Please note:

This comic review for A Haunted Girl by Ethan and Naomi Sacks discusses mental health conditions and suicide ideation from the beginning. I know from experience how triggering it can be to read about these topics. If you are not in a place to read about these, please be kind to yourself 🙂 For content warnings for the comic itself, please see above.

As a teenager, I struggled a lot with my mental health and had no clue how bad it was until much later. At the time, I just thought it was normal teenage angst, and that how bad I was feeling was what everyone else was feeling. That was what the magazines said, after all. While some things have got better since I was a teenager, there is still, so little mental health representation out there, especially for teenagers. They skirt around the topics of medication, hospitalisation, and suicide ideation.

A Haunted Girl by Ethan and Naomi Sacks was created by a father and daughter who lived through all that together. The idea came to Sacks when he was waiting to visit his daughter Naomi at a paediatric psychological ward where she had been hospitalised for severe depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. These experiences are reflected in the pages of the comic as we follow the journey of 16-year-old Cleo, an adopted Japanese-American, from her stay in hospital to her reintegration back into her old life.

Rather than the starting point being Cleo’s first day outside the hospital, we first meet Cleo in the hospital. It’s her birthday and her dad brings her a cake, and although it wasn’t the sixteenth birthday either of them imagined for her, they make the most of it. Fast-forward two months, and Cleo is meeting with her psychologist for the first time before returning to school on Monday. Again, this was good to see because so often in the media it feels as though the teenage protagonist is just thrown straight back into mainstream society without any support.

When Cleo’s first day comes about it’s as awkward as expected, with awkwardness from the teachers who don’t know what to say to her, and nasty comments from the mean girls. What I particularly liked was how the Sacks showed the way Cleo didn’t know how to deal with her friends. What to say to them, how to react to their enthusiasm that she’s back, how to explain that she’s still struggling. The visual impact of the comic makes these scenes feel so much more powerful.

With a father and daughter team behind the wheel of this comic, we get to see both sides of the relationship, and while Cleo is the focus of A Haunted Girl some wonderful scenes show the struggles of a parent in this situation. Both creators truly put their heart and soul into this and it shows.

As well as being about mental health, this is a supernatural comic and as Cleo tries to return to her old life she finds out that the odds are against her. While she’s been trying to act like everything is normal, she’s been having terrifying visions. It’s almost a relief when she finds out that they’re not hallucinations… almost. Something else much more serious is going on, and it’s something Cleo can’t run from.

While A Haunted Girl does use the ‘chosen one’ trope, this is not a story where the main character is suddenly cured. It’s a story about understanding mental health, recognising that life is in a state of flux and that means there will be problems. Sometimes those problems are mental health conditions, but with the right support, we can work through them.