The Confessional
Cartoonist: Page Hender
Publisher: Silver Sprocket
Publication Date: March 2025
Even if you’ve consumed every vampire story you can sink your teeth into, The Confessional by Paige Hender will make you feel like it’s the first. With its excellent settings, expressive characters and incredible layouts, it’s an outstanding pageturner that will haunt you for days after reading.
The Confessional
The Confessional is set in New Orleans in 1922, and the opening page affords essential historical context for the story. It’s two years into Prohibition, three years after the Axeman murders and five years since Storyville, the city’s red light district, was shuttered by the United States Navy.
All of these elements play into The Confessional, which centers on Cora Velasquez, who lives in La Chauve-Sourisa (“the bat”), a brothel and speakeasy run by vampires. In 1921, Cora was rescued from a death by consumption in Texas by Dolores Iglesias, who turned her into a vampire and brought her to La Chauve-Souris.
However, Cora does not take to the vampire life. Unable to confront the reality of what she has become, she resists hunting mortals and even turns down proffered human blood. Instead, she sates her hunger with pigeons and attempts to repress her increasingly overwhelming desires. And, like so many who have attempted to repress their desires before her, she seeks the succor of the Catholic Church, and specifically, the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
It is these trips to the confessional that bring Cora into close contact with Father Orville Thibodeaux. Before too long, Orville has learned the secret of Cora’s true nature. But when the duo forges an unholy alliance, the situation rapidly grows more complicated… and considerably more bloody.
Blood and Beauty
First of all, Hender’s art is superbly well-suited to the content. Her depictions of New Orleans a century ago are resonant and atmospheric. Meanwhile, her characters are distinct and appealing. I particularly enjoyed Cora’s monstrous bat-like vampiric form, which strongly contrasts with the large-eyed innocence conveyed when she is presenting as human.
The Confessional also utilizes a limited color pallet to great effect. Aside from a deep navy blue and the white of the paper pages, the book uses only shades of red. Obviously, red is utilized to depict blood. But it’s used in other interesting ways, as well: for fantasy and flashback sequences and panels, for certain word balloons, dialogue, and sound effects, and in a few memorable instances, for Cora’s eyes when she’s allowing the vampire within to take full control.
But while every page of this dark and engaging story is a visual feast, the pages depicting Cora and Orville’s exchanges in the confessional stand out. Part of this is Hender’s formatting, which ingeniously adapts the panels to evoke the box’s two separated compartments.
This is further bolstered by a repeated motif of the confessional screen. The motif is not just used in these scenes but also adorns the graphic novel’s endpapers. If you’ve ever spent time in a confessional booth, it is guaranteed to be immediately and deeply evocative.
Available Now
In addition to all these visual virtues, The Confessional’s examination of a deplorable man masquerading as a holy moral authority is as resonant in 2025 America as it would have been in 1922. The deft combination of demonic and religious imagery creates a compelling narrative that will be worth revisiting, even if you feel you’ve already read several lifetimes worth of vampire stories already. The Confessional is something special.
If you’re at all familiar with any of the titles published by Silver Sprocket, it should go without saying that the presentation of this hardcover graphic novel is top-notch. While this is Hender’s debut graphic novel, it reads like the well-honed work of a cartoonist with dozens of volumes under her belt. The Confessional is an impressive tour de force, and readers will be left anticipating the work Hender produces in the future.
The Confessional is available now at a local bookstore and/or public library near you.
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