By Dustin Cabeal

Here is something you don’t particularly want to say with a title like Sex Fantasy, it wasn’t what I thought it would be. Now, that makes me sound like a pervert, and I guess I’ll just wear that for a moment as I explain that I didn’t think this would be about sex at all. It sometimes wasn’t, but other times it was.

Usually, when a comic is weird, you’ve got my attention and my readership. Sex Fantasy was weird, but not my kind of weird. At times it was, but then at other times it came across as life advice being passed on from the author to the reader and I’m frankly too old and comfortable in my life to need the advice. Its meant for a younger person or maybe someone still searching for themselves.

What is unique and rather striking about the book is that each page is one panel. This often gives the story a flip book like feel which is something you rarely see in comics. It worked incredibly well and made reading the stories go by quickly. This is a monster of a book, by the way, clocking in at over 400 pages so being able to read it with any kind of speed is fantastic. Most of the time when I pick up a book of this size I plan on reading it the entire day but didn’t find that to be the case with Sex Fantasy.

The different chapters collected in this book are all different. A few of them feel connected, but by the time the story comes back around to them, I had long forgotten the details of what I had read. I suspect that’s what will happen with most people that read this book. There were a few stories that stood out, one being autobiographical. I’m not going to judge the relationship, but it was insightful. Perhaps my favorite story came towards the end and was about a woman the size of a mouse that was traveling to get it one with her boyfriend only to have a blizzard ruin everything. At first, it seemed like it was just a metaphor, but then it definitely wasn’t. It was a strange, goofy story that was entertaining to read.

Something that strangely hurt the overall reading experience is that you could see the creator develop and change the stories. Dialogue plays into the latter parts of the volume and in general the storytelling changes. Usually, I’m a fan of seeing a creator grow and develop before my eyes, but the changes were jumps instead of an overall steadiness which made the reading experience suffer.

The art was the star of the book. While the faces were intentionally vague and in a chosen style, the rest of the art was realistic; from the body movement to the way, the clothing hangs from the body. All of the characters have realistic body shapes and sizes, obviously not in the tale I mentioned before because that was the intent of that story. I will say that seeing the art get better and better was a treat. You can see the creator become more comfortable as the work goes on.

While Sex Fantasy wasn’t what I was expecting, it was an entertaining read. It was something different, and for that, I would recommend it, but I also would say that I didn’t love it. It was interesting, and I’m sure that others will take different things away from it, which is perhaps the biggest reason to read it.

Score: 3/5

Sex Fantasy
Creator: Sophia Foster-Dimino
Publisher: Koyama Press