We have endless webcomics about video games at our fingertips, screaming for our attention at every minute we spend surfing the comics sphere of the Internet. There are nigh infinite comics about movies, being a college student, being punk, hanging out, falling in love, going to hell, and having wacky, off the wall adventures. I don't know about you, but I do only a couple of those things on a day to day basis, and even that couple I do are things I hardly spend my spare time thinking about. You know what I spend my time thinking about? What my next job is, what I'm going to eat today, where my paycheck will come from this week, and sex. And sex. And also: sex.
I'm not alone in this. Most conversations I have touch on sex at some point. My friends are thinking about it too. I have to imagine that you're thinking about it a lot, yourself. You definitely are now. And depending on where you're reading from, you may be ashamed of that, or you might not. In Europe, sex is a fact of life. In parts of Asia such as Japan, there are unisex bath houses where men, women, and children casually walk around in the nude, as well as a bustling pornography industry that frequently operates shamelessly in broad daylight. Americans, on the other hand, are just beginning to grow vaguely accustomed to the sight of two men or women kissing on television. Television stations can be fined huge sums of money for displaying a woman's breasts, and, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, the "wide open beaver" (or, vagina, as the case may be) is both one of the most common things on the entire planet, and a grave national secret under serious legal protection. Repression is the name of the game in the USA, where sodomy laws still cling tenaciously and the Texas GOP is rearing to make performing a gay marriage a felony. In other words: I envy Europe.
Our fine arts tend not to reflect these attitudes greatly. Vonnegut, a famous critic of sexual repression, has been writing for half a century, now. Musicians are allowed to say more or less whatever they want, and they frequently do-- the government occasionally making ominous rumblings about censorship bills, but never really delivering. If you want to make a film with a lot of sexual content, you certainly can, although it will probably be a financial flop if you don't follow some odd rules, or make it all out pornography. And print comics? Why, they can and will do anything they want, though not always without blatantly unconstitutional legal consequences.
But the Examiner is a webzine about webcomics, and, webcomics are -- in spite of inhabiting the last, strongest bastion of true freedom of speech in this country, in this world -- easily the most irritatingly repressed medium of them all. Why is this? Because webcomics are frequently condescending fluff made to attract the largest possible audience. Because webcomics artists are-- to their benefit and to their detriment -- accessible in the extreme, and a vocal minority will frequently intimidate them into keeping their content from going into uncomfortable realms.
This extraordinarily long preface serves to introduce this thesis: Sexy Losers, while it may be turn out to be somewhat disposable in twenty or thirty years, is absolutely essential to the medium of webcomics today. I'm not kidding. I'm saying, in all seriousness, gentle readers: We are in desperate need of comics about fucking.
There are, of course, other sex comics out there. I've probably read the vast majority. They are, to put it gently, uniformly terrible. Some of them are sort of cute, you know, I don't necessarily hate them. But I wouldn't recommend you read them. Just being about sex doesn't make something good, even in this time of national repression. (On the subject of nationality: Hard, the pseudonymous author of the strip, is a Canadian expatriate currently residing in Japan.) What does make it good, even important, is the enlightened attitude it displays toward sex, along with its highly impressive craftsmanship and sharp writing.
Get this: Hard has a number of plotlines involving men who want sex, and the men aren't treated like disgusting, sweaty pigs with one thing on their minds. And imagine: wanting sex doesn't make a woman in his world licentious, "slutty", and ultimately somehow "masculine". If you can believe it: He's done maybe two "cock jokes" in his five year career. How shocking: unlike a horrifying majority of sexual humor, Sexy Losers never depends on racial slurrage to get a laugh. Instead, Hard uses sardonic wit and spot-on sexual observations to get a laugh, combined with plenty of shock value. Make no mistake: not everyone can read this strip, or should. But for those of us fed up with the repression that is undeniably damaging our society, a little shock value seems appropriate, even necessary. The pioneers in any field have always had to carry the biggest, nastiest guns. You'll see all manner of bodily fluids in every kind of context, and ideally, you'll laugh. Don't feel bad if you don't-- for once, it very well may be society's fault.
Come on, people. Semen is funny. It's the great equalizer.
Hard rotates a large cast of bizarre, disturbed, and perfectly innocent characters with all manner of kinks, fetishes, and personality disorders. Each plotline tends to have a pervasive running gag-- take Mike, a masturbation-obsessed man who has turned his hobby into a veritable art form. Whenever you see him around, you can pretty much expect to see some masturbation. The joke is usually in how we get from some seemingly unrelated situation to the inevitable act. No matter what, each character can be counted on to at least attempt to satisfy their deepest desires-- or, in some cases, and devastatingly: change them.
Thematically, this is suggestive of a sharp understanding of what drives non-reproductive sex in the first place. We all have deep emotional needs that get repressed, much like sexual desire does, and the needs and desire end up entangled. Eventually, both will have to be satisfied. Sexy Losers makes a lot of how strange our desires can be, and how desperate we can be to fulfill them full on-- rushing toward self destruction with our eyes wide open, looking the inevitable results of our excesses.
