Afternoon Affair

1 month ago 11

Sommer Browning | February 14, 2025

You know what you’re in for as soon as you glance at the evocative-pink (good nail polish color name!) cover of the first issue of Afternoon Affair. You really need to open it up fully to see exactly what is going on in Sunmi’s, the cover artists, drawing. A sensuous reader reclines on a couch, wearing only a flimsy apron, maybe it’s an ill-fitting sundress. Their tits escape the sides. In their left hand is their erect cock, in their right a copy of Afternoon Affair. A blushing femme peers in through the open window. The curtains are lifted like a skirt by a most perverted breeze. The voyeur’s thought bubble reads, Yes…yes! while the hands at her mouth coyly feign propriety.

And this is exactly what you’re in for: tits and dicks, definitely, but also a bit of voyeurism and a very healthy, fully vaccinated dose of flagrant pleasure. But I think the thing I love the most about the cover is how absorbed in reading (okay…maybe just looking at the pictures) the figure on the couch is. It’s like the masturbating wasn’t planned—the curtains were closed after all—but the content was just so hot it was inevitable. And the content of the first issue of Afternoon Affair is hot. Book. Cover. Judged.

Helen Chazan (frequent contributor to The Comics Journal) is the editor and publisher. She’s probably most well-known to TCJ readers for writing about comics, but she also holds the enviable position of Project Manager at The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies Sexual Representation Collection at the University of Toronto. That mouthful is, according to the website, “Canada’s largest collection of sex work history and adult film history…[w]ith a particular focus on feminist, queer, trans, and kink sexual cultures…”

With a professional background managing an archive so inclusive, it’s no wonder Afternoon Affair is delightfully positive and refreshingly diverse. It’s a femme-forward, all-body-parts-welcome collection of lust, fucking, intimacy, technology, and joyful desire.

He’s a Big Girl is Sam W’s raunchy, futuristic, anarchist adventure. It’s fast-paced, anti-fascist, and sticky. Voluminous fluids careen across prismatic panels of nakedness making it deliciously hard to tell which parts belong to Buster Anger, our good-guy, vigilante superhero whose head gets transplanted onto a sex doll, and which parts belong to Virginia Kitano, Anger’s sexy, horny accomplice and head transplanter. While the authorities look for the wanted duo, they test out Anger’s new body in all the ways. It’s funny and punny and dirty as hell.

Molly Kiely’s The Return of Maura Picacho Part 1 is a femme, time-traveling, nature goddess stag comic on psilocybin. It unfolds slowly, asking us to liiiiinger on the labia and nipples entwining and merging first with mushrooms, roots, and seed pods, and then planets, quasars, and stars. The labia and nipples belong to two desert travelers who pull off the trail to “water the horses.” With hardly a straight line in the whole comic, Kiley curves and spheres and flames and curls through nature’s fecundity, hardcore Sapphic kink, and in the end deep, touching intimacy.

Lina Wu contributes an erotic story set in virtual reality, cyber.exe. In a smooth, animation style, Wu introduces two friends—one a heartbroken EmoLink addict named Jade. Worried about Jade, the friend decides to see what EmoLink is all about and proceeds to log into the VR world that is “realer than reality.” The friend, whose avatar is disguised, runs into Jade who is wearing a whole bunny get-up. What ensues is a cyber-Shakespearean, mistaken identity, furry cum sex romp as the friend tries to cheer the little rabbit up—and succeeds.

Sprinkled throughout Afternoon Affair are Ines Estrada’s drawings of wild, sexy, gutter punk beauties, hairy and melting and glistening and pleasuring themselves fantastically. These drawings have the most underground, freaky feel in the whole issue, partly because their sexual power is about one tenth of the mystery these women exude.

In the introduction, Chazan mentions Eros Comix, an erotic Fantagraphics publishing venture that lasted from 1990 until it petered out in the aughts. Kiely had several books out with them. Chazen writes “Afternoon Affair is a DIY attempt to resurrect the fun, transgressive vibe that Eros Comix brought at its finest, reimagined for an era of dykes, transsexuals, and other queer gender perverts who have enjoyed an alarming quantity of str8 porn.” The DIY vibe is evident, the issue is a stapled, xeroxed zine, black and white save for the cover, and highly collaborative. But what else Chazan is saying in this sentence is also very true—and hilarious. Some of us have enjoyed an alarming quantity of str8 porn—even though for some of us the “alarming quantity” was just one Victoria’s Secret Angels catalog before we were like, Uh, consumerist-emaciated-nippleless-polyester-softcore? Nyet thank you. But there was one good thing to come out of perusing that catalog and that was the way those fluttery girl-wings piqued a hidden desire to be ordered around by a paranormal, demonic, terror-god in garter belts.

And guess what? Afternoon Affair takes that lusty desire and raises it to Alpha Centauri.