Mommy Blog // Review
Astrid is looking to become loved. She’s got a solid presence online. She wants to be the perfect mother. Given the fact that she’s a wealthy American, she’s certainly able to focus on it. She does have so very much time available to her. Plenty of time for giving helpful advice online. Plenty of time to figure out why it is that so many children in town seem to be going missing. She’s going to solve the mystery while gaining notoriety in Mommy Blog. Writer Marguerite Bennett and artist Eleonora Carlini deliver and upper-class psychological horror tale with colorist Hoyt Silva.
Actually, Astrid may know more about the missing children than she’s willing to divulge. After all...the local moms in the area are a very insular, tightly-knit group and she doesn’t want to alarm any potential friends with any allegations of anything unseemly. She DOES want to be accepted by them. She certainly IS being accepted by the internet. She’s generally a very well-respected mommy blogger. She’s genuinely happy and she’s doing things that are really, truly helping people. Of course...a very narrow focus on success just might overlook some rather glaring issues that she might be ignoring, but she’ll get around to dealing with those issues in time.
Wealth, status, success and serial killing is something that Brett Easton Ellis literally wrote the book on back in 1991 with his novel American Psycho. A year later Joyce Maynard explored murder, fame and ambition in her novel To Die For. Bennett pulls psychosis, status and homicide in a fairly straightforward dark comedy. The actual story is fairly obvious and derivative, but Bennett’s satirical look at the lives of upper-class mothers is total genius. There’s a delicate and deft approach to the style and status-conscious first-person narrative that’s great fun to engage with.
Carlini’s art has a nice sense of exaggerated amplification. There isn’t a great deal of precision in the art, but there doesn’t need to be. It’s all quite expressive and strikingly well-modulated throughout. The soft, sweetness stays soft and sweet. The grizzly murder is as shocking as it needs to be to provide horrific contrast to the lighter elements of the story. Everything seems to fit into its place with a great deal of precision that seems to work on a great many levels.
Bennett could have easily expanded this one-shot into a full-length mini-series. Given the opportunity to explore aspects of the ensemble of characters in a bit more detail would have given her the opportunity to explore the distinctive aspects of the story in greater detail. it would have felt a bit less like a mash-up of To Die For and American Psycho if the main character and the rest of her ensemble would have had a bit more room to breath around the edges of the center plot. As it is, there simply is NOT a whole lot of room to move around between two coverse. Bennett’s idea would have worked better as a series.
