Mariana Neves

What lurks in the margins of everyday life? What of ourselves do we exile beyond the borders of whom we’ve been conditioned to be?
In waking life, in dreams. As Rita attends the last year of Catholic school in Leiria, Portugal, a new girl joins the class, and Rita is plagued by visions of a dragon following her relentlessly. The Monsters in My Closet is a graphic novel about confronting one’s inner demons against the backdrop of a wider belief system. It depicts a journey of acceptance and the realisation of one’s queerness while living in a conservative, Catholic city and wrestling with a lack of references, teenage insecurities, internalised homophobia, compulsive heterosexuality, and a religious upbringing.

The comics draw inspiration from medieval illuminations and marginalia, subverting Christian aesthetics by exploring the tension between the Word of God and the margins, insiders and outsiders, heteronormativity and queerness, and the process of othering.