Sunhead's Embodied Metaphor
Content Warnings: spoilers for Sunhead
Sunhead (author website) is a comic by Alex Assan about Rotem, a queer teen figuring herself out via her favorite book, Sunrise. Scenes from the book are strongly pink-tinted and framed with clouds, while scenes from Rotem's life have a wider range of colors and conventional rectangular panel frames.
There's a few different visual elements involved in that effect, different ways of pointing at the same thing:
- Limited Palette: defined by an overarching emotional tone, looks less like "reality" (not that anything in this comic is a "realist" art style! But the scenes from Rotem's life have a comparatively wider emotional range)
- Pink: beauty, romance, pleasure. Also, pink is usually read as feminine- but, while Sunrise is a teen paranormal romance (strongly referring to Twilight, actually) the story is more complicated than "it's a book for teen girls.
- Non-Rectangular Panels: dreamy, unreal.
- Clouds/Mist: "head in the clouds, mystery, softness.
Sometimes, Rotem's feelings about Sunrise spill over into her broader life. Here, she's just had a long conversation about it with a new friend, and the pink clouds appear around her.