Sunstone Volumes 1-5

The Long And Binding Road

Sunstone
Print Collections 1-5
Written and illustrated by Stjepan Šejić
Top Cow Publishing

I’ve only recently gotten into digital comics and they’re not really my best choice of reading materials when I much prefer the printed page to all this electronic gubbins. But price and scarcity trump that kinda consideration in the digital realm, I guess. That being said, I’ve noticed lately that the .cbr and .cbz files which can be downloaded from the internet (often for free, it seems to me) are nothing like, say, watching a comic or cartoon off of a DVD or Blu Ray, which tend to get a little pixilated, quite often. This file format is pretty good, when synced up to an iPad (or nearest equivalent tablet) at giving you something which is 100% the same, almost, as holding a comic in your hands... if not actually approximating the scent of a good old comic or giving you that feeling of paper rubbing against the fingers which is almost as much about the reading experience as anything else.

I do know comics a little, though. When I was either three or four, I started reading with comics such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and SHAZAM! (the original Captain Marvel) and it certainly a format that teaches you to read fast, I can tell you that. I was reading a lot of comics for the first 16 years of my life and then, back in July 1984, I read the serialised version of what was and still is, to me, the greatest single literary experience of my life. I never thought I’d say that about a comic but it’s true... within the pages of 2000AD, which I’d been buying and saving since its first issue, Alan Moore’s three book epic, The Ballad Of Halo Jones, first hit my brain and has never left it. Even with great works like the same writer’s Watchmen or Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns or Moore’s The Killing Joke... The Ballad Of Halo Jones has never been surpassed and it’s the standard I measure all comics against. It’s always been the greatest comic ever written and drawn and that’s still the case.

Sunstone is, therefore, not the greatest comic ever written and illustrated. At least to me. However... it is easily the second greatest comic ever written and I say that having read some really great masterpieces in my time. This comic is just about perfect... so it obviously makes it difficult to review, for sure.

Now, I think I may have heard of Sunstone before, a couple of years ago... or I may not have. It rang a bell but when I found a stash of the first six volumes of this book online I gave it a go and... well. What’s that you say.... there are six of these (so far) but you are only going to be talking about the first five here? Well, yes. That’s because... and much to my surprise because I wasn’t done with the main characters yet... the first main arc of the book comes to a close at the end of the fifth volume and it seemed, with only the sixth volume starting the next arc actually out there so far, a natural place to break from what has been an intense binge session of a great work of art.

Sunstone tells the story of Lisa and Allison, two bisexual turned lesbian characters who have an intense BDSM relationship which turns very quickly into an intense love affair... which neither of them wants to admit for fear of the other one rejecting that their friendship and sexual role play (Alli is the domme and Lisa is the submissive) is anything more than that. Now the book is told from the point of view of Lisa, who is a writer, telling her story and, also, the story of many of the friends they make on their journey. It tells of how they met, how they both grew up and how their appreciation of the BDSM scene came about and, also, how everything jelled for their friends too. In fact, the nice thing about this book is that it jumps off on a tangent and the various other characters become as much people to care and worry about as the two main protagonists.

It also explains, to some extent, some of the different guises and forms from the world of BDSM which, I have to say, would probably be fairly educational to some people. I’ve been interested in and participating in certain aspects of that in my life in different guises and levels for a while now so I'm fairly experience in a wide range of stuff but, I’m happy to say, the writer is pushing ‘safety’ and ‘limits’... and the extension of those limits... to the forefront of the occasional sexually charged scenes within the story (of around 600 pages of story divided between the first five volumes). Heck, even the title of the strip is the safeword Alli gives to her subs and lovers when she is playing with them. As the pages go on a newbie to the scene can learn about stuff like harnesses, rigging, S&M play and also, on occasion, some of the risks involved... such as the consequences of someone stupidly cutting off the blood circulation with ropes applied incorrectly or a nice throwaway comment about the use of gags and how you play with them when a sub isn’t able to utter a safeword.

