When I opened the parcel that contained Small Favours I was intrigued immediately. The lovely pastel colours on the cover, the adorable girls cuddling and dancing, it looked as innocent and delightful as a vintage Archie comic. The words “Girly Porno” and “Adults Only” blend in so neatly you might not even notice them. I took one look at the beautiful brush-inked indie style figures and expected a book where maybe a deep friendship might perhaps lead to a shy kiss at some point. Just another prettily drawn touchy feely girl’s comic. It turns out that I underestimated Ms. Coover completely.

The premise of Small Favours is simple really. Our girl Annie, doe-eyed moppet, and devoted onanist is busily engaged in a fantasy about her next door neighbour when she is sucked into another world. She is told by a stern subterranean queen that she has used up her whole lifetime allotment of masturbation. (This is something which I believe many of us have worried about at some point in our lives…”what if I use up all my goes?”) The queen’s response is to assign a tiny woman to Annie to act as her conscience and guide her back on to the straight and narrow. As it turns out the tiny woman called Nibbil is as sex obsessed as Annie, possibly more so. When Nibbil returns home with Annie the two embark on a series of lusty encounters, which soon (as these things do) turn into a relationship.

What Ms Coover has managed to do is set up a world in which adorable fantasy creatures and hot steamy sex sit comfortably side by side. The fantasy elements might have seemed contrived in someone else’s hands, but here they are as natural as someone seeing stars and tweety birds when they’ve been hit on the head. The style of the artwork reminds me very much of the Hernandez brothers’ “Love and Rockets” (which was one of the first comics with gay characters I ever read) with the bouncy fluid lines giving Annie and Nibbil real personality and charm.

The main thrust of the book (if you’ll pardon my pun) is the sex. It is absolutely chock full of muff. The girls spend the whole of the live long day screwing. Even when they are busily engaged in other activities there’s always time for some action. They have a never ending supply of toys, and are never scared to improvise with household items. There’s a nice scene, where they tell us they know we are watching, and then perform just for our pleasure. This small scene totally breaks the main boundary found in any erotic fiction. Ordinarily you find yourself to be an unwitting voyeur, pervily peeping in on a scene, but Annie and Nibbil are different. They know you’re there and they encourage you to watch for longer.

The whole experience is delightfully cosy (Not a word I use often when describing pornography). They are such fully rounded characters, you get the very real impression that they love each other, that their sexual antics are borne out of affection as well as lust, and that even the most depraved things they can think of to do to one another, are done with a wink and a cheeky grin.

The thing I thought was the most original element was Nibbil’s size. Her tiny dimensions make her able to treat Annie’s body as landscape as well as a lover. I hadn’t realised until I read it how powerful this is an erotic device. When Annie awakes in the underground kingdom she is laying paralyzed by magic, unable to stop Nibbil from wandering around on her body. Like a sexy naked lady version of Gulliver, she can only watch, helpless as Nibbil does some very rude things to her.

Throughout the book we are constantly switching between viewpoints. Annie becomes “The attack of the 50ft woman” when viewed from Nibbil’s tiny height, and seems all the more gorgeous because of that, and Nibbil’s cavorting and exploring seems like a delightful hallucination, as if a tiny sex sprite climbed out of an absinthe bottle one day and never hopped back in.

This charming book explores many of the naughty things that are possible if one of you is only five inches tall, and Ms Coover depicts it all with relish and delight. There are no apologies made, no shying away, everything is there for you to marvel at. To be honest it makes vigorous sex with a miniature girl seem quite the proper thing to do.

The only disappointment is the end, when you realise you haven’t got a Nibbil of your own, but i suppose it doesn’t hurt to keep looking, just in case…

Editor's note: Buy this comic here or ask for it at your local comics shop.

Leah Moore was born in Northampton in 1978. Since then she has gotten slightly taller (but not much) and now writes comics with her husband John. She has a cat and likes finding new things to write and do. She has a terrible fear that someone will make her get a proper job one day.

All characters and images © 2002 Colleen Coover and Paul Tobin. Review © 2006 Leah Moore.

Prism Comics promotes the works of the LGBT community in comics. It does not implicitly endorse any other material or products associated with those works. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s).