Graphic Novel

Mormon Ladybug: My Mormon Mission to San Francisco

Above are a few random pages from my Graphic Novel Mormon Ladybug, charting the personal experiences of a young teenage missionary in the California Bay Area (San Francisco and Oakland) in the mid 1990s. Color is used to denote different peoples and different emotional states. This book is neither an expose nor promotion of faith, but rather a reflection on religion and the human desire for autonomy, acceptance, and meaning. In short, it’s a story about how beauty is not found in containment, but rather the process of letting go.

In 1995, there was around 50,000 full-time missionaries sent out to nearly 400 different proselytizing missions throughout the globe. This is a simultaneously funny and tragic story of one of them.