‘Small Favors': A Girly Porno Comic about a Woman in Love with her Conscience [Sex]

Good erotica should make you want to reach under the covers when you read it, and warm yourself up to the level of the acrobatic characters on the page. Great erotica should leave you in a happy post-pornographic glow, filled with thoughts about how fun and loving sex can be. Colleen Coover's "girly porno comic" Small Favors is just that kind of great erotica, with an intriguing premise: Annie is a masturbation-obsessed lady who falls deeply in love with her own conscience.Small Favors is set in a magical city populated exclusively with beautiful, fun-loving ladies. Annie lives next door to one of those women, the gorgeous Yuriko, and spends most of her days spying and imagining all the sexy things the two of them could be doing together. But since Annie is too shy to approach Yuriko, and so the only person she ends up pleasuring is herself.

Because Annie can't go more than a few minutes without fiddling with her lady bits, her conscience decides to intervene. The queen of Annie's conscience assigns Nibbil, and adorably blond sprite, to keep Annie's wandering fingers clean. Nibbil turns out to be a poor choice for the assignment, since the first thing she does is pop on top of Annie's nipple and bring herself to orgasm. Oops. Annie is, of course, immediately smitten with this sexually imaginative piece of her conscience, and soon they are going at it day and night.

It might seem strange to sex up your own superego with a strap-on, but Annie and Nibbil's relationship is delightfully uncomplicated. The first few issues of Small Favors are devoted to Annie and Nibbil's sexual play. Nibbil can grow to be Annie's size or shrink to the size of a sex toy, and the two take great delight in imagining all the varied ways they can please each other.

Soon, Annie and Nibbil start taking their sexual play outside the house, bringing other equally playful ladies into their sexy orbit (including Janus, another initially uptight piece of Annie's conscience). What's clear throughout these games is the intense affection all these sexual partners feel for one another. Small Favors features bondage (sometimes magical), sadism, and masochism, but the girls always do it with a wink and a nod, telegraphing that it's all done in great fun, in the name of everyone's physical and emotional pleasure. When they've exhausted their orgasms, these are women who collapse into a cuddling heap and then all go out for brunch. And if there was any doubt about the tone of these sexual antics, Coover introduces the comic's mascot Bean, an adorable gerbil creature who provides a great deal of the narration.

Coover also uses her medium to its greatest advantage, breaking the fourth wall to make the reader an accomplice in the sexual games. Nibbil makes it clear that she gets off on having the readers watch her at play. It's a clever trick, but it also absolves us readers for peeking in on the not-so-private lives of these ladies. We may be voyeurs, but like everyone else in Small Favors, we've been invited in to receive our pleasure.

Small Favors was originally published by the Fantagraphics Eros Comix imprint, and a new collection is due out from Top Shelf later this year.