Chester 5000 XYV by Jess Fink

Ah, comics erotica, when you're good, you're good, when you're bad, that's normal.  The story of a woman and her sex robot, Chester 5000 XYV is somewhere in between. A mostly silent, Victoriana-themed, hardcore is promising of course, and the fact that there is a sweetness and fun about the whole book is even better. But the thing about about art meant to jingle jangle your downstairs is that it kind of matters what you are into and I am into story and this is where the book forgets foreplay.

The book opens with heterosexual newlyweds going at it. They seem to be having a good time when the man looks disturbed and runs from the room. The next panel is the wife looking sad and the husband thinking hard. The next page is devoted to his construction of the titular robot, before he hands his wife the key and runs off. The rest of the story shows the evolving relationship between wife and robot, husband and jealousy and a determined brunette and all three of them, but, storytelling-wise, that first page haunts the rest of the book.

Husband flees wife

I can't figure out why the husband flees the bedroom and decides to replace himself with a robot, which makes his eventual jealousy less interesting, and his love for his wife less believable. The book copy has an answer, but I don't read book copy and didn't even look at it until writing this review. It says that he is too busy thinking of inventions to fuck, but it doesn't ring true, partially because of the time he is shown jackin' to their shenanigans and partially because he creates a robot that can love her. The brunette's lack of distinguishability (besides hair) from the wife also bugged. If her body looked different from the wife's it would have helped give her more of a character, especially with much of the action in this book happening during, well, action. The usual cartoony mangling of anatomical detail (missing buttholes, weird proportions, etc.) crops up here and there which is distracting but not terrible. Fink's style, though not my preferred vision of erotic cartoons, made details of robots, ladies and annoying dudes getting off pretty fun, even if the final product was a tad too superficial to earn a spot in the try harder library.