Sunstone is the adult webcomic Stjepan Šejić writes and draws. It first went up on DeviantArt in 2011. It is an erotic romantic comedy, and it is also a graphic novel about power exchange, communication, and intimacy. The story follows a circle of friends already deep in BDSM: D/s, jealousy, failed conversations, self-bondage, club life, and the long walk from scene partners to spouses. For adult readers who know fetish culture, the trait that shows is how rope, dominance, and aftercare are built as the infrastructure of the relationship, not as a shop window for a kink.
Power, feeling, and the silence
The main line is two adult women. Lisa Williams is a writer just starting out. She has a strong submissive hunger and almost no partnered S/M beyond tying herself. Allison “Ally” Carter is a well-off programmer and a dominant. She had a decent time with an ex-boyfriend, Alan, and had never been the domme in a full D/s relationship. They connect online because of Lisa’s fiction, then build a sub/domme dynamic in person. Friendship deepens. Lisa writes the relationship into her fiction. Feelings grow on both sides, and neither will say so, because “love” feels like a second, riskier contract than the scenes they already negotiated. After they move in, the attraction keeps rising and the words still do not. Tension, jealousy, then a blowup at a Halloween party over Anne. They break up. Lisa moves back to her own apartment. Alan and Anne, by then a couple, help the two of them see their own mistakes and the patterns that wreck things. Lisa sets a date with Ally at a New Year’s party. They reconcile and admit what they feel. Later pages show them married. The point the story keeps making is that honesty and communication hold a relationship together as much as the rope or a perfect scene protocol.
Mercy: what the past does to the present
As the plot moves, the view leaves Lisa’s eyes and opens onto other people’s histories. The Mercy arc is the one that does that work. College student Alan Benson becomes an outcast after his drawings are mocked, until classmate Ally reaches out. Shared kink leads them into creative experiments in his dorm and in an abandoned attic. They get hooked on the scenes, let school slide, and the arrangement breaks. Some time later Alan is working at a BDSM club and meets Marion. Marion is a woman from a destructive relationship he already had before the events of Sunstone Volume 1. That backstory changes how a reader understands Ally’s early experience, and how Alan later functions as a friend. Art student and metalhead Marianne “Anne” Murphy falls for singer Miriam at a concert and realizes she is attracted to women. At the next concert she meets Laura, a lesbian who is also there for Miriam. With Laura’s encouragement Anne becomes a tattoo artist. Laura’s jealousy and possessiveness drag the relationship down, and they split. The side characters, stuck in love, desire, and control, point back at Lisa and Ally: feeling that never gets said will wreck an intimacy, whatever kind it is.
How it was made, and how it was published
In November 2011 Šejić, then blocked as a writer, started posting fetish art on DeviantArt under the account Shiniez. Only later did two recurring characters turn into a story. He had more than ten years in the BDSM scene. He and his wife, fellow artist Linda Lukšić Šejić, are both practitioners. Negotiation, what happens after a scene, self-bondage, and partnered power exchange are distinctions that come from that. Linda later made her own webcomic, Blood Stain, which shares continuity with Sunstone. The story is told mostly through Lisa’s eyes while she writes a book about her own experience. Šejić plans the whole work as four parts, twenty volumes in all. The second arc is Mercy, the third is Jasper, and the fourth was still unnamed. Top Cow Productions, under Image Comics, has published the paperbacks since December 2014. Volume 2, out in May 2015, reached number 7 on the New York Times paperback graphic books list. Volume 8 was published on 15 May 2024. Comic Book Roundup scores the series 9.6 out of 10 from 22 reviews. Publishers Weekly, on Volume 1, praised the humor and the humanity of the characters and also said it sometimes repeats. Explicit D/s is rare in a mainstream comics pipeline. Sunstone puts LGBTQ themes and BDSM culture in the same book, with the feelings and the fetish detail both still in the panels.
