Crossposting from another board I visit:

So I make no secret of the fact that I love Sunstone, Stjepan Sejic's romance/comedy/erotica/drama series he does for Top Cow (and for free online on his deviantart page) and I'm not the only one: in the afterword of Top Cow's "Swing" (one of two series this post will be about), Matt Hawkins (Top Cow president and COO) says "Sunstone has sold more copies of the collected editions than any other comic book in Top Cow history... and that includes the heydey of the early 90s." Noting the success of Top Cow and how many female fans came to the Top Cow stand with the question if they had anything else like it, Hawkins decided to publish more titles of a similar tone.

Linda Sejic's webseries Blood Stain was the first one*. Now joined by Swing and Sugar. All four series are published as collections/OGNs instead of in singles like other American comics, avoiding the direct market mostly and aiming for bookstores and so far it seems to be working. (At least for Sunstone and Blood Stain, Swing and Sugar are too new to have any numbers published.) I really wanted to talk about both series/graphic novels (as I've just read the both of them) and the two comic threads on SE are not exactly the right place for it. This board itself has been pretty dead the last few years, but this thread fits the best (not confident enough to actually make a new thread for it and not sure it will receive any replies), so:

From the Ashes You Shall Rise, dear GV general comics thread

I'll start with Sugar first, even though it came out later. Because I actually like it the least of the four series and I want to end on a positive note. The only one of the four series that doesn't have the Sejics involved, even though it's unofficially named the Sejic-verse. Sugar is written by Hawkins and Jenni Cheung (husband and wife.) and has art by Yishan Li.
It deals with student Julia Capello, a poor student who has several jobs to pay for her tuition and to support her recently unemployed mother and younger sister. Understandably, she has trouble making ends meet. Too busy with jobs and her study, Julia has had no time for any relationships recently. The other protagonist is John Markham, a middle-aged divorcee, who still has trouble getting over his wife. Halfway through the book, the two meet up and begin a relationship. John has heard from his business partner/friend Richard about sugaring, where a wealthy man will get companionship from a young woman (usually a student) in exchange for support with their tuition, rent and other needs. John wants to help Julia, but Julia is uncomfortable with the idea, feeling it too close to prostitution. She does really need to money though, so she agrees to the proposition with the understanding that all the money will be a loan, not a gift.
Hawkins, usually a writer of sci-fi titles for Top Cow, admits how hard it is to write romance, even with the help from Jenni and it's most noticeable in this title. Both Julia and John don't really feel like characters, they are parts of the plot. Compare this to any of the main characters in the other three titles where we get to know them as people, their passions and hobbies. Both John and Julia are portrayed sympathetically (a bit too much so even, it's John's ex-wife who is portrayed as basically everything that was wrong with the relationship. So much that you would have trouble understanding what John ever saw in her. Then again, this is true of many relationships I have seen in real life. The series also sidesteps some of the more problematic aspects of the relationship between John and Julia, though they may be explored more in the next two installments.
The art is also a big factor in why I'm liking this less than the other series, Yishan Li is not a bad artist, but her faces are not as expressive as those of the Sejics, whose mix of cartoony and realistic art somehow works at making the characters feel more like real persons.
Also a super minor complaint, the story is divided into 5 chapters, but each chapter seems to end at a random point. It was written as a single story, so the need to divide it into chapters feels weird and if it needed to be divided you expect the endpoints to be the major moments in the story. You even have 5 major moments in the story: the moment the two meet, the moment the relationship starts, the moment Julia decides to accept the proposal, the moment the ex-wife shows up, the end. Those would easily have been the major breaks in the story to start a new chapter each time.

So on to Swing and it's quite a difference. Still Hawkins and Cheung writing, but Linda Sejic is drawing (interesting to note Linda Sejic is the first creator credited on the cover. In American comics it's usually the writer first/artist second, while in Europe, it usually is artist first/writer second (though there are many exceptions to that rule). Cathy Chang goes to college and is finally out under her strict mothers supervision. Time to meet some boys. But the boys are mostly disappointing, until she meets teaching assistant Dan Lincoln. The two hit it off and Cathy even convinces her mother that Dan is a good catch. And then she ends up pregnant. Jump several years, Cathy and Dan are married and have two children. Both are happy with their life, their partner and their children, but the spark has gone out of the relationship. Cathy finds out about swinging and wants to spice up the relationship by trying it out.
The writing in this just is so much better, both Cathy and Dan are established as characters with interests and passions outside of the relationship (for instance, Dan loves poetry and we see a short crossover with Blood Stain and Sunstone as he is in the same MMORPG guild as characters from those two titles). Both characters are sympathetic, but not flawless. They acknowledge that there are problems with their relationship, problems which they are both responsible for. Their first visit to the club is awkward. Sejic's more cartoony art works wonders with making the characters feel like actual human beings, but I think that Hawkins/Cheung feel more engaged with the content in this than in Sugar (the afterword has Hawkins talk about the research they did and the clubs they visited and some scenes from the comic are taken from their own experiences). I think Sunstone is still the best of the four titles, but I enjoyed Swing and will be getting the next parts.

* = Blood Stain itself is a bit of the odd duck of the four. The other three are all focused on romance and non-conventional relationships. Blood Stain is more slice-of-life/comedy. Unless Vlad and Elliott will be getting it on in later volumes... but that's just... no... Vlad is so not ready for any type of sexual relationship.

Note: All four series are intended for adult audiences. In case of Blood Stain it's just the slice-of-life story would hold little interest to younger readers IMHO, but there is no adult content in it: no sex, nudity or violence. Sunstone has some nudity in it (which I guess by American standards immediately turns it into an Adults Only title, though the BDSM aspects may be more of a factor in getting the Adult Only tag. I've seen some reviewers describe it as pornographic, but I guess we have very different definitions of porn.)
Sugar is a bit more explicit than Sunstone, but has no BDSM, just naked people and R-rated sex.
Swing is significantly more explicit than the other titles, so beware if that bothers you.