Stephanie Stalvey grew up in an evangelical community where love and obedience were overlapping themes. In this world, sin was inevitable, her body was a temptation, and desire was dangerous. Her own thoughts could not be trusted, because she was only saved if she believed the “right things” about God.

But as she grew, built a life of her own, and fell in love with a young seminarian named James, the complexities of the human experience became impossible to ignore. Was God truly so exacting and judgmental? Could faith exist beyond these rigid borders? Could love be both passionate and pure? Her connection to James―honest, caring and sensual―became a safe place for her worldview to expand. And when their son was born, she understood love in a whole new way… suddenly, everything was sacred, everything was in color.

Out this week, Everything in Color: A Love Story is a graphic memoir exploring Stalvey’s experiences. Through striking prose and beautiful mixed media illustrations, Stalvey takes us on an emotional journey of faith, romance, motherhood and loss. With tenderness and honesty, she unravels the fear and guilt woven into her past, reclaims her sense of self, and shows us how to embrace a love that is healing, transformative, and wholly one’s own.

We got a chance to ask Stalvey some questions about the graphic novel, her upbringing, and using art to explore and examine difficult situations.

Check out the interview below along with an exclusive preview. You can get your copy now from your local comic shop or bookstore, Bookshop, Amazon, and more.

Graphic Policy: What motivated you to create Everything in Color?

Stephanie Stalvey: At first, the motivation was really personal. Around 2020, I was making these short autobio comics in my sketchbooks with watercolor, gouache, and a micron pen. At that point, they were kind of like illustrated diary entries. I wasn’t making them for an audience or imagining who might read them. I was just using comics as a way to make sense of my own life and past. I have always loved comics. Ever since I was a kid, I have been reading, writing, and drawing them, just for my own joy and pleasure. So it felt very natural for me to return to this form of storytelling. Comics are something I knew by heart.

Gradually, I began sharing some of my comics online, which is when people really started to respond. I realized that by being open and honest about personal parts of my story, I was tapping into something more universal. People kept saying, “this was me, too.” This is my story, but it’s also an attempt to give shape and language to something a lot of people have felt but maybe haven’t seen reflected back to them yet. Eventually, I knew that I wanted to take on the challenge of composing a full length narrative. It was something I felt very compelled and driven to do… to put my heart and my story on the page, to make something creative and beautiful out of the raw material of my life.

 So I felt like I needed to write this book for the sake of my own soul… but also, I wanted to use my personal experiences to speak about these larger issues that affect us all. Religion and spirituality intersecting with politics is crucially relevant right now. As a person who was raised by an evangelical pastor in an evangelical world, I feel like I have this inside perspective. It’s just one experience, and I don’t pretend to be an expert, but I can share my own story. I wanted to use narrative and my lived experiences to explore how these systems can shape our personal relationships, marriages, families, communities, and our relationship to ourselves in a really formative way. I wanted to speak to people who felt scared or lost in the heartbreaking, slow process of religious deconstruction and healing. It’s something I will probably keep writing about for a long time. 

GP: It’s based on your life. As a creator, how does it feel to put yourself out there like that?

SS: It’s definitely vulnerable, but I think it’s the work of a memoirist to go to those vulnerable places. When I’m willing to be honest about intimate parts of my own story, that’s what bridges the personal and the collective. Because really, we’re all just human, and we’re not as alone in our personal struggles as we think. And honestly, the response from readers has made it feel safe for me to open up. When people say, ‘I’ve never seen this part of my life reflected before,’ it transforms that vulnerability into something connective and healing. 

That being said, there’s a lot of care in what I chose to include and how I chose to frame it. As the artist, I’m shaping the story, reflecting on the past, providing context, etc. In order to tell this story, I had to give myself permission to creatively reconstruct the details of events and conversations that happened over 15 years ago. So some of the conversations that James and I have in the book are word for word, and others are written through the lens of memory, informed by what I know of our dynamic. My journals were very helpful in shaping this, but I definitely took creative license in condensing some of the timeline, changing people’s names and likeness to protect their anonymity, etc. By making this a very creative project “based” on my life, I was actually better equipped to arrive at what felt most true. By turning myself into a cartoon, I created a degree of separation that helped me feel comfortable being more vulnerable, open, and honest, I think. It’s like a magic trick. 

So yes. There’s very intimate content in there. There’s childhood wounds, there’s the birth of my son, there’s pregnancy loss, there’s romantic physical intimacy between me and James… and yeah, sometimes I do feel like, “Whoa, am I oversharing?” But at the end of the day, it’s not exposure for the sake of exposure. It’s just human stuff, and it’s a part of my story that was essential to the narrative. And actually, it’s completely thematically relevant to overcome the shame that typically keeps us quiet about those aspects of life. 

GP: There’s a lot of influence by the Evangelical community on our lives and direction of the country. What do you think it is that creates the drive for imposing those beliefs on others as opposed to just living those beliefs themselves?

