“Sexy Losers”
Drawn and written by Hard
Updates weekly (currently on hiatus)
For those lucky few for which this will be their first link, the World Wide Web is filled with pornography. For pay, for free, or for pop-up, the web is filled with carnal media. Very little of this painting of whores is of any value beyond demonstrations of what one lover can get another to do for posterity. Fetish is now facilitated beyond the dreams of trench coat-wearing grubby-theater loiterers. Electronic stimulation through image, sound, and text swiftly replaces what was once the most adult of activities and reduces it to a mere cheap cartoon.
Truly, it was with distaste that I accepted this assignment. Sullied pornography is not my inclination, as any encounter with a true and accommodating lover swiftly proves the shallowness of this alternative. One of the exceptions I found to this is Sexy Losers, a web-comic that looks beyond mere sex and into the human heart and the relationships of mature adults.
The work itself is of reasonable quality and layout, and exhibits a considerable Manga-influence in basic style. It is arrayed multi-paneled, in color, and is produced sequentially in individual and arc formats; but all this is distraction.
Though purported to be a comedy where sex is used to make the joke, it is more of a comedy d’art. The creator has managed to cleanse a tawdry exercise and use it to demonstrate the forte and foible of the human experience. Even as more and more outre fetishes are presented within the work, starting with the Oedipal and rocketing past necrophilia to the scatological, the basic stories are laid more cleanly bare with each taboo broken. Vulnerability, hope, adoration, alienation, ennui, and all else is presented in a bawdy picture show that clothes the nude and strips the clothed. People are at the heart of the matter, and that is what makes them adult.
A poor boy-man wants a woman, and repeatedly fails by fortune’s whim. He endures degradation after degradation, all the while his travails are born witness to by super-ego and id. A mother’s lust for her virile man-child shows the pain of her own marriage and the lack of her own fulfillment; she eventually kills her fresh and fertile rival through her insatiable lusts. A love-struck girl spirals down from being a mortician to a necrophiliac to find acceptability in the eyes of the alienated man to which she is attracted. That man seeks the dead because the pain of the living is unbearable to him. A woman’s upbringing in family of coprophagists places her in conflict with the world and its feared rejection. Dutch wives are brought to life. Masturbation becomes a discipline and fills the empty hours of a life bereft of aspiration. Scientists try to create solutions but find no cures.
For those of legal age and mature mind, I whole-heartedly recommend Sexy Losers for its insight into the Human condition. The body is the temple of the mind, not the reverse.