Stjepan Šejić (born November 27, 1981 in Vinkovci, Croatia) is a Croatian comic book writer and artist. Šejić was born in Vinkovci and resides in Crikvenica, Croatia. Šejić started his career as a colorist, painting covers drawn by Tyler Kirkham. He was mainly inspired by Italian comics before he stumbled upon a copy of Top Cow's Witchblade, which inspired his own art. His work is also influenced by Marc Silvestri and Michael Turner.
In 2007, Šejić signed up to draw the art for Witchblade from issue #116 to #150, the longest run of the series drawn by a single artist once completed. He also illustrated the Witchblade miniseries First Born and Broken Trinity, and covers of the Top Cow series The Darkness. He also cooperates with smaller publishers such as Arcana Studio and Dynamite Entertainment. Since 2015, he has been focusing on his creator-owned titles, which include Sunstone, Fine Print, Death Vigil, Ravine, and The Queen & The Woodborn.
Šejić is married to fellow Croatian artist Linda Luksic Sejic, and has said that he has mild Tourette's Syndrome. He's also known online by the username Nebezial ("celestial" in Croatian), often shortened just to Neb.
Selected Bibliography:
Comic Books
Webcomics
Tropes found in Šejić's work:
- Attention Deficit Creator Disorder: The number of projects he has lined up (most of them personal and creator-owned) would supposedly keep him busy for at least over a decade.
- Author Appeal: Bondage, especially in Sunstone.
- Back-to-Back Badasses: He drew a Variant Cover for Pathfinder: Origins #2 that depicted iconic cleric Kyra back-to-back with iconic paladin Seelah. The story portrays the two adventurers teaming up to fight a vampire infestation (actually chupacabras), though this specific pose doesn't appear.
- Bondage Is Bad: The idea behind Sunstone is to show that it's not. The characters are all perfectly normal people with somewhat out-there kinks. But it's all Safe, Sane, and Consensual and you shouldn't think lesser of them for it.
- Brains and Bondage: The Sunstone-verse in a nutshell, which fundamentally depicts BDSM aficionados as geeks about sex, who naturally have to be very intelligent to think up what they do with each other (the primary domme of the original series is a freelance computer programmer).
- Chainmail Bikini: Parodied along with Bare Midriffs Are Feminine in his "Womb Power"
short comic, which "explains" that the uterus generates a Deflector Shield to protect scantily clad female superheroes et al. from harm. - Genre Roulette: While he's arguably best known for Sunstone, a BDSM Romantic Comedy, he's also written a lot of Urban Fantasy, plus folkloric fantasy in the case of The Queen and the Woodborn and horror-comedy with Death Vigil, while Achilles Shieldmaidens is a Super Robot-style mecha series.
- Has a Type: It's particularly transparent in his one-off projects and random doodles, but then there are always the main characters of Sunstone, which were popping out in his doodles looong before the series started and the way how he was handling his run with Witchblade.
- Hunk: He draws as many Mr. Fanservice characters as he does Ms. Fanservice.
- Loophole Abuse: Where Magically-Binding Contract come into his stories, at least one character will try to find or make a way to take advantage of the situation.
- Only Six Faces: His characters largely suffer from this - and he's very much aware of that - but make up for it by being extremely expressive with distinct characterizations. This does, however, cause problems in crowd scenes, something that Šejić often commented on himself.
- Statuesque Stunner: Expect to have at least one female character that's taller than everyone else while also being pretty muscular (but without being a Brawn Hilda) in each and every one of his projects. Said character is also going to be consistently portrayed as sexy precisely due to her brawny build.
