With ‘Everything in Color,’ Stephanie Stalvey explores faith, purity culture, and identity
April 29, 2026
For Stephanie Stalvey, Everything in Color didn’t begin as a book — it began as a way to survive her own thoughts.
“I started using comics as a way to process how complicated I felt about that once I kind of reached adulthood,” Stalvey said. “I was writing diary-style comics so that I could make sense of my story in my own head.”
What grew out of that private practice is now a sweeping, 500-plus-page graphic memoir (that you can read starting today, April 28) that traces her journey through an evangelical upbringing, first love, motherhood, and the slow, often painful process of redefining faith on her own terms.
The result is intimate, searching, and visually striking, a book that feels as much like a reckoning as it does a genuine release.
Courtesy of 23rd St.
Maturing in a World of Conditions
Stalvey was raised as the daughter of an evangelical pastor and missionary, immersed in a worldview where love and obedience were inseparable.
“When you grow up evangelical, the word ‘unconditional love’ is used a lot to describe God’s love,” Stalvey said. “But, in fact, there are all these terrifying implications about punishment and hell. And so on one level, that’s taught quite literally in the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. ”
That contradiction sits at the heart of Everything in Color. The promise of love exists alongside fear, punishment, and the constant pressure to believe the “right” things. Within that structure, even the body becomes something to be controlled. Stalvey traces those ideas back to childhood, where authority is absolute and often physical.
“Church kids learn at a very early age that their body belongs to the authority figure,” Stalvey said, describing how those lessons carry forward into adolescence and purity culture. What is framed as protection reveals itself, over time, as something else entirely.
“It kind of fundamentally teaches you that it is dangerous… for you to have agency and power over your own body,” Stalvey said.
That realization does not come all at once. As Stalvey mentioned, the clarity she has now is the result of years of reflection. As a child, questioning those ideas came with fear, all of which went into Everything in Color.
“You trust what you are told,” Stalvey said. “And there’s this embodied psychological terror that comes with even having the questions.”
Self-Exploration Through Art
Part of what makes Everything in Color so effective is how it visualizes that internal struggle.
Stalvey moves between black-and-white depictions of the past and full-color sequences in the present, a formal choice that mirrors the emotional shift in her own life. The earlier world is rigid and constrained, and the present feels open, uncertain, and alive.
That structure emerged naturally as she expanded her original diary comics into a larger narrative. Stalvey added, “It had to get as big as it needed to be.”
The act of drawing also became a way to confront parts of herself that had long felt abstract.
“When I’m drawing my younger self, it really felt like a type of therapy,” Stalvey said. “I could recognize it as me…and have more adult perspective and compassion.”
Throughout the book, symbolic imagery (wolves, demons, and sacred figures) lend shape to emotions that are otherwise difficult to articulate. It turns memory into something tangible, and something that can be examined rather than simply endured.
Courtesy of 23rd St.
Love, Intimacy, and Rewriting The Sacred
If the first half of Everything in Color is about constraint, the second half opens into something more expansive.
Stalvey’s relationship with her husband, James, becomes a major turning point, a space where affection, desire, and trust begin to reshape her understanding of love. That shift deepens with motherhood, which reframes everything she once believed about the sacred.
“One of the scenes in the book is taken from something I wrote when I was newly postpartum,” Stalvey said. “There’s this image of a breastfeeding woman with a halo…and it says, ‘this is my body broken for you, take, eat.’”
That moment captures a profound change. Spirituality moves from doctrine to experience, from rules to relationships.
“It was this shift away from viewing the sacred as this disembodied set of ideas,” Stalvey said “Into something that is deeply experiential and embodied…in the way that we give to one another, feed one another, love one another.”
The irony, she notes, is that this new understanding circles back to something familiar, but newly transformed.
“You have to deconstruct this other version,” Stalvey said. “And then you find yourself coming back to something that is really meaningfully sacred, but in an entirely new way.”
Courtesy of 23rd St.
The Risk and Reward of True Vulnerability
Telling a story this personal comes with its own challenges.
“There are definitely moments where it feels like a lot,” Stalvey said. “When I’m writing well, I’m not thinking about how it’s going to be received. I’m just putting my heart on the page.”
Only later does the question of sharing come into focus. Even then, her answer tends to remain the same.
“These are deeply human things,” Stalvey said. “Once you’re willing to say them out loud… they’re the things that unite us.”
That belief drives the book’s emotional core. It pushes past shame and isolation toward something more open, more honest, more connected.
A Story Even Grander Still
Everything in Color took years to come together, evolving from small, personal comics into a fully realized graphic memoir. Stalvey began the project in 2020 while working as a teacher and raising a young child, building the story piece by piece before reshaping it into a cohesive narrative over several more years.
Added Stalvey, “There is still a lot that I left on the cutting room floor.”
The sheer scale reflects the scope of what she’s trying to capture. Faith, identity, love, motherhood, and loss are not small subjects, and the book gives each of them space to breathe.
Courtesy of 23rd St.
Everything Truly in Color
In the end, the title says it all.
Stalvey originally considered calling the book Pure, a reflection of its early focus on purity culture. But as the story expanded, that framing no longer fit.
“It was bigger than that,” Stalvey said. “I was flipping back and forth between the past in black and white and the present in color, and I realized that’s the heart of it.”
What emerges is a story about moving from certainty to complexity, from fear to connection, from a world defined in absolutes to one that allows for nuance, contradiction, and growth.
A world, finally, in color.
That journey only works because Stalvey was willing to go places that feel deeply personal, even risky. Writing about faith, intimacy, loss, and identity meant confronting parts of her life that are often left unspoken. But for her, that openness is the point.
“The gift of vulnerability outweighs the risk for me as an artist,” Stalvey said.
It’s a philosophy that runs through every page of the book, and one that helps explain why the story resonates so strongly. In sharing something so specific, she opens the door for readers to see themselves in it.
And she’s not done yet.
Stalvey is already at work on a follow-up, building on the foundation she’s laid here.
“I’m about a quarter of the way,” Stalvey aid, noting that the process feels different this time as she feels more confident, more in rhythm.
If Everything in Color is about learning how to see clearly, the follow-up might be about living in that bright and open new world.