Emily Carroll’s web-comic, His Face All Red, focuses on two main characters—the Narrator and his Brother. Neither is named in the story, therefore I have capitalized their titles for referencing purposes.

The Narrator immediately builds sympathy for the Brother by describing him as handsome and trustworthy, while painting himself as envious and unpopular. Due to an unreliable narrator, the only thing I can tell for certain what is true are his emotions, as his story may have untruthful elements pertaining to events and appearances. For example, it is not clear if when the characters pass by a tree and stream whether the descriptions are simple similaic descriptors, or if the trees and streams in this fictional world actually look and sound like that.

After the Narrator kills the Brother, he is celebrated for slaying the beast that was terrorizing the village and is given his Brother’s animals. He seems content here, as he notes he dreamt of nothing. One part of the story is that the Narrator is the only one who notices the Brother’s coat is not missing the piece he ripped from it. If the Narrator really did take a piece and show it to the townspeople for proof of his Brother’s death, why then was he the only one who noticed? I suppose everyone could have been too overcome with joy to notice for themselves. This is peculiar nonetheless.

The Narrator seeing the Brother at night digging could be a hallucination or an actual event, but at this point in the story he is just as confused as the reader, if not more so due to him not being entirely normal/sane at the beginning.

In the hole the Brother was deposited into, the Narrator comes across a body. Personally, it was hard for me to tell if it was the Brother’s or not as all that was shown was some hair and an eye (and the outline of his jacket I suppose). It is possible that it could be the Brother: the Narrator had just finished asking why the Brother who had come back does not look at him, implying his Brother usually does. The eye shown looking at the Narrator in the final scene could be a reference to that. It could possibly be any sort of dead body. What the Narrator finds may not even be real; he could be imagining whoever/whatever he found down in that hole, as his mind is clearly not in the best shape.

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One of the most intriguing mysteries readers may find themselves pondering while reading “His Face All Red” is the ambiguity surrounding when the murdered brother is the beast, and when he is himself. Emily Caroll uses a number of storytelling devices to facilitate this narrative vagueness including recurring phrases, color selection, and the specific placement of visual indicators.

The poem opens with a dark-red tint coloring the image in the panel. It is revealed to us that this is not the narrator’s brother, and that he had killed his actual brother. We cut to see a goat, a victim of the beast, covered in blood, another occurrence of red. The narrative flashes back to reveal information about the town and the characters, establishing that the narrator is feeble and the brother has all he desires. In referencing the beast’s emergence from the woods, the narrator claims in a parenthetical aside “most strange things do.” Following that, the narrator and his brother go into the woods to hunt the beast. When they locate it, the narrator hides while the brother confronts the wolf off-panel. This is when the dark-red panel shading returns for the first time since flashing back, flooding a panel while the brother kills “the beast,” which turned out to only be a wolf. The dark-red hue returns once again when the narrator makes another parenthetical aside to claim that the villagers would only be grateful “to him (brother).” There is another red flash as the narrator murders his brother off panel. He emerges from the wood, dragging his brother’s corpse behind him with his face covered in blood. This is an occurrence of the dark-red color existing inside the narrative of the piece. The narrator returns home a hero and comfortably slips into a guilt free routine, until his brother emerges from the woods unharmed. Here, there is a return to the phrase “most strange things do,” once in reference to the beast and now in reference to the brother. The panel now tints dark-red whenever the brother is in frame. The narrator cannot sleep and has dreams of his brother’s red, bloody face. In a last attempt to reconcile reality from delusion, the narrator returns to the hole he buried his brother in and finds his corpse with his face still red. The corpse turns and looks the narrator dead in the eyes, and the poem concludes.

The proposed theory, as substantiated by the above evidence, is that the beast became the brother while the narrator was hiding. The narrator uses the parenthetical aside, “most strange things do” to describe the beast’s emergence from the wood, and uses it again when referencing the brother’s emergence. This is a deliberate literary inclusion to indicate the beast’s presence. After the brother returns as the beast, he is seen almost exclusively through a dark-red tinted lens. This is not the only occurrence of red being used to signify the beast throughout the comic. Red blood covers the face of the beast’s first victim, one of the brother’s goats. The screen also flashes red at the deaths of both the wolf and the brother, suggesting that they were also victims of the beast. They both appear with their faces covered in blood. Red is traditionally used in literature to indicate aggression and intensity. The panel turns red during the second parenthetical aside. Essentially, the beast became the brother when the wolf was supposedly killed, using the wolf as a distraction. After the brother/beast is put back into the hole, most likely serving as a lair of some kind due to its return later in the comic, he emerges and returns to the village transformed as the brother. His panels are largely tinted red throughout his encounters with the narrator. When the narrator returns to the hole at the end of the passage, the red returns as he goes further down the hole, only to find the monster, face covered in red, still waiting for him.

