45 Days Of CCS, #24: Violet Kitchen

Violet Kitchen came out of the gates at CCS doing interesting work, and they've only built on that potential since graduating. They co-founded GoPress Girl with Rachel Bivens, and they are already publishing excellent work on top of their own comics. The comic they published with the ShortBox Comics Festival this year, Allodynia, is probably their strongest work to date. It is fundamentally a comic about the limits of empathy. 

The title refers to a condition that is a type of nerve pain triggered by a stimulus that doesn't normally cause pain. The classic example is when sunburned skin feels unusually sensitive to touch. In the comic, the term has multiple meanings. The narrative follows a young trans couple named Tess and Jules. Tess is a jock who loves running, while Jules is a homebody who struggles with the pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia. Tess volunteers at a clinic for an experiment studying pain and responses to pain. They receive a drug that gives them a sort of total body burning sensation while they are in an MRI, and then they see images of human faces and click on the ones that seem to be in pain. It's a clever set-up for what follows next, especially as Kitchen is careful to establish the loving relationship between Tess and Jules, albeit one where Jules clearly feels the need to do certain things on their own, sometimes to Tess' chagrin. 

After a couple of sessions in the clinic, an unusual thing happens to Tess: they begin to perceive pain in others and feel their own pain in electric jolts. Working at a cafe, they start to look at their customers like the images in their experiments, observing their expressions to see if they are pained or not. Kitchen brilliantly uses color in an otherwise black & white comic to express this. When their nervous system is activated (something they never share with anyone), Kitchen uses a bright red to emphasize this pain. The images of people in pain are in blue. Kitchen repeats these patterns later when Tess starts perceiving all of this information outside of the clinical setting. 

As I said, this is a comic not only about the limits of empathy, but also how we interact with others based on that level of empathy that we feel. When Tess can sense how much pain Jules is in all the time, their empathy doesn't just come from a place of caring, it comes from them not wanting to perceive that pain in someone else anymore. It is allodynia--something that was a part of normal life has now become painful for them, and their reaction is to recoil from this feeling someone else's pain while ignoring their actual feelings. Jules tells them they need to do things for themselves, even if it hurts, and begs them to back off. Tess replies "I'm just supposed to let you watch you do that?", refer to Jules' pain, depression, etc. Jules goes to a logical place: if their pain bothers them so much, be with someone who's healthy.

The irony is that Tess can no longer escape from pain--including their own. The end sequence, with Tess listening to their motivational recording spout platitudes like "I know change is not comfortable" brilliantly encapsulates their sense of being trapped in this new sense of awareness, and it dawns on them that this is how Jules lives all the time. All of this is heightened by them both being trans, especially in a sequence where Tess seethes in frustration about having to educate someone at work about trans issues. Tess is furious, but it's also clear they relish having the moral high ground and are offended by the lack of empathy they receive from cis people. Their empathy only extends to themselves, something they learn the hard way. Kitchen is a fabulously nuanced storyteller who understands how to use color and tell a story primarily through the use of visuals. Some of the color registers were a tad off and there were a few lettering corrections that weren't quite fixed, but these are minor quibbles for one of the best comics of 2024.