Sweet Time

Book excerpt: Vibrant swathes of paint build resonant portraits of heartache, childhood memories, and loneliness Sweet Time is an intimate rumination on love, empathy, and confidence. Singaporean cartoonist Weng Pixin delicately explores strained relationships with a kind of hopefulness while acknowledging their inevitable collapse. Her stories are like a series of snapshots in a photo album or the brightest highlights from an Instagram profile. Gorgeous image follows gorgeous image in a delicate quest to find connection. A night out turns into a chance encounter that is at first ecstatic and then quickly descends into awkwardness. A round of “he loves me, he loves me not” becomes a way of reading every action taken by a distant love interest. A couple find themselves in an artificially beautiful landscape, but the relationship can’t survive their difference of opinion on the illusion of its beauty. In Sweet Time, thick and bold strokes of color mingle with delicate lines. Weng combines the colorful realism of Maira Kalman with a gentle wit and introspection all her own, crafting infinitely relatable stories of everyday life and love now.