Liz Suburbia’s Sacred Heart imagines a town where every adult vanished for reasons nobody bothers to explain, and the local teenagers are left to run things themselves — which sounds like a fun premise right up until you remember that unsupervised teenagers, historically, do not run things well.
They fight. They go to punk shows. They love each other in the specific, bruising way you only can when no one older is around to tell you it’s too much. Somewhere at the edge of town, a killer is loose, and everyone treats it with roughly the same energy as a persistent weather pattern. It’s less Lord of the Flies and more: what if nobody’s parents ever came home, and everyone just adjusted. Teen Titans: Raven at least hands its kid a foster family to fumble through the aftermath with. Nobody here gets that luxury.
Story Themes
Suburbia isn’t interested in handing anyone a redemption arc or a tidy moral. The kids in Sacred Heart aren’t symbols of anything — they’re just teenagers doing what teenagers do when there’s no one left to catch them: drinking too much, loving too hard, pretending the ambient dread isn’t there. Faith shows up in fragments. Someone’s still going to church out of habit. Someone else gave up on the whole concept a while ago. Nobody gets a clean answer, because the book isn’t interested in giving one.
The real horror here isn’t the guy killing people on the outskirts of town, though yes, that is happening in the background the entire time. It’s the loneliness of a place that’s stopped being anywhere anyone’s coming back to. If you want horror that leans harder into the killer and less into the ambient dread, Through the Woods covers that territory instead.
Art Style
Suburbia draws this entire world in Sharpie, which sounds like a limitation until you see what she does with it — thick black lines, hard shadows, negative space carrying more weight than most artists manage with a full palette. It reads like a zine that got a slightly bigger budget and refused to lose the edge that got it noticed in the first place. If you’ve spent any real time near punk scenes, the DIY instinct here won’t feel like an aesthetic choice. It’ll feel like the actual thing.
Liz Suburbia’s art is raw and emotive. A quick dive into her Tumblr and her other work reveals that she is heavily influenced by punk aesthetics and underground comics. Throughout this graphic novel, her bold black-and-white linework frequently relies on heavy contrast and sharp, jagged lines that add grit to the story panels. It has to be noted that Suburbia has a true gift for communicating the emotional depth of her characters through subtle facial expressions and body language, in a way that makes her stories feel authentic.
Suburbia’s work often visually explores the chaos and loneliness of youth, using detailed backgrounds and panel layouts that create an immersive, almost cinematic feel. Her DIY approach and zine-like sensibilities make her work stand out, resonating with readers who appreciate independent, subversive storytelling.
Despite the limitations of using permanent markers, Suburbia skillfully balances detail and simplicity. She often uses negative space and strategic hatching to achieve depth despite her lack of color use. The Sharpies aesthetic is rife with the teenage rebellion, DIY ethos, and everyday mayhem that permeate Suburbia’s work.
Conclusion
Sacred Heart doesn’t resolve so much as it just stops, which is either going to feel true to life or mildly infuriating depending on how badly you need your fiction to wrap up with a bow. Either way, it’s one of the more honest portraits of teenage limbo you’ll find in graphic novel form — freedom and isolation as the same coin, flipped over and over until you can’t tell which side you’re looking at anymore.
If graphic novels doubling as emotional processing are your thing, Comics That Helped Me Process has a few more recommendations in that vein.
Sacred Heart, by Liz Suburbia, is published by Fantagraphics.