The exemplary plotline in this case is also probably the strip's most notorious and controversial. Years ago, readers of the comic were introduced to a woman who lusted for her son. She spent years attempting to seduce him, rebuffed at every turn by her son's all-consuming naivet. Then he got a girlfriend. The girlfriend and his mother began competing for his affections. Just as he began to really understand what was going on, the mother and girlfriend ended up together. He was, quite honestly, destroyed. Sex can do that to people. Like Sexy Losers, sex is silly, funny, and underneath it all, horrifying in its power. It's very scary that we will do these things-- and make no mistake, there are millions of people in the world in the act of replicating everything you see in this strip, even as you read this-- just to achieve orgasm, an intense but incredibly brief experience with little or no consequence in our day to day lives. But, as this strip points out, we most certainly will. People are idiots.
In Sexy Losers, it must seem to some that the artist sees the world as a hedonistic, nightmarish place of endless orgiastic entanglements. But three factors must be taken into account. Firstly, the four panel gag strip has never been held responsible for realistically portraying the world. Nor should it. The idea that a cartoon aiming for humor can, in four panels run once weekly, reflect the realities of life is absurd. But if critics of the comic are not objecting to it solely on the basis of its sexual content-- and I haven't any interest in the views of those who are-- then this perceived failure must be their complaint. This is at least sympathetic as a possible issue, but ultimately, it's flat out stupid. Nobody complains about Penny-Arcade making it seem as though all young men do is hang out in pairs and discuss video games. Secondly, the strip is, at its most frequent, delivered weekly, rarely with events in any one plotline following on each other's heels. Months of time frequently pass between the sexual events portrayed in the lives of these characters. We are only seeing one aspect of their lives. The comic makes that clear at every turn. It's easy to be shocked out of reading between the lines and understanding that these characters have lives beyond what we're seeing, but we can hardly criticize Hard for our own shortcomings as readers. Thirdly, the distorting nature of cartooning is well documented. Yes, ultimately, Sexy Losers does portray a world where sex is perhaps more important than real life. Fair enough. But I personally find it horrifying that critics rage about this while lauding comics featuring constant and pervasive violence and murder. If you honestly find incest more horrifying than decapitation or dismemberment, clearly, our society has failed in some truly essential way.
This is not to say that the strip does not have its shortcomings. There are numerous examples throughout its archives of moments where the creator seems to run out of ideas and relies purely on shock value, often with disturbing results. In the most recent case, a son is eating breakfast while his mother, works just out of the camera's focus. He talks about having a dream about going into her room and beating and screwing her, and voices some concern that something must be horribly wrong with her. Predictably, it is revealed that he did indeed do exactly that the night before. She's beaten, bruised, and harried. This was gross and it was shocking, but it wasn't funny. It built up an expectation and then followed through on exactly that expectation, and not even in an extraordinary way. One wishes Hard had a collaborator of some sort to provide him with fresh ideas, or that he would at least stop taking these creative lulls as an impetus to amp up the shock value factor of his humor. Neither is likely to happen any time soon, and this issue is likely to continue unresolved.
What ties the strip together, and what makes it truly fine art, though, is its fine art. Those few webcomics portraying sex exist tend to be truly hideous, betraying an underlying belief that sexuality is somehow inherently ugly. In this case, the opposite is true-- while many of the circumstances portrayed are hardly aesthetically pleasing, they are uniformly rendered in lushly detailed, computer-crafted manga style. The art of Sexy Losers hasn't always been like this. It started out as relatively crude black and white manga fare with the occasional spark of artistic life, and gradually grew into the work of beauty that it is today. There have been some awkward phases along the way, with his normally invisible line-work occasionally exploding inexplicably, but mostly it's been really amazing work, especially considering this is a free internet comic.
Sexy Losers, the premiere webcomic dealing mainly with sexuality now and for the past five years, certainly has its shortcomings. But its function is vital to this community, this time, this country, this medium. Webcomics cannot expect their Tropic of Cancer, their The 158 Pound Marriage, their David Boring to be built overnight. First, we will need to be willing to discuss, portray, and enjoy sex in a mature manner. Most of all, we will need to be able to laugh at it. Because if you're constantly holding back laughter while you try to talk about something, you'll never truly be able to take it seriously. With his gorgeous graphic art, smart dialogue and sharp observations, Hard is doing more than his fair share in the task of starting this conversation. The controversy he stirs up will, ultimately, be an aide to all of us: Hard helps us know where we stand, and forces us to ask ourselves as readers why exactly that is. In a world where the shockingly sadistic Jack is considered art of the highest order, there is no excuse for persecuting one little sexy webcomic creator. So long as violence is held above sex as a proper subject for art, our society is truly, deeply sick.
Sometimes, a little shock treatment is exactly what the doctor ordered.
