Did You Hear About Mimi Green? concludes in a fashion resembling the third act of The Substance, or honestly your average GWAR tour stop. Mimi battles the seemingly immortal and definitely not friendly Tyler for her body and soul as well as the lives and general existence of her partner Natalie and roommate Ashley. It’s a full body/mind/psyche fusion that comments on the manipulative nature of the entertainment industry, and how it ruins folks’ self-image. But Connor Goldsmith and Josh Cornillon never lose sight of Naomi/Mara/Mimi’s arc and using horrific, red-stained imagery, they have her clawing back to sanity and finding stability through the love that Natalie, Ashley, and eventually herself shows her.

The decline and fall and rise of a showbiz figure is a common story in American popular fiction, especially film and television with takes on the topic ranging from sleazy Behind the Music type documentaries (At least, those had decent production values ; now we’ve got AI-slop on celebrity scandals.) to great works of art like Sunset Boulevard and most recently HBO’s Hacks. Goldsmith and Cornillon use the infinite potential of the comic book medium to tell this story using exec-frightening gore and bodily twist and turns. On the surface, Did You Hear About Mimi Green? #4 seems like a final act superhero fight scene between good and evil with loved ones hanging in the balance. Josh Cornillon gives Mimi Wolverine claws that break against Tyler’s unbreakable body and also throws in some fun imagery like Tyler being a TV screen monster. The layouts that he uses also look like different body organs with the black gutters like veins or arteries flowing through the meat of this story. Using horror imagery as a metaphor for body dysmorphia is a no-brainer, and I like that not everyone comes out of the story 100% on the body positivity train. (Let’s just say there’s a GLP-1 reference in here.)

Along with Mimi Green #4’s pure viscerality, it has some fascinating intertextuality. Brain pathways that lay dormant since elementary Sunday school fired when Mimi walks through a door with “Ruth 1:20” on it, and Goldsmith and Josh Cornillon reveal that the Naomi/Mara duality is straight from the Hebrew Bible where the woman Naomi changed her name to Mara, or “bitter”, because she lost her husband and two sons in a famine and had no one to care for her except her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth. In the comic, Mara is a therapist figure that lays bare the harshest truths about Mimi including her previous name Naomi before she lost weight and changed her entire image to become a “hot” (In both senses.) public figure. Of course, Mimi wants herself and the world around her to forget about this previous part of her life, but it holds the key to her self-actualization and freeing her from the fucked up reality of the Answers wellness center. Goldsmith uses one of the first great stories of female friendship to liberate his protagonist and continue to the echo truth that’s okay to sit in grief for the person you used to be while being open to new connections and (in this case literally) devouring your past life.

Did You Hear About Mimi Green? uses extreme, trippy visuals to take us on a journey of self-discovery and maybe becoming less of an asshole along the way. I enjoyed seeing deuteragonist Ashley come into her throughout the series culminating in her becoming a blue-tinged badass and saving Natalie from Tyler although let’s just say that her actual ending is very L.A. Mimi eating the corpse of her old self/therapist is disgusting on a surface level, but it’s a call to be authentically kinder and gentler to our past, present, and future selves. Plus I’ll take a horror comic over a self-help book and definitely a wellness retreat any day, especially one that doesn’t have easy answers about tough body stuff.

Story: Connor Goldsmith Art: Josh Cornillon Letters: Ariana Maher
Story: 8.4 Art: 9.0 Overall: 8.7 Recommendation: Buy

Dark Horse Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

Purchase: Zeus Comics – Kindle