Some Thoughts on Sunstone: Mercy

In this issue people learn things about themselves

Written and Illustrated by Stjepan Sejic aka @nebezial-asheri

“MERCY,” Part One How can you teach a broken heart to trust again? How can you embrace each other with hands still clinging to your past? Why do you always need to pee after I tie you up? Anne and Alan have more than a few questions to answer as the world of SUNSTONE deepens with this new story arc.



Prequels can be a tricky business, see the Star Wars prequels or Fantastic Beast series as prime examples among many. There can be an air of fate acompli to the proceedings, a feeling that could be heightened in a series like Sunstone that is about the relationships of a group of BDSM loving friends. Which is why writer/artists Stjepan Sejic’s request to “forget” what we know about Sunstone in the forward to the series sixth volume, and start to prequel story Mercy, and take Mercy on it’s own merits struck me so. In one sense that request is the bald faced comics literalism that drives his at times snarky, but incredibly earnest art and style, put into words. He isn’t entirely wrong, though. For Mercy to succeed it needs to make you forget about Ally and Lisa, and to care about Alan, Anne, and their various partners in-between.

The opening pages of Mercy don’t hide where things are eventually going as Alan and Anne sit down with Lisa for their turn at the couch. But Sunstone isn’t really a series concerned with a strict plot timeline of things. Mercy hits similar beats as the first volume of Sunstone, but it is undoubtedly has its own story to tell as it explores the college years of Alan, Ally, and Anne. This is a story about how Alan and Ally became best friends with benefits and the potentially fraught emotional foundation that simplicity is supposed to deal with. About Anne realizing her bisexuality, and entering the larger narrative as a meaningful character. Mercy is its own story, and at least for the first volume, manages to be the 300: Rise of an Empire of erotica as prequel and side sequel without crashing into the rocks so many other stories have done before.

While I’ve done my best to come at Mercy on its own terms, as a critic I can’t help but think about the stuff we’ve already seen, and how the conceit of retrospective narration from our various protagonists changes things, turning this series into the romantic Rashomon. In the second volume audiences read if not Ally’s full perspective, the highlights, of her time with Alan in college. Mercy isn’t about Ally or her thoughts on the matter, it’s all about Alan. With the start of Mercy it appears Sejic is leaning into that subjectivity even harder than before which gives this book oodles of sincerity without devolving into Bathic irony. As Alan begins to tell his story, he frames it in the vein of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge’s quartet of ghostly visitors take the form of the important women in his life. Only for it to be punctured and obliterated with an interjection from Anne with the turn of a page. Now that moment is used for comedic effect, however, its use is manifold. It works as an example of couply needling and preview the kind of tonality the series will be playing with. It also helps Alan to work through his feelings on talking to Lisa about how he and her wife were friends with benefits in college.

Sejic’s art in Sunstone has always had a whiff of literalism too it, as in he pairs a verbal turn of phrase with a literal artistic representation of that phrase. Before Alan has his game face on, he sees Ally on his bed, but imagined as a lioness. Another example of this literalism comes in the form of Sejic’s lettering as Alan and Ally have a meeting of the fetishist minds. Alan speaks on the raising of and sundering of his shield wall, and Sejic places it all over the top of slowly splintering shield. By leaning into the subjective perspective, Sejic is able to make an endearing relationship blossom for readers.

Sexy fun times and highly theatrical not-Wicked concert scenes aside, Mercy isn’t a book that has a lot of action. It is a slice of life story which entails a fair amount of sitting and talking, walking and talking, or not talking because you’re an emotional mess and vulnerability is scarier than making your Dom mad. After flipping through some earlier bits of the series, I’m struck at how Sejic’s page design has changed. The production of Mercy is different from prior volumes in that everything was done to conform with a standard comic page from the start. This shift in production led to a move away from constructing reading lines with verticality in mind and moving towards horizontal ones. The fundamentals and overall energy of those early strips are still there. There is a page as Ally and Alan get off to some porn together that is this beautiful mixture of circular paneling flanked by vertical panels of the cheesy porn that’s just beautifully composed. That sequence in particular is a nice twist on the overall self-awareness that permeates the series, and how Sejic uses comics as a medium to fuse two realities into one. As the series cross cuts between Alan and Anne’s stories, he finds some nice matching transitions or just fuse the two together on a single page. Mercy gives him moments to go big an bold, but the page design on the smaller , normal everyday sequences, are well considered and have a way of making sitting around drinking coffee engaging to read.

Tackling Alan and Anne’s stories simultaneously is to the books benefit, Sejic shows good control of pace dropping in and out of each thread at moments where the “boring” stuff would happen or a dramatic cliff hanger. The dueling threads also offer up differing genres as they both explore similar motifs of friendship and romantic relationships.

Ally and Alan’s college days quickly turns into a sex comedy. Sejic’s ability to create layered expressions worked wonders on Aquaman and his more dramatic. The work with Alan and Ally has me curious how he would handle more straight forward comedy. The sex comedy and jokes derived from it are pretty much what you’d expect from Adventures in Fetishism, but the control of pace and timing that allows those beats to land makes it all work.

Anne’s arc in this volume is a bit on the standard coming out/of age side of things, but like the sex comedy angle, it works. The sequence at the concert where she realizes some things about herself, was one of my favorite things I read from last year – and it still is with some slight changes here. Mercy is a trip through relationships past, and while knowledge of the future hangs over everything in this book, it still dose the right thing by showing why Anne and Laura worked at that given moment. In the moment Anne and Laura work and so I care about them, future and promised heartbreaks be damned. For all the softcore BDSM and super pretty looking fetishwear, Sunstone is fundamentally a series about various types of relationships and opening it up Alan and Anne allows for more types of ships to be explored.

Having followed Mercy since its original release as a webcomic and with the change in production, I was curious to see what kind of difference reading it as a book would appear if any. Despite being formatted to the standard comic page and the overall shift to a more horizontal reading approach reading Mercy as a vertical strip was excellent – assuming DeviantArt didn’t crap out on you. The emphasis on horizontal spacing in a vertical apparatus actually highlighted some fundamental differences between a comic laid out vertically and the infinite web strip found on places like LineWebtoon. Obviously there is more friction due to page turns, but it isn’t a meaningful amount. That level of friction highlighted how well Sejic used pages as containers for scenes and their role in overall sequences for dramatic pace compared to previous entries. The sequence as Anne test drives her sexuality as a clearer sense of crescendo page by page as opposed to a vertical strip. As a comic, Sunstone: Mercy on a design level probably the best overall comic he has done.

With a new cast and stories, Mercy continues the tradition of the series epitomizing the reaction: “I’m not into BDSM…but this story…I get it.”