In Sugar & Other Stories, Joy San delivers seven deftly illustrated horror comics that will make readers shiver, gasp, and carry each image into their nightmares. Whether it’s a morning headache that could simply disrupt a young student’s day, a reflection on what it means to be a “good girl,” or a long-desired beautiful smile, each tale begins innocently and ends on an unforgettable note.
Sugar & Other Stories
Joy San
Silver Sprocket
March 15, 2023
I’m a big fan of San’s art; she shares her work generously on social media and her website so it’s easy to grow familiar with her watercolor and colored pencil work. However, San’s stories always shake her readers out of familiar territory and offer something new. Like Benji Nate, her comics often involve cute, seemingly carefree girls combined with sinister happenings or motivations. However, San’s style is often more minimalist, as is most of Sugar & Other Stories. Comics like The Island or, in this collection, “Too Much on Your Plate,” feel like rare, full-color treats. San tends to lure her readers in with brilliant, deceptively simple line work and spot color, then blows up the horror with more color.
To capture that range, we can start with “I Like to Squeeze into Tight Places” and then jump to “Too Much on Your Plate.” “Tight Places” might be my favorite comic in the collection, especially if we are ranking the stories that freaked me out most up top. Appropriately, in a comic about actual physical places, San’s genius use of space on the page is the highlight. In a small scene that takes up only about a quarter of the page, the protagonist comes across a densely packed wood. “Tight Places” is black and white with solid inks and no shading, but the spindly trees are wound so tightly around the cave that the space’s smallness is palpable. On the following page we don’t see the trees or cave again, nor do we need them – a tiny black circle, barely big enough for the protagonist’s body, subsumes her into the cave and we know, viscerally, that there is no other space for her – the white space on the page will not welcome her. Her love and desire to be in these places, to be subsumed into what’s created by the solid black ink, is all the reader needs to understand her feelings, and thus to reel back in horror.
Here is San’s first incredible skill: she can make you feel everything while using almost nothing. Now we’ll move onto her second: using full color to create a full, internal, emotional world.
“Too Much on Your Plate” is the second-to-last comic in the collection, and displays San’s skill with watercolor. The cover reveals a great deal about what’s to come: a woman wearing a simple white nightgown holds a white plate over her face and a large kitchen knife in her other hand. The background is a watercolor wash of black and purple, but the colors enshroud her completely. Even the title text, “Too Much on Your Plate,” is kept carefully away from her, as it’s fully white and uncolored.
There are more full watercolor backgrounds of this style in the comic, but they always appear in the woman’s dreams. During the day she moves through her life by moving through typical comic panels. The reader follows as her boss drops unreasonable deadlines in her lap or her husband carouses at bars late into the night while she cleans a filthy house. Her dreams are different – they’re full page illustrations in which she takes up much more space. Both her body and her rage explode against those two-tone watercolor washes in the form of jagged lettering, distorted facial expressions and that knife from the cover, in her hand once again. The fully painted backgrounds immerse us in the protagonist’s internal world, the only place where her feelings and effort are truly acknowledged.
San takes all these burdensome symbols of domesticity and twists them. In the dream, a horrifying woman with a face made of teeth and an opening in her dress that seems to reveal fleshy but inhuman innards appears, and rings a simple dinner bell. She consumes the knife, and then drives her teeth into the protagonist’s face, as if performing some kind of horrible acupuncture. These terrifying scenes give the woman peace during her waking hours by allowing her to handle all that is “on her plate,” bleeding her dry of all her negative emotion, and making her blind to the way her world is spiraling. San has created a disconcerting visual the reader can easily recognize as a horror, but the woman with a face of teeth is not the source of horror in this story. It’s the attention that she takes from the protagonist, the lack of action she creates, and the awful consequences that ensue.
“Too Much on Your Plate” is layered – both visually and in story – in a way “I Like to Squeeze into Tight Places” is not, but both are stunning horror stories that will stay with readers for a long time, as are all the stories in this collection! Sugar & Other Stories is a true celebration of San’s incredible range, with something for horror fans of all kinds. My one critique of this collection is that there is no break between stories. It’s wild to watch San move between styles, changing her medium or use of color to perfectly convey a character’s emotions and motivations, but those frequent shifts create a need for the reader to breathe between stories. However, this is the tiniest of complaints – I am so horrified and delighted by this collection, and it deserves a spot on your (or your library’s!) shelf.
