Sex vol. 2: Supercool

The short version is that despite what the title would have you believe, this volume is certainly not that.  It continues the story of former superhero Simon Cooke as he tries to resume life as an ordinary billionaire head of a multinational corporation.  Complicating this is the fact that his former sidekick isn’t ready to give up the life at all and is embarking on his own plan to clean up the streets of Saturn City himself.  Even though they used to work together, the dynamic between them couldn’t be more different and writer Joe Casey gets some good dramatic irony from their relationship as we know why Simon quit the life.  Keenan, the sidekick, is justifiably pissed at him for apparently doing it without a good reasons.  Then you’ve got Simon’s former rogues gallery from his time as the Armored Saint, and it’s pretty amusing to see that they’re just as lost as he is without this opponent to pit themselves against.  I liked what I read, but there’s no denying that the story is on a very slow burn here.  While the deconstruction of the cast is interesting to watch, after a while you start to wish that something would happen to give the story a bit more direction and momentum.  Something more than watching the Cooke Company manage a trade deal with a Japanese corporation and cover things up when the sexual proclivities of its boss lead to disaster.

Ah, but I can’t forget to talk about the title element.  There’s still plenty of sex in “Sex” and if you’ve read “Sex Criminals” and thought to yourself, “This isn’t bad, but what it really needs is MORE penises!” then this is the book for you.  Really, by the end of the volume I wish we had seen more of the Prank Addict’s fake cock gag given the amount of male genitalia on display here.  The sex also feels a lot more gratuitous in this volume compared to the first.  You could argue that its presence here in this volume is to show how it forges connections between people both good, with Keenan and his girlfriend, and bad, the Old Man’s interrogation of the Prank Addict.  In that context, the three pages we have of Simon masturbating in the shower make perfect sense.  It still doesn’t make me think that it wasn’t completely unnecessary, and now that this book has to exist in a post-”Sex Criminals” world these kinds of scenes really stand out.  That title does an excellent job of making its sexual content feel like a natural part of its world, and more relatable too even in its fantastic context.  Should there be less sex in “Sex?”  I’m starting to feel that would be a viable and welcome approach after these two volumes.