I'm a storyteller and filmmaker! I'm working on a lot of things, but my main project right now is the bug world of @coelary! Check it out!

You might also know me as @chirasul.



cwf
@cwf

I've been painting this little comic about trauma for a couple months now. I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. Please note that the comic contains self-harm imagery.

made with @nex3's grid generator

If you like, you can buy a handmade high-quality physical copy here: https://www.coelary.com/shop/comic-i-got-hurt


pieartsy
@pieartsy

this is amazing.

how I interpreted it/what I think it's about:


put simply, trauma.

put less simply, defense mechanisms put in place to protect yourself from pain caused by traumatic events, but the evidence of what happened leaking out anyway.

The comic conveys numbness, dissociation, shutdown. "Oh, I must have gotten hurt." There's not actually shock or confusion, just a dull awareness which comes from observing the evidence of trauma (the blood) rather than the pain itself. And instead of concern, Karine feels embarrassed. Defensive that people would notice or want to help. The only upset that seems to come in the comic is "why didn't I notice when it happened?" The nuance between the meanings of hurt == was injured and hurt == in pain is explored to great effect. How can you get hurt but not feel hurt?

Even the title, "I got hurt", is almost childlike in its construction. It's passive too, the question of who or what hurt Karine, how it was done, when, if it was just once or repeatedly, is never definitively answered. It's only gestured at.

Some pages show that Karine self harms via cutting (an easy, more literal explanation for the blood, though not at all explaining the other places it shows up). Some pages like Karine in the bath of blood indicate a more egregious, violent trauma experienced as an adult. Some pages imply a much deeper, older wound, such as the portraits of Karine growing up with blood growing, or the page of the child's drawings on the wall.

That last page alone made my blood run cold with its implications. My thought process: parents don't tend to like kids drawing on the walls, and you can see someone walking down the stairs -- while that seems to be Karine's blood, is that her hand which left the mark? Or is it a sign of physical punishment leaving a stain? It seems like a bigger hand than a child's but I could see it either way.

And of course, none of these explanations preclude the others, they could all have happened.

Speaking of cold blood.

The art.

The choice of blood being blue as opposed to red, while presumably primarily due to the characters being insects, thematically works far better than the raw familiarity that red blood would bring. Blue blood is cold, alien to red-blooded humans, and of course (as seen in the bath and "oh, I must have gotten hurt" pages) reminiscent of water or tears. It emphasizes that this pain isn't hot, searing, or violently sudden like a splash of red implies. It's a cold, numb, distant ache.

Insect people is of course Coelary's whole Thing, but here, the realization that Karine is an insect with missing wings, not revealed until the penultimate panels adds another layer of horror and tragedy.

I do think that the pages read better as spreads as opposed to in a line, as it was hard to parse what the wings page was at first until I paired it with the next page. And the spread of Karine looking down at her bloodstained clothes and hands I imagine would work better seen properly, stretched with Karine's head vanished in the space between the pages and the range of vision purposely distorted too wide.

Did I resonate with it?

Yes.


@cwf shared with:

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in reply to @cwf's post:

ooh, this one hurts. i wish us both the best in our respective recoveries.
would you be able to put a self-harm content warning on the post? unfortunately sh is a very bad trigger for me and i stumbled upon this comic without knowing that sh imagery was going to feature in it
however that in no way diminishes its worth