‘Did You Hear About Mimi Green?’ asks the big questions: accountability, social media, and body horror

Questions are a huge part of Did You Hear About Mimi Green?

(I mean, it’s sort of right there in the title, yeah?)

Like, who exactly is Mimi Green? Luckily, that’s an easy one — she’s a beloved essayist and tastemaker from L.A.

Why should we care about her? Well, aside from her genuine talent, Mimi has found herself mired in a wee bit of controversy after “a blog post she wrote a decade ago, cruelly mocking fat people, resurfaces and sparks a viral furor.”

From there, the answers get a touch more complicated. Like, will her plan (to ride out this controversy in some bougie mental health facility in Topanga) actually work? What’s up with her needy, cloying roommate, Ashley? What role will Natalie, the “lesbian lover Mimi hid from the public,” have in our ensuing drama? And what, pray tell, is going on with the facility itself and all that thick blood and mutating infrastructure?

Like I said, questions galore. And while we could just ask the creators (writer Connor Goldsmith and artist Josh Cornillon), they’ll offer up just as many brand-new questions as they do firm answers.

So, did you hear about Mimi Green? ‘Cause you really, really should have by now.

Who Exactly Are These Upstarts?

Even with so many questions still on the table, at least Goldsmith’s name is already familiar. As the co-host of the awesome X-Men podcast Cerebro, Goldsmith and company have made a career out of deep, intensive dives into the X-canon. Cornillon, meanwhile, is more established (thanks to projects like Young Men in Love), but even this is his first multi-issue endeavor.

When asked about making the “pivot” now, Goldsmith made a very good point about the nature of comics in general.

“Josh and I were both fans who were trying to break in for real; that was something we were excited about doing,” Goldsmith said. “I’ve been saying to all of my friends in the business, like, it does seem a little bit insane to choose to enter the comic industry in 2026. They were like, ‘Listen, here’s the thing, there’s never been a good time to do it. Certainly not in the last 30 years, so you’re fine.’”

But their collaboration isn’t just about making comics cause it’s always insane to make comics. Cornillon made another equally interesting point: If you’re on the sidelines long enough, eventually you make your move or remain there forever.

“And it’s that dream that everybody has as a fan where you read this stuff and your brain starts to move in like, ‘Oh, it’d be so cool if I could see this happen,’” Cornillon said. “It’s also one of those things that helps you put your money where your mouth is. Everybody has this dream of like, ‘Gosh, they’re doing all the wrong Spider-Man comics, but if they would just do my Spider-Man comic, it would fix everything.’”

Could They Actually Walk The Walk?

Of course, unlike many other creators, Goldsmith and Cornillon had something of an edge coming in. Over his years in the biz (as well as many years spent as a literary agent), Goldsmith has collected quite the Rolodex of names, and many creators were more than happy to help him out with insights and edits.

Goldsmith said that two creators (Tini Howard and Steve Foxe) “both really tore [the script] apart with me.” For his part, Foxe told Goldsmith that the initial draft was “like a screenplay in a lot of this, but you have to remember is that the characters do not move. It is an optical illusion to trick people.”

Added Goldsmith, “So when you’re writing a panel breakdown, you can’t say, ‘Mimi and Ashley run down the hall.’ You have to say, ‘Mimi and Ashley are running down the hall. We catch them in the middle of the hallway in front of such and such door. This is happening. Mimi is posed this way. Ashley is posed this way.'”

Howard, meanwhile, said that there was “a lot of Mulholland Drive” in the story.

“I would say it’s an L.A. horror story with a lot of sunlight in a similar way,” Goldsmith said of the comparison. “But Tini said to me, ‘You know that moment where they push the headshot across the table and they say, ‘This is the girl.’ That was exactly what I’m trying to do – she said, ‘I could tell.’ She then said, ‘I need you to convey to me that this is the girl, even if she can’t say that much in this first issue yet.’”

Goldsmith said that the process was a massive help, and that it’s given him a greater “appreciation for the form and a better understanding of all of the logistical considerations that go into writing the script.” Even the smallest insights had such a massive effect.

“It was little things first – like realizing you have to figure out which pages are odd pages and which pages are even pages because the page turn has to reveal things,” Goldsmith said. “Or, thinking about how you only have a certain amount of real estate on each page for a certain number of actions.”

In turn, the experience has even made Goldsmith a better, more understanding critic.

“It’s made me really stop and think more about the way I criticize stories, or the way that I analyze them,” Goldsmith said. “The scariest thing probably about going from being a comics commentator to being a comics writer is that I’ve talked a lot of shit about a lot of comic books on a lot of hours of a pretty popular podcast. It’s like, ‘So you talk a big game, well, what can you do about it?’ I’m more conscious now of just how much pressure you’re under to make every piece fit together and how delicate a balance it is.”

And, along the way, Goldsmith only made one minor “misstep” (if you want to call it that).

