#plart

Well. There was also a little plastic mechanical pencil involved at some point in the process. But I forgot to put it in the photo lol

I chose to adapt Herman Hesse's "Demian" because it's a very influential book for me. I saw myself in the protagonist, Emil Sinclair in how he worries about what other people think of him as a kid, leading him to tell different lies to different people. His struggle to rationalize what is "good" or "evil" is rooted in his religious upbringing, and his first step towards discovering himself and his own values is from someone (Demian) telling him a different perspective, and inviting him to think for himself. I felt seen in how Sinclair wants to be guided by others, but feels unable to teach others, and seeing him eventually reach independence makes me want to reach that point too. He starts off the book seperating things into binaries like Man and Woman, Good and Evil, but over the course of the book those concepts start to overlap and gray for him. He admires Demian and Beatrice for being a boy with feminine features, and a girl with masculine features, and when he eventually meets Frau Eva, he loves how handsome she is. The scene I adapted, where he sees himself in his own painting, not visually but emotionally, really connects with me as an artist who puts themself into their work, and gets a slightly better understanding of myself when I first step back and look at it. I don't want my pictures to look like a mirror of me, but still reflect me somehow. And with my experience with gender, I see myself in Sinclair's idealization of androgyny, even if those sorts of words would not be used at the time. This connection I felt with the book helped move me to read more classic literature and see myself in them.

I decided for the first page to not have a lot of narration because I felt that it could be told through pictures. The scene starts with the sun "slanting red through my window" during sunset, and "Inside my room it was dusk", which gave me my color palette for the comic; reds and warm purples. Sinclair is not very detailed in the first page because I thought it would feel more atmospheric, and to emphasize the self discovery on the second page. The three panels on the bottom were repeated with subtle changes in expression to give the feeling of time passing as, in the narration, "For a long time I sat oppposite it even after the picture had faded out." He blends in with the light of the painting because of how much he's taking it in; the last panel's sudden contrast is the moment of realization leading up to the next page. The painting's sudden detail is partly because I got too into drawing it, but is so important that it should be in substantially more detail; it is a catalyst for Sinclair, and it is symbolic of his connections (and future connections) in the book. Besides Sinclair's emotions, it is the most detailed description in that scene, and the way he describes it radiates joy and excitement.