Is it too early to announce my favorite comic of 2020? Obviously. So I'll just say Weng Pixin's Sweet Time is one-hell-of-a contender.
Though the art of Sweet Time is by definition comics art, it stands impressively far above most of the conventions and genre expectations of the medium's mainstream publishing history. In terms of form, Pixin is a comics artist—because she is composing sequences of juxtaposed images—but the visual impact of her artwork escapes the norms of most other graphic literature.
This is true despite her working with traditional panels and gutters. But how often does a comics artist carefully construct and layer strips of paper to form gutters that are as visually engaging as the content of the images they frame? How often does a comics artist focus attention on the qualities of her brushwork as her impressionist dabs widen into the thick swaths of an expressionist? How often is a comics viewer able to appreciate the texture of the paper absorbing the watercolors? It might be more accurate to simply call Pixin an artist, one who happens to be working in the comics form.
Categorizing Sweet Time is pleasantly difficult too. What do you term something that combines fiction and nonfiction—though maybe it doesn't? Graphic memoirs are sometimes called graphic novels despite prose novels indicating fictional content. Whatever the nature of Pixin's content, the work implies a collection, so even the more recent and inclusive term graphic narrative falls short.