Who's this smug asshole?

Paradigm Shift is a story of a young rabbit woman (by the name of Star)–recently enrolled in college–who one day finds her dorm room transformed into a portal that sends her on a journey that will challenge what she thought she knew about the world around her.

From the forward:

January 2012: It was my second semester in college, and I was admittedly having a bit of a crisis. I was dealing with expectations that I had set for myself (to be completely enjoying college, to feel independent, to have found a romantic significant other) and the expectations that I had fabricated that society set for me (see the previous list). I was 18, and for some reason I thought this meant that I was supposed to have everything in order, that I was supposed to “feel” like an adult, or at least not like a child (let me say now that this concept is silly), and the fact that I didn’t made me feel like I had failed grievously at some point. I knew (and still know) nothing about the world, and the things I thought I knew were contrived and naïve.

Paradigm Shift was created over a period of roughly two months as a final project for one of my courses during that semester. The course itself was called Great Ideas, and was sort of a mix between a philosophy class and a literature class: we would read selected texts and discuss them, and how they related to these “worldviews” that we were studying, presented to us in Dennis Ford’s book The Search for Meaning. The concept of the final project was to incorporate some of these worldviews, as well as exploring your own.

The worldviews that we studied really helped to bring some own organization to my own mind, to help me define the way I thought and the window through which I viewed everything around me. I finally felt like I unlocked something that I had been struggling with for quite some time. I was much less stressed, and while I would have moments of anguish and needless worry, I felt like I had the tools to overcome these struggles (though, it was a double-edged sword at times).

Paradigm Shift is mostly a comic about exploration and self-discovery. It was an experiment for me, not only in completing it under the time restraint that I had, but in trying to put my feelings into such concrete words. I was influenced not only by these concepts discussed in the course, but in what I was reading at the time: The Fault in Our Stars, a fantastic novel by John Green, came out around the same time, and it really flipped my whole world on its head, which I think shows in the comic.

It’s also the first full comic that I had ever completed in entirety. Looking back at it, I’m sure that there are edits I’d like to make, pacing I’d like to change, but it feels complete. Flawed, certainly, but complete.

With that, I thank you for reading, and allowing me to share my thoughts with you through this format. This may be one of the first things I’ve ever released in its entirety to the world, but it certainly won’t be the last.

Some other literary works are adapted in Paradigm Shift. The list of those works can be found here.

DREAM STATE is the continuation of Paradigm Shift. It is much longer in length, has some of the same characters as the original, and some new ones. You don’t need to read Paradigm Shift in order to read Dream State, but it helps. You can find the first page of Dream State here.

About the author:

Your humble author.Emily Kardamis is an artist, writer, and actually finds writing about herself in the third person pretty awkward. You can find her art blog here, her long form blog here, and her causal blog filled with stuff she finds awesome here. She also occasionally draws another comic, titled Bunny and Friends, which you can find here. If you’re really inclined, you can also find her either waxing poetic or screaming incoherently on Twitter.