SS: This is such a good question, and it’s one of the things I wanted to “show not tell” in this book. It’s not only intended for people who grew up in church, it’s also for people who grew up outside of it and can’t quite understand the stakes, dynamics, or rationale of the people inside of it. For a lot of Evangelicals, obedience and the authority of scripture is paramount. (To be clear, we’re talking about their specific interpretation of the Bible.) Anyone who does not share their same beliefs is “lost,” ungodly, and in need of saving.

When obedience and authority are paramount, and when your faith becomes about convincing people to adopt your worldview, you can start to believe that it’s a holy mission to impose your religious framework on other people. If you think you’re saving people from Hell by convincing them to obey your religious rules, you can participate in some pretty un-loving behavior and call it “love.”

I do think it’s also important to emphasize that for many people, faith is not like this: it’s about actually loving your neighbor as yourself, not about forcing your neighbor to adopt your doctrinal worldview in order to avoid going to Hell. And I think that it’s really valuable for people to feel free to form healthy, positive relationships to spirituality and faith that are disentangled from punitive, hierarchical systems. That’s hard, ongoing work. But these harmful systems do not have a monopoly on faith, God, Jesus, meaning, morality etc. It was important for me to include this aspect in the book, too. 

GP: It’s not something I’ve experienced so have no idea of what it’s like, but do you see the rigidity and control as cult-like?

SS: I try to be really careful about this language because I don’t want people to shut down conversation, and because Christianity all over the world is incredibly vast and varied. There are many healthy expressions of it. That being said, there are absolutely large factions of evangelical culture that fit the description of shutting down critical thinking, claiming to have the exclusive truth, authoritarian leadership, fear of punishment, no tolerance for dissent, claiming control over people’s bodily and financial decisions, etc, etc. At that point it can become something dangerous, and I think we need to look at that honestly and seriously. Because it’s not harmless; it has real effects on our country, our world, and our individual lives and relationships. 

In Everything in Color, I do try to take an unflinching look at some of these patriarchal, punishment-based religious structures without demonizing or blaming the individuals within those systems. My mom and dad, for example, were good and loving parents who were raising us in a Christian social context. That social framework gave them some very bad advice about how God wanted them to raise and discipline their kids. In the book, I wanted to show what it was like to be inside that social context, especially when I was a young adult. Most of the people I was interacting with were genuinely kind and just doing their best, but many of them were handed a bad script. Some other people did use that bad script to justify cruel, controlling, abusive, and even narcissistic behavior. I try to show the social policing and the existential threats that underpin a lot of internal interactions, but I try to do so with a lens of compassion.

 I also wanted to depict how fear-based messages can live inside of the body for a long time, even after the mind has moved on, because that has been my experience. It’s a really complex and ongoing process of healing, because for those of us who grew up in church, the harmful messages were also tied to a lot of positive experiences and wrapped up in our definition of “love.” And like I said, they were often passed on to us with good intentions.

Part of the goal of this book was to show how, eventually, real encounters with love helped me to heal from some of these strict, punitive, fear-based religious messages. If God is love, God could not be this wrathful, authoritarian, punitive figure who is fundamentally separate from us. Because that’s not what love is like. That was central to my personal transition.

GP: When creating Everything in Color, how did it impact your understanding of your experiences?

SS: When you’re inside of an experience, it can feel very immediate and confusing, like you’re stuck within it. Illustrating my experiences gave me a chance to be a compassionate witness to my own life. There was that degree of separation that made it feel reflective and relational. I was spending a lot of time with my younger self, and I felt this tremendous love for her. In a lot of ways, I made this book for her and with her help. 

In Everything in Color, I created different visual archetypes to represent and personify various parts of my psyche (like, for example, the wolf represents my anger and “strong will.”) This allowed me to actually face those parts myself with compassion instead of feeling overwhelmed by them. The whole process of creatively revisiting your own story and reclaiming it in your own voice is just profoundly healing. 

Also, creating a book like this allowed me to memorialize beautiful, significant moments of my life, like becoming a mother, falling in love, and developing a spirituality that felt more rooted in real, embodied love. I could also give myself the gift of perspective. For example, my experience of falling in love was, at the time, overshadowed by a lot of unnecessary guilt and shame. In this comic, I could depict it as it actually was: sweet, earnest, tender, and pure. I tried to use a combination of humor and heart to ease the pressure and panic I felt back then.

GP: Do you see art as a tool to escape and educate about religious fundamentalism?

SS: I think I see art as a healing, empowering tool in general. And honestly, I think the arts are capable of something more powerful than information alone: art allows people to feel something. Information can tell you what happened, but art can help you understand what it was like to live inside it. Especially with something like religious fundamentalism, which is often very internal, emotional, and connected to so many aspects of a person’s life (both positive and negative) art becomes especially powerful. In my mind, that sort of complexity really calls for narrative.

So I see art as a way of fostering empathy, creating language, and sometimes creating a sense of permission for people to question, to reflect, or to imagine something different without needing to have all of the answers right away. I want to meet people in their hearts and in their embodied experience. And story is such a powerful way to do that.