Every month, Dark Horse Comics gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a comic or book in the Horsepower column which appears in each of our printed comics issues for the month. These articles can include the inspiration behind a specific title, what it's like to work in the comics industry, or some other special feature on the highlighted title of the month. In this month's Horsepower, Connor Goldsmith gives readers a look into his debut horror comic series, Did You Hear About Mimi Green?:
I find something poignant about millennials entering our middle age. Most people feel that way when it's their turn, I suppose, but in so many ways the babies of the ’80s and ’90s grew up believing we would change everything. Captain Planet told us we would save the Earth, and we believed him.
It isn't going great.
We were the first generation to really grow up on the modern internet, and perhaps the last to navigate it while it was still an undiscovered country. I built my whole career there, from ezboard to LiveJournal to Tumblr to Twitter to Instagram to Patreon. I had a front-row seat as what felt like a secret garden grew into an odd new permutation of the public square, where strangers with marble busts and anime catgirls for faces call you slurs for having the wrong opinion on Star Wars.
Social media gave us the ability to platform ourselves, to build an audience without any arbiter's approval. It also turned us into brand ambassadors for our own value, fighting tooth and nail for attention because it is the only real currency of value left. Over the years I spent developing and writing Did You Hear About Mimi Green?, I've both quit drinking alcohol and quit using Twitter. If I'm being honest, the little blue bird was the more debilitating habit.
Mimi came from a conversation with my friend Josh Cornillon, whom I'd met online, and who was also trying to break into comics. We passed one-sentence loglines back and forth, concepts for projects we might want to work on together, and in one round he hit me with a suggestion I found particularly striking: a woman checking herself into an inpatient clinic and finding something wrong there. I could picture her immediately, and started asking myself about her. What is she running from? Where has she sought sanctuary? What lies in wait for her there, watching from behind the walls?
I recalled a bit of tabloid drama I'd found ironic: a popular female writer publicly apologized for insulting a celebrity in an interview, and then a few months later that same celebrity faced her own internet auto-da-fé for cyberbullying. Amid the Covid lockdowns, with nothing to do but yell at each other online, the snake was well and truly eating its own tail—and for all the men bemoaning the supposed dangers of "cancel culture," it usually seemed to be women run out of town on a rail. Some of them deserved it, sure, but there was a sadism about it I found disquieting.
This is a psychological horror story about the attention economy, about body dysmorphia in the public eye, about the thrill of fame and the ache of rejection. It's a little bit Silent Hill, a little bit The Substance. It's an ode to four years I spent in Los Angeles, where I did a lot of growing up, a little behind schedule.
Mimi Green is talented, creative, intelligent, and successful. She isn't very nice. She's said things she regrets, and things she doesn't, but all of them will live forever via the Internet Archive whether she likes it or not. She wants to be loved, and feels unlovable. I love her with all my heart, and also kind of hate her.
I hope you will love and hate her, too.
—Connor Goldsmith
Did You Hear About Mimi Green?, written by Connor Goldsmith, illustrated by Josh Cornillon, and lettered by Ariana Maher, is now available wherever comics are sold!