Sunstone is Stjepan Šejić's warm, funny and emotionally incisive comic about desire, trust and the surprising difficulty of saying what one wants. First published online before becoming an Image/Top Cow series, it begins with Lisa and Ally, two women who meet to explore a consensual BDSM relationship. Lisa is looking for a way into desires she has struggled to name; Ally is more practised, but not immune to the complications of intimacy. Their story unfolds through jokes, missed signals, negotiated boundaries, and the everyday embarrassment of falling in love.
Stjepan Šejić began Sunstone in 2011 as a webcomic, posting pages free on DeviantArt, where its humorous, emotionally attentive treatment of kink and relationships quickly built a substantial following. Image Comics and its Top Cow imprint brought the series into print in December 2014; its second volume reached The New York Times Paperback Graphic Books bestseller list. The original run following Ally and Lisa across Volumes 1–5 was published between December 2014 and January 2017, before shifting in Volumes 6–8 as Mercy, the arc centred on Anne and Alan. Mercy 1 appeared in March 2019, followed by Mercy 2 in May 2021 and Mercy 3 in May 2024. Alongside the individual volumes, oversized hardcovers collecting multiple books were published in 2017 and 2018. In 2026, Image and Top Cow launched compact ‘New Edition’ paperbacks, each with newly-painted cover art by Šejić. Despite its print success, Sunstone has retained its online roots – Šejić has continued to make PDF editions available to readers free of charge.
Volumes 1 and 2, included here, are a strong introduction to the series’ particular achievement. The pages are lushly painted and intentionally sensual, but their force lies in the character work. Šejić is unusually good at a face caught between confidence and panic, a too-long pause, a deadpan reply, or the small physical awkwardness that can make a sincere moment land harder. The kink relationships are built through communication, consent, friendship, and the continual work of being honest with another person.
The opening thirty pages of Volume 6, Mercy 1, which we have also included, make a revealing turn towards Alan. Šejić's own account of the Mercy arc describes it as exploring Alan and Anne, the friendship Alan and Ally formed, and their college years. Alan and Anne’s history is presented as part of the foundation for the wider community around Ally and Lisa. This extract therefore expands the portfolio selection without abandoning its central concern – it shows that the world of Sunstone has histories, friendships and formative mistakes behind it.
Read together, this selection demonstrates why Sunstone has endured beyond any easy description as an erotic comic. It is an adult romance that makes room for explicitness, but its defining quality is care. Desire can be funny, awkward, negotiated, and capable of changing the way people understand themselves.
In July 2025 Jason Bergman from The Comics Journal interviewed Stjepan Šejić; here are extracts which describe the process of creating Sunstone. You can read the whole interview online here.
Sunstone was an unplanned thing altogether. It was the end result of a catastrophic burnout where I was actually considering leaving comics and just accepting one of the several video game company offers. Because I wasn’t fulfilled, you know? I wasn't writing my own stuff. I was drawing other people’s stuff. And yeah, it’s nice when you get a script that’s very cool and high action, high pace, but you don’t always get the benefit of that. Sometimes you need to do the character moments.
And the problem was at the time, I was also having a crisis of style. When I started comics, I had a style that was my own, that was very similar to what we have in Sunstone now. But as I got into the American nineties comics I convinced myself that my approach was wrong and I should make my comics look like that. So I kind of adopted a strange Frankenstein of a style comprised of influences from Michael Turner, Marc Silvestri, and Alex Ross. I put them all in the blender and hit purée, and what came out was a marketable style. But it was like writing with another person’s handwriting. The whole thing felt creatively insincere to me.
I started drawing these characters, right? Actually that’s an overstatement. They weren’t even characters. They were just kind of simple, fetish-y illustrations. My idea was, I was gonna do something fun, and make a bunch of BDSM-type jokes. I figured I had experience with it all and knew how funny the whole thing actually is. So I drew these two women, just the most stereotypical looking domme and her submissive. The style was messy and distorted but honest, so I decided, fuck it, I’m just gonna draw some drawings of them, draw some funny jokes. Oh, hey, maybe I’ll give them names. Maybe I’ll explore how they met for the first time.
BDSM is sexual LARPing, and as such it’s fertile ground for a whole lot of comedy and drama, both often connected to the game not going according to plan. Then of course there are the themes of consent and trust. These topics are inevitable by the very nature of the game. People who are sexually submissive have a fantasy of surrendering one’s control into the hands of another. Ideally it’s something they’d want to do with somebody they trust enough to give that sense of control back, to respect the agreed-upon safe word. The problem is, again, it’s also something that's kind of frowned upon because it’s been depicted in so many different ways. This is where it always gets messy.
But the moment I decided, yeah, okay, I'm committing to this being a romance, I had to ask myself, okay, what’s the point of the book? Where am I going with this? For the first book, I decided on the theme of taking stuff for granted, taking roles for granted, taking a person for granted in general. Lisa has been so used to this whole idea that Ally is a domme, so Ally has to make the first move on everything. Then eventually Lisa becomes introspective, looks into her own relationship paths and realises, oh shit, I’ve been waiting for everybody to make the first move every time. And it’s kind of became a pattern for her.
Sunstone in general has proven itself a very fertile ground to look into some genuine issues. Not just with the kink, mind you. Kink on its own tends to be very simple when it comes down to it. But you start looking at the people behind it all, and that’s where it gets interesting.
Chronologically speaking, the Mercy arc starts before Ally and Lisa meet. So it covers Ally and Alan’s history together and Anne’s early years. Then it’s going to cover Alan and Marion’s history. All of these arcs are going to both expand and continue the initial story of Sunstone. We’re going to see Ally and Lisa progress until it goes to volume 20. And volume 20 is Ally and Lisa’s wedding and all of the shenanigans that happened.
Sunstone is not here to present kink as good or bad, but as profoundly human. That is a responsibility I take very seriously. I wish to offer a look behind the curtain, past the kayfabe of it all, and just show a bunch of kinksters for who they are. By the varied nature of its expanding cast Sunstone allows me to do just that, but even so I can’t cover every flavour of it, nor would I ever try. After all, proper representation of anything is a matter of building up multiple works by multiple creators with different outlooks. I’m just here adding my brick to it all.
Stjepan Šejić has made all of the Sunstone books free to download as PDF files for personal use at the Dropbox link here.
