“Mateja’s coming out” is a short comic I made in 2019. I posted it page by page on Newgrounds when I joined back in August. Now that multi-art posts are a thing, I’ve decided – after much thought – to consolidate it into a single post on the Art Portal. The only reason why the pages were published separately was because there was no other way to do it before the update, so there’s really no need to keep them that way anymore. Plus, my brain doesn’t like the idea of my profile saying I have 20 art pieces when 12 of them are just parts of a single piece. This post replaces the separate original pages which I’ve unpublished.

A little background: the titular character of this comic appears as an adult in a series I was working on at the time. However, I liked him so much that I spontaneously started having ideas about his backstory, and this short comic sprouted out of those ideas. I really loved making this and feel genuinely proud of it - in my opinion it is one of the best things I've ever done. The comic is set in Serbia, hence the names and some Cyrillic text.

Essentially this comic was a sort of therapy for me, a way to consciously (and unconsciously) work through some baggage. If you’re interested in a bit more in-depth explanation, you can read the paragraphs below:

My relationship with my father is not the greatest. I know that he loves me, and he has always provided for me, but he was never the kind of person I could be open with and talk to about my thoughts, interests or problems. We’re also very different people with wildly different outlooks, to the point that I feel I would never willingly spend time with him if he wasn’t my family. Relevant to the subject matter at hand, all I’ve ever heard him say about the LGBT community was very negative. Hearing that kind of thing semi-regularly from a parent is not at all easy when you yourself are part of the G in that acronym.

Because of this, coming out to my father was, for the longest time, something I thought I could never do. A rock tied around my neck that I carried through life. In his values system, finding out that your son is gay was one of the worst things that could happen to a person, and I had no idea just what he would do if that happened. Would he say things that would scar me for life? Would he raise his hand at me, my partner, himself? How far would he go? The constant fear of such scenarios kept me paralyzed and afraid for years. To hear him say, like Mateja’s dad, something along the lines of “I know you’re gay, and I don’t want you to live your life afraid of what will happen if I find out”… Honestly, it would have made a world of a difference. With this comic, I guess I was just drawing something I wished I had.

I hope you enjoy this comic. It’s far from perfect but it was a labor of love in the truest sense of the word.