Is “Sugar” sweet enough or is it too sweet for its own good?
Written by Matt Hawkins and Jenni Cheung
Illustrated by Yishan Li
Colored by Yishan Li
Lettered by Yishan LiIn SUGAR, a couple embarks on a relationship that starts off as more of an arrangement, but ends with them falling in love—at a cost. Neither has ever done anything like this before, and the emotional swings they face threaten to undo what could be a perfect match in this companion book to both SUNSTONE and SWING.
“Sugar” volume 1 is another entry in Top Cow’s line of romance-erotica comics, created by writers Matt Hawkins and Jenni Cheung and artist Yishan Li. Unlike previous entries this one isn’t in the Sejic-verse, though keep your eyes peeled for a couple of Easter eggs. This book focuses on the relationship between Julia, a twenty-something poor college student, and John, a recently divorced forty-something. After a meet cute and a hook up, John propositions Julia with a transactional relationship; wherein he plays the role of Sugar Daddy to her Sugar Baby. On it’s face, “Sugar” offers a novel alternative relationship style, a contractual one, to build a drama around as emotional and physical intimacy are juxtaposed with the agreed upon financial arrangement – – echoing other business relationships like the Underwoods from House of Cards or the Jennings from The Americans. “Sugar” isn’t as immediately successful as other books in this vein from Top Cow and offers a good case study in why that is.
The core of the book’s shortcomings are derived from the comics script as an organizing unit. The book’s sound sense of structure gets in the way of exploring and selling readers on Julia and John’s relationship. The structure gives the book a good generic skeleton, and makes it an overall fine read, but lacks emotional meat as it goes through its paces at times. With relationship stories it isn’t so much about tracking two people coming together as it is showing the reader why it is these people would want to spend time together. Why does their relationship work? Ally and Lisa are able to be emotionally and sexually open with one another in ways they weren’t with previous partners. Cathy and Dan’s relationship is shown to be built on a rock solid shared commitment to each other. Those kinds of statements don’t come to mind after reading “Sugar” several times. Julia can make John laugh and John is gentlemanly in ways that none of the other male characters are. These qualities make for a strong meet cute, but in the aggregate feel generic and underdeveloped. When things take an inevitable turn and they both vocalize that they have fallen for one another, the moment didn’t land because I couldn’t place where that was supposed to have happened for them in the book.
The broad read of their relationship is due in part to the decisions made on how to present their dates, after they have entered into a business arrangement, mostly as a series of double page spreads. Artistically Yishan Li does an excellent job with them, balancing John and Julia’s various activities against one another and giving the pages an energetic feel. However, after back to back spreads and their placement leading towards the latter acts, their use reads as both an inefficient use of page real estate and ineffective narratively.
“Sugar” volume 1 is about 108 pages of narrative content with 11 pages used for either single or double page spreads – – which works out to just under 10% of the book’s narrative content. It isn’t that these pages are artistically poor, Yishan Li’s art is a major reason to read this book, it is that their use of big spectacular images may not have been the most efficient use of page space with the book’s budget. The use of bold spectacular imagery, while visually appealing, wasn’t as effective on an emotional level.
The more immediate issue is how these date spreads are ineffective narratively in selling their relationship. They functionally mimic a date montage from various romance films, which is good for showing the passage of time but doesn’t reveal any deeper ideas about their relationship. Everything is rendered surface level. Which is a shame considering how well the first chapter of this book illustrated the transactional and precarious nature of Julia’s experience against the Romanticized image created by the romance film she watches. Having these sequences play out as a economic wish fulfillment runs counter to the ideas expressed in the earlier chapters and more importantly doesn’t contend with the inherent drama of their relationship. Is this just John playing his part and fulfilling his end of the agreement or are these also genuine expressions of companionship? We don’t see Julia, whose perspective this story is told from, consider these things as she is supposed to be falling for him. These fantastical images make for a nice shattering moment after Julia feels like she has been discarded, however, the moment wasn’t evocative because the underlying emotion that would’ve supported it hadn’t developed for me as a reader. Unlike other entries, “Sugar” doesn’t seem committed to exploring the contours and potential emotional pitfalls of this transactional relationship beyond using it as a gimmick to get these two together.
Continued belowThe writing in this book may underserve it at times, but artistically Yishan Li brings a lot to it that makes it stand out. Li’s style is in the realm of cartoon representational, leaning slightly more towards cartoon with how she does the eyes and use of thinner line weights. Her eyes are not super expressive manga eyes – there’s actually a nice somewhat dead quality to them early on as John and Julia circle one another’s lives – but they have a that kind of expressive quality when called for. The way she does her eyes mixed with her overall figure design gives everyone a good expressive range that is key to these kinds of books. The character of John is depressed at the start, Li finds a good range that shows how he still feels down but also can give his friend Richard a good incredulous side eye at what he’s hearing. For Julia she finds the right way of showing the performative happiness she does as part of her various jobs and overall easy going nature with the moments where she is alone and drops it for a bit. This mixed with her good use of framing for panels makes the conversational sequences feel intimate. When the book does those kinds of scenes they were well done.
The biggest difference is Li largely eschewing the comics literalism found in the Sejics’ art work. The rose motif shows up twice and there are a couple of panels that have the background fade away to emphasize shock and beauty, but overall Li aesthetically tilts this book in a more realist direction. There is still a Hollywood quality of pretty people doing pretty things in terms of character design, but pushing this kind of story into an artistically more realist realm required a bit more subtlety that Li pulls off.
Yishan Li’s figure and page design work is solid, but what ties it together so well is her use of color. Her color palette is often not super saturated and exists more in a pastel range. When the saturation is turned up it helps realize fantastical moments, like those spreads, or show how high class an environment is. The pastel range is more washed out and helps sell the idea of Los Angeles as a beautifully lonely place and the unfulfilled quality within the characters in the book’s opening chapters. That range also makes for interesting play with the lighting of the various environments, going from enveloping soft light too harder mixed neon lights. One of the most effective splashes in this book at showing how much of a fish-out-of-water John is in part due to how the environmental lighting is handled and how that clashes with what he is wearing. The use of color in “Sugar” does a good job of giving pages their own palettes and environments a sense of place, while using that color as a unifying theory to bring the various panels together. This unifying theory extends to giving the two leads their own distinct pallets. Julia is generally surrounded by earth tones while John is more in the aqua range. The macro use of color in “Sugar” gives pages a Color Field quality either through their singular use or playing with John and Julia’s pallets off one another that make pages pop.
The typical Top Cow backmatter is present with a Matt Hawkins column. It’s a bit light compared to other columns he has done.
Final Verdict: 6.5 – “Sugar” volume 1 is an overall fine read with excellent art that is let down by writing that doesn’t investigate the nature of the titular relationship enough, leading to a product that is emotionally a bit generic and broadly Romantic in the way it thumbed its nosed in the text.
