I recently had the good fortune to write a review of Sas Milledge’s graphic novel Mamo for Women Write About Comics. The book came out last April, but it’s been at the back of my mind all year. Mamo is the sensitive queer critique of cottagecore that I’ve always wanted, demonstrating the appeal of “nature” and “tradition” while simultaneously arguing that these concepts must change and evolve for new generations.

Mamo is about a witch who returns to her hometown for a brief visit and gets pulled into a local mystery despite her best intentions. I started thinking about Mamo’s story this summer while trying to grow a tomato plant from Home Depot in my tiny concrete backyard. Either I was watering the plant too much, or I wasn’t watering it enough. Maybe it needed to be around other plants? Maybe it needed to be lifted farther off the ground? I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t thriving, and I kept wishing that I weren’t so clueless about growing a simple tomato plant.

Like, wouldn’t it be nice if I’d lived in the same place all my life, and I’d grown tomatoes every summer, and I knew exactly when to plant and harvest them. Wouldn’t it be nice to bake my own bread to go with the tomatoes. Wouldn’t it be nice if a kind older adult helped me. Wouldn’t it be nice if, when I went to the grocery store, I knew exactly where the yeast is, and everyone I saw in the store greeted me by name. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a backyard that wasn’t concrete. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tree by my house. Wouldn’t it be nice to live near the friends I grew up with, and be part of a community.

The truth is that I did spend a part of my childhood in a green and beautiful small town in rural Georgia where my mother’s entire extended family lives. And the truth is that I felt extremely alienated and unwelcome there, and that I couldn’t stay. My mother’s family has all the “tradition” you could ever want, and this was extremely unhealthy for me, especially as a young queer person. Even if you leave, though, a part of you is still going to miss the abstract concept of “homeland,” especially when it’s tied to all the simple pleasures most people don’t get enjoy in a city.

Mamo understands this, and it expresses these tensions beautifully. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

As a renegotiation of tradition, the cottagecore visual aesthetic of Mamo is liberating. Milledge’s bold and expressive art celebrates green spaces that exist on their own terms regardless of human relationships. The literary trope of seeking freedom from oppressive social constraints by venturing into the wilderness is as old as human storytelling, and Milledge’s colorful and immersive art invites the reader into the forest along with Jo and Orla as they attempt to find a new path between untethered freedom and rigid tradition.

You can read the full piece on Women Write About Comics here:
https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2023/08/mamo-by-sas-milledge/

As always, I’d like to express my appreciation for my editor, the amazing Kat Overland, who allowed me to write about a graphic novel that came out more than a year ago. Kat also writes about comics, and you can – and should! – follow them on Twitter (here) and on Bluesky (here). You can also follow Mamo’s creator, Sas Milledge, on Instagram (here) and on Tumblr (here). As I was reading Mamo, I realized that I used to be a huge fan of the artist’s Legend of Zelda comics (like this one), and it turns out that they still have excellent taste in fandoms.