Sunstone is an adult webcomic series written and illustrated by Stjepan Šejić, first published on DeviantArt in 2011 and later moved to Pixiv. Eight volumes of the ongoing series have been collected as trade paperbacks by Image Comics and Top Cow Productions since 2014. Described as an erotic romantic comedy, it focuses on a group of friends and their mutual interest in BDSM culture—D/s practice, jealousy, communication failures, self-bondage, club work, and the long road from scene partners to spouses. For lesbian BDSM and kink-media readers, Sunstone is one of the most visible modern graphic novels to treat rope, dominance, and aftercare as relationship infrastructure rather than one-note fetish window dressing.
Main Arc: Lisa, Ally, and the Domme/Sub Romance That Won’t Stay Casual
Lisa Williams is a budding writer with strong submissive desires but almost no partnered S/M experience beyond self-bondage. Allison “Ally” Carter is a well-to-do programmer and dominant who has had decent experience with a former boyfriend, Alan, but has never been in a full D/s relationship as a domme. Ally discovers Lisa’s erotic fiction online; they meet and begin a real-life sub/domme arrangement. Friendship deepens; Lisa mines their dynamic as the basis for her writings; romantic feelings grow on both sides, but neither is fully willing to acknowledge them—partly because of the nature of their power-exchange relationship, which makes “love” feel like a separate and riskier contract than negotiated scenes.
After they move in together, attraction continues to grow while remaining unaddressed, leading to tension, jealousy, and ultimately conflict. Anne, a tattoo artist and mutual new friend, gets caught in the middle. The couple break up after a heated argument over Anne at a Halloween party, and Lisa moves back to her apartment. Despite the breakup, neither Lisa nor Ally can fully let go. With Ally’s encouragement, Lisa continues writing fiction based on the two of them, which she turns into allegorical stories in an attempt to salvage their relationship. Both women come to recognize the mistakes they made as well as their own self-destructive emotional patterns, with help from Alan and Anne (now a couple). Lisa sets up a date with Ally at a New Year’s party, where the two reconcile and finally admit their true feelings for each other. They are shown to have become a married couple in the future. The emotional thesis is pure kink-community wisdom: honesty and communication matter as much as the rope, the flogger, or the perfect scene protocol.
Mercy Arc: Alan, Ally’s Past, Marion, and Anne’s Own Path
The Mercy storyline expands the cast’s history and widens the series beyond Lisa’s point of view alone. College student and BDSM enthusiast Alan Benson has his drawings taken and posted in school hallways. As a result he is subjected to widespread mockery and becomes an outcast. Ally Carter, an intrigued fellow student, reaches out and befriends him. Their shared love of kink brings them closer and leads to creative experimentation on various aspects of BDSM—first in Alan’s dorm room and later in the abandoned attic of a school building. They become addicted to their BDSM sessions at the expense of grades and other responsibilities; rising tensions cause them to break off the arrangement altogether. Sometime later, Alan is working at a BDSM club where he meets Marion, a woman with whom he had a destructive relationship prior to the events of Sunstone Volume 1—backstory that reframes how readers understand Ally’s earlier experience and Alan’s later role as friend and mirror.
Marianne “Anne” Murphy, art student and metalhead, attends a concert and discovers her own attraction to women after developing a crush on the lead singer, Miriam. At a following concert, Anne encounters Laura, a lesbian and fellow Miriam fan. The two hit it off and begin a passionate romance through a series of dates at Miriam concerts. Prompted by Laura, Anne also starts a career as a tattoo artist. Laura’s own fears and insecurities stemming from past failures, however, begin to derail the relationship. Though both try to mend things and affirm their love, Laura eventually lashes out against Anne due to rising jealousy and possessiveness, and Anne breaks up with her once and for all. These threads feed back into the Lisa/Ally core: everyone in the friend circle is learning how desire, control, and fear of abandonment wreck scenes and relationships when left unspoken—whether the dynamic is D/s, vanilla lesbian romance, or both.
Conception: From Fetish Art Account to Comic About Fetishists
In November 2011, Šejić—then suffering from writer’s block—began publishing fetish artworks under the DeviantArt account Shiniez. He eventually developed storylines involving two recurring characters, transforming his work from fetish comics into “a comic about fetishists […] their lives, their hobby, and their relationships, honesty, and communication.” He is assisted by his wife and fellow artist Linda Lukšić Šejić, who went on to create Blood Stain, a webcomic series sharing continuity with Sunstone. Šejić has over ten years of personal experience in the BDSM scene, and both he and his wife are practitioners, which informed the creation of the series—practice knowledge that shows up in negotiation talk, scene aftermath, and the difference between fantasy self-bondage and partnered power exchange. The story of Sunstone is told primarily through the eyes of Lisa, who is writing a book about her experiences—a meta frame that lets the comic discuss kink ethics while remaining a romance.
Šejić plans Sunstone to be a four-part story of 20 volumes in total. Each new story arc after the first features a subtitle. The second arc is titled Mercy and the third arc Jasper. The fourth and final arc was as yet unnamed in the source record used for this rewrite. That long-form ambition—twenty volumes across four arcs—is why the series rewards reading as a relationship saga rather than as a single “BDSM comic” one-shot.
Publication Timeline and Critical Reception
Šejić initially published Sunstone online on DeviantArt. Top Cow Productions (an imprint of Image Comics) published the first volume of the series as a graphic novel in December 2014. Volume 2 was published in May 2015 and reached No. 7 on The New York Times Best Seller list for Paperback Graphic Books. Volume 3 was released in August 2015. Volume 4 was published in February 2016. Volume 5 was released in January 2017. Volumes 1–5 were also prominently featured in Top Cow’s Humble Comics Bundle: Sex & Science. Volume 6 (the first part of Mercy) was published in March 2019. Volume 7 was released in May 2021. Volume 8 was published 15 May 2024.
The multi-issue series holds a critics’ rating of 9.6 out of 10 at the review-aggregation website Comic Book Roundup, based on 22 reviews. Publishers Weekly, in a review for Vol. 1, praised its humor and humanity in its characters, but criticized the fact that it sometimes gets repetitive. Industry framing at launch included Image Comics’ own conversation around bondage, discipline, and love—positioning the book as romance with real kink rather than pure erotica packaging. Related shelves often point readers toward LGBT themes in comics and BDSM in culture and media more broadly; Sunstone sits at their intersection with uncommon mainstream-comics distribution muscle for explicit D/s content.
For bdsmwild readers mapping LGBTQ BDSM comics, Sunstone is the flagship Šejić title: lesbian D/s romance, self-bondage origins, dorm-and-attic experimentation, BDSM-club labor, marriage as long-game payoff, and a creator who writes from inside the scene rather than looking in through a tourist window. It remains the webcomic-to-Image pipeline success story that put negotiated kink relationships on the graphic-novel bestseller shelf—and kept them there across Mercy volumes years after the first Lisa-and-Ally arc made its case for honesty over perfect protocol.
