-robbing escapade and their brush with the white-clad enforcers of the sexually superpowered, Suzie's life more or less returns to normal.  She's granted a slight, but manageable, reprieve for her library, and she throws herself into her job.  Jon, on the other hand, finds it much harder to recover his equilibrium.

In a very awkward exchange at the bank, he's confronted by the stern lady of the Sex Police, he becomes obsessed with tracking the "bloop"s on the cumpass, he becomes increasingly frustrated by Suzie's distraction from their sex life, and he grows paranoid about being followed and watched.  As his stress and mental instability spiral out, he gets shingles, self-diagnoses cancer and AIDS, and eventually must seek help from a psychiatrist and return to the medication that numbed him out.  There are real stakes.  Real consequences.  But the Sex Police's vindictive interference with Suzie's library, their petty decision to punish the lovers despite giving up any criminal activity, and the smug confidence of their "Sex Batman" Kuber Badal, launches Jon out of his medicated stupor and into a righteous fury for his lover's sake.

Sex Criminals may have taken a turn for the decidedly darker, but Fraction and Zdarsky have maintained the comic's characteristic humor.  Their lives may have become infinitely more complicated by their entanglements with the Sex Police and their brief foray into a life of crime, but they've lost neither their wit nor their affection for one another.

"I don't know what the Ass Men of America did to the Bilderberg Group or the president or whomever it is that really runs the show to make them somehow convince...  ...literally every woman alive that leggings and tights are actually pants, but... ...but as an ass man myself, jesus, well done ass-illuminati."  (15)

Two panels later, a middle-aged bearded man walks by in maroon leggings.  That's still what kind of comic this is.