There’s also a lot of humour in the pages and, absolutely, a lack of casting judgement on the practices on display here from the writer... not always from some of the characters but, hey, that’s how you create the drama and provide the path to enlightenment. For instance, on the humour front... and its hard to recreate this without showing the panels but... let me just put it in script form...

Lisa narrating: We had to employ advanced tactics to persuade her...”

Person A: Come on!
Person B: No!
Person C: Come oon!
Person B: No!
Person A: Come ooooon!
Person B: “No!”
Person C: “Come ooooon!”
Person B: “Fine.”

Or in another scene where Alli has worn out Lisa’s now sore tongue by having her bound body going down on her for an incredibly long session so all her ‘s’ sounds become ‘sh’... and when Alli’s best friend Alan shows up just after and calls them on it... “Of course you don’t. Lisa merely developed a mean case of Connery by diving for pearls.” This book is really, very funny and, quite smart while also having tonnes of nerdy references to stuff like Star Trek, Doctor Who and even a ‘Dildo’ Baggins joke (at one point Lisa likens Comic Conventions to Fetish Conventions and, yeah, with what Comic Conventions have become over the years, I totally see that).

And the art is gorgeous too. Painted stuff which constantly walks a thin line between exquisitely detailed realism and cartoony expressionism, which shouldn’t quite work this well when combined but it really does. Also, the way the panels are designed in the comic are amazing. There’s a lot of stuff where you see simultaneous things happening, where the action of two individual characters and situations are crosscut visually on the same page, for instance. But, the artist manages to pull off this kind of stuff which does, in some pages and spreads, include some elabourate designs, without throwing up any impediment to the way the eyes decode the flow of the material on the page... which is a difficult thing to get right and, believe me, I’ve seen in a lot of published stuff where this can sometimes go wrong and your eye is left not knowing which part of the page to read next. This didn’t happen to me once within the first five volumes and... well, what can I say? This guy nailed it. And bearing in mind how tangential and sometimes devilishly metatextual some of the content in this book is, that’s really no mean feat.

 I haven’t quite figured out how he’s able to write female characters so well yet but, it all seems pretty authentic to me and he does manage to explore a few different ‘character voices’ over the arc and none of them seem out of place or too overly like anyone else when they are talking or thinking. And this, I’m sure, is one of the things that makes this book so addictive. I seriously didn’t want to put it down and that’s why I’ve had to stop for a while now that Lisa and Alli are no longer going to be part of the next arc. I mean, yeah, I’m sure they’ll feature heavily in it, actually but, this is the majority of their story done I think (although there are some important bits hinted at that we’ll obviously see from a different perspective when the time comes, I am guessing). The book takes the form of a flashback to real events from Lisa, Alli and their friends’ life in the past but, occasionally, the past will be interrupted by a little intrusion from ‘the present’ where Lisa is writing from and, obviously, things are still moving towards where they are at in their lives now.

I am, of course, referring to these characters as real people because, very quickly (like from the first couple of pages) they became just that for me... and I’m telling you now it’s rare for me to get this attached to fictional characters, for sure. Presumably because the writer has a very good ear and there is a strong sense of 'the truth of things' coming across in the writing all the way through. This is just plain good writing. Period.

So, yeah, as you can probably tell, this comic totally had me hooked and I feel like I need to come down a little to exorcise the addictive hold it has on me... which is, of course, where me writing a review of it comes in. If you write about something then maybe it stops holding power over you, right? At the moment I’m not sure whether to go onto Book Six or wait until the next couple of volumes come out before getting back to it. Either way though, I’m guessing you can tell from my somewhat clumsy enthusiasm here that I’ll definitely be recommending it to pretty much anyone I meet who has an interest in either the format of the comic strip or the particular subject matter at hand. Sunstone is seriously a comic book that means a lot to me right now so... yeah... this one is something you should read, for sure.