Wit & Attitude Quote by Phil Foglio

Foglio’s line is a cheerful grenade lobbed at a culture that treats sex as either solemn literature or cheap scandal. The profane opener ("Why the hell") signals impatience with the gatekeeping that frames erotic storytelling as automatically grim, transgressive, or pedagogical. Coming from a cartoonist, it also reads like a defense of tone: humor and warmth aren’t evasions, they’re aesthetic choices with their own craft demands.

The intent is disarmingly direct - more happy sex on the page - but the subtext is sharper. "Nice happy stories" rejects the default narrative arc where desire must be punished, complicated into trauma, or redeemed by tragedy to qualify as meaningful. Foglio is calling out a long-running moral logic in popular media: sex is plot fuel for downfall, not a credible setting for tenderness, comedy, or ordinary joy. That logic shows up everywhere, from prestige dramas that use intimacy as a psychological stress test to romance-adjacent stories that fade to black to preserve "respectability."

The small rhetorical trick is the pivot from personal craving ("That’s what I want") to collective permission ("I bet a whole bunch of other people want it too"). He’s not just lobbying publishers; he’s validating an audience that’s been trained to feel childish or suspect for wanting pleasure without catastrophe. In a medium often dismissed as unserious, Foglio flips the hierarchy: maybe the truly adult move is admitting happiness can be a story engine, not an absence of one.