With her writing and illustrating for the graphic novel The Deep Dark, Molly Knox Ostertag takes readers on a journey into the psychology of dark thoughts and their potential to suck the life from us.
Trying to survive senior year, Magdalena Herrera (aka Mags) is stuck in a small Southern California town under a mountain of responsibilities that include coursework, a part-time job, caring for her mostly bed-ridden abuela, and struggling with her gender and sexual identities.
When her transgender childhood friend Nessa returns from college, Mags has a kindred spirit to help support her, and together they must make the choice to thrive or be swallowed by judgment, rejection, loneliness, and guilt.
Ostertag uses a monster in the basement as a metaphor not only to capture these challenging emotions but to represent the idea that all families have secrets. To further reveal her characters’ emotional turmoil and the complexity of their inner lives, Ostertag varies her illustration style and color scheme.
Even while tackling these difficult and sometimes controversial topics, the story communicates an optimistic message of acceptance and the need to love the skin we’re in. Ostertag further insists that the parts of ourselves we don’t like or that society doesn’t accept require nurturing, not denial and hiding.
Other significant morals come as the characters realize that it’s not someone else’s job to make us better; that’s something we have to do on our own, starting with honesty and self-acceptance.
- Donna