In Emily Carroll’s His Face All Red, the reader is left open to interpretation of the ending. To decide whether the main character’s brother is dead or not, and if he is the beast. Many small details of the comic can allow readers to propose the theory that the brother is in fact not dead. The first piece of evidence readers encounter, is when the main character is describing his brother’s house. Which is said to have a lilac bush outside of the house, later in the comic the main character says the mysterious hole in the woods also smells of lilac. This clue many not seem important but after the brother revisits the same hole, he finds a man who looks similar to his brother, resting within. As readers have not been made aware of the sleeping arrangements within the brother’s house at the beginning narration of the comic, thus we do not know if the brother has been  sleeping in the house or has been sleeping in the hole. The lilac smell coming from within the hole, can cause the reader to assume that the brother sleeps within the hole, and is in fact the beast.

The Reader gain the final piece of evidence when the main character is shown dragging his “dead” brother towards the hole within the woods. The face of the brother is shown with his eyes still open. The same faces is shown when the main character finds the brother within the hole, after the main character “killed” him. The illustration of the brother with his eyes open after “death”, allows a reader to assume the brother is still alive as most illustrations of people who are presumed to be dead are drawn with their eyes closed.

Emily Carroll seems to have ended the comic with many questions unanswered, but the subtle use of clues within her illustration, and the way she uses narration to describe little details, allows the reader to come to a conclusion of the brothers fate.

One of the oldest maxims of writing is the simple statement, “Show, don’t tell.” In her comic, His Face All Red, Emily Carroll applies this principle to her illustrations and uses the reader’s intuition to streamline and focus her narrative. Much of the subtleties regarding the character relationships are communicated through her illustrations rather than the character’s words. Take for instance the younger brother’s subordinate position in the community relative to his brother, which is depicted in the sizes of their homes.The same information can also be seen in the very first frame, in which he is depicted in the far right of the frame, isolated from the community.In this way we are given detailed information about the characters from a single frame that would take a paragraph of narration to convey.

Carroll complicated the “show, don’t tell” principle by conversely using it to intentionally add ambiguity to her story. Take for instance the two instances in which she saturates the frame with red. The first time, when the older brother kills the beast, the death of the beast is taken as definite fact.But the central crux of this comic’s mystery lies in the reader’s interpretation of the next instance of this device, during the murder of the brother.Here the story can branch into a multitude of different directions. The brother could truly be dead, and some shapeshifter goes on to take his place. The brother could have survived, and through some unknown circumstance ends up untouched back in the village in three days time. By not directly showing the murder of the older brother, Carroll allows for multiple explanations of the plot and creates a narrative with a unique flavor for every individual reader. First she establishes the practice of communicating definite fact through illustration, and later turns that concept on its head by intentionally obscuring the absolute truth of the narrative.

Just as an interesting aside, the film Valhalla Rising, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Bronson) does a very similar thing of filling the frame with red to imply violence and/or murder.

Obsession is a type of behavior that usually connoted negatively and is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a state in which someone thinks about someone or something constantly or frequently especially in a way that is not normal.” In Emily Carroll’s digital graphic novel, “Margot’s Room,” this ongoing theme is emphasized greatly through both the narrator’s and her husband, Gilles’, lives and behaviors throughout the story. As the reader follows the story, it is clearly evident that the wife has issues distinguishing between reality and fantasy due to her downward, obsessive spiral. Gilles suffers as well but has a more generic aftermath (distancing oneself, marriage issues, etc.) of his daughter’s death while the narrator suffers from something darker.

In Part I, Flowers, the husband is seemingly happy, or aloof, despite that his future wife’s father, his ex-boss, had just passed away from an unspecified illness. There is also the possibility (that many readers interpret) that either he killed his boss in order to have his wife all to himself, or that it could have been the other way around, she killing her father to be close to him: both being signs of obsessive behavior.  However, in this part, the main focus is on how the narrator keeps speaking of her feelings in the past while juxtaposing them with the present’s, and how she is obsessed with the death among her loved ones. The last frame records her saying “he promised he’d live forever,” emphasizing the inability to move on, and her focus on death. So even in the first frames we meet the pair, there is already something uncanny about their relationship and the odd manner they deal with death.

In Part II, she cannot move on from her daughter’s, Margot, death and wonders whether she could have done anything to prevent it. At this point, it’s fairly evident that her obsession with her daughter’s death is what drove her husband away, despite his efforts to comfort her.

Part III presents the same obsessive behaviors that the narrator had previously exhibited and she herself notes that she spends most of her time alone waiting for her husband’s return. In addition, Gilles also begins to spend a longer time away from home since he was very affected by the death of his daughter and his wife’s conduct. At this point, it’s also evident that he is obsessed with Margot’s death as well and also becomes an unreliable narrator, especially when his wife discovers the villagers never saw him at all, thus, invalidating his alibi.

The narrator’s obsession with her daughter is elaborated upon in Part IV when she endlessly ponders on the life Margot did not get to fulfill, asking herself whether it “was it kindness in the end?” Obsession often clouds a person’s mind with intense anxiety and can be the reason why she drove her husband away from her and caused him to “change.”

The power of obsession is what allowed the narrator to murder her husband, she did not see anything realistically anymore and neither did he since she was plagued with illnesses and deaths. Just as the monsters that Gilles saw in the woods could have been a representation of the obsession they have possessed from dwelling on the death of their daughter. Whether or not it was a supernatural occurrence or their own insanity, their obsession with Margot’s death brought them to these circumstances, and ultimately drove the narrator to murder her beloved husband.