The Yellow Wallpaper recounts the travails of a woman prescribed a “rest cure” for a “temporary nervous depression”. The comic begs the question of whether darkness is a presence or an absence, and asks which might be considered preferable when the void is looking into you. The darkness, sometimes impenetrably black, other times a grainy charcoal or graphite smog, fosters the intended sense of inexorable suffocation that the reader cannot help but share with the narrator. The comic’s unrelenting chiaroscuro does away with Lannes’ need for any traditional framing devices characteristic of the form. Early on, as the narrator and John have sex, he’s an inky black negative space, a silhouette upon her prone body that bleeds into the surrounding darkness. Never has a comic more effectively exercised both the visually suggestive and metaphorically rich possibility of shadow. Lannes’ narrator begins to develop holes all over her body, hollowing from the inside out to better resemble the lacuna that John wants to fill. The body horror that follows is probably best skipped by trypophobes. Enter John, an “extraordinary” man seeking exactly such vulnerability in a prospective partner upon which to exert a pathological desire for control. The narrator that John, Dear centers on is already untethered from her sense of self by grief over the loss of her mother.
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