“The one time that I really did apologize was when I made Josh draw a horse,” Goldsmith said. “This is something that has been impressed upon me by other comics writers – vehicles and horses are a big ask because they have to be precise.”

What Really Makes The Machine Hum?

That ongoing collaboration across Mimi Green wasn’t just empowering for its creators. (And a good lesson in complicated horse anatomy.) It was also about promoting a better understanding about the true makeup of great comics.

“I think fans in particular, unless it’s a huge superstar artist like Jim Lee or what have you, people tend to privilege the writer as the person who makes the comic and the artist as the person who executes it,” Goldsmith said. “And that really isn’t how it is once you’re under the hood. In that way, it’s a lot like what I do on my podcast.”

Added Goldsmith, “Because my podcast always has a guest, and so the back-and-forth with the guest and putting together a product that’s both of us is the most exciting part about it. Not that I don’t think I have great ideas, because obviously I enjoy my own thoughts. I really love the way that this medium in particular forces two people, or more – because our letter, Ariana Maher, has also been very involved from early stages – to sit down and just really create something that only they could have created with that specific brain trust.”

And they really took that “brain trust” idea to its natural end: Comics worth a damn aren’t just a collaboration, but a melding of minds, energies, etc.

“There’s no part of this entire creative process that both of us have not 100% been involved in,” Cornillon said. “And that is very unique for a book that’s a debut for both of us in this format. There is definitely this world where people get matched with a sight unseen script and an artist and there’s not necessarily that jelling. So just conceiving this 100% beginning to end together, it’s very hard to tell where Connor starts and I end.”

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Even if they were an especially cohesive unit, Goldsmith and Cornillon never strove for absolute perfection. Rather, they “allowed” some uncertainty as a way to better shape the narrative.

“I think it’s important for both of us that neither have the expectation that we’re doing 100% the right thing all the time,” Cornillon said. “Frequently there would be moments where I send Connor things and say, ‘Is this too absurd over the top?’ And we’d be like, ‘It’s not too absurd, but maybe not the goal of what this was supposed to look like.’”

Because an important question often wasn’t what is too much, but rather, have they gone far enough?

“If I’m tasked to swing for the fences in a big way…what is going to look very different from anything on the shelves right now,” Cornillon said. “What’s going to feel really different in terms of what horror looks like in comics right now? What’s going to feel really different just in terms of what the creator-owned landscape is looking like right now? It’s taken quite a shift from the golden days of Image now that things are a lot more IP-driven.”

Plus, working in the realm of indie comics allowed the team to truly test their creative mettle.

“If our first thing was working on a Marvel or DC or any other licensed project…they’re much more regimented in terms of what you can do,” Goldsmith said. “And that’s the expectation of working with other people’s characters and playing with other people’s toys – you have to play nice in the sandbox. Building the sandbox, we can kind of do whatever we want, which is freeing, but also makes it scarier to land the plane because I feel like I’m landing it on a runway we built.”

How Deep Have They Truly Dug?

So much of the foundation of Mimi Green is based on that first issue. Not just in the ways you’d automatically expect from any new book, but how it lent the creative team so much courage and skill to march through all four issues together.

“Once we had the first issue…I understood not only the literal architecture of the building, because it’s a bit of a haunted house story, and it was helpful to know what that room looks like, and that helps with blocking the scenes,” Goldsmith said. “But also knowing what the visual language he had crafted based on the script…when I started writing issue #2 and #3, it was so much easier to convey exactly what we wanted to do. Like, ‘Can we really mess with the structure of the page here?’ It’s been us growing together, which has been a really rewarding way to do my first project in this space.”

And by leaning onto one another even further, that inevitably meant that Mimi Green felt deeply connected to both Goldsmith and Cornillon as separate, fully-formed people.

“It’s fascinating because a lot of the themes in this story are very personal to me,” Goldsmith said. “And it’s very interesting to tell a very personal story that requires you to channel it through and with another person. It’s been really mind expanding and I’ve found it actually therapeutic.”

Because in a story where our lead sees her carefully curated public persona crumble from one post, Goldsmith has lived in that proximity for a very long time.

“Another one of the lines on that first page is the first thing we see Mimi say out of her own mouth: ‘I wrote that post 14 years ago,’” Goldsmith said. “But we all feel like we were a kid when we did something stupid, right? Like, ‘I was just a stupid baby on LiveJournal having an argument about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’ But I was a college graduate. So you have to be accountable a little bit for the things that you say as a fully grown adult.”

It’s not just something to be familiar with if you’re an online niche celebrity type. No, an entire generation of people is now grappling with these larger ideas.

“But I think that our generation – that Gen Y, elder millennial thing – we grew up on the modern internet,” Goldsmith said. “But for the most part, what felt very ephemeral has turned out not to be very ephemeral at all. You have more of a permanent record of your behavior than ever before in human history. And particularly when you’ve chosen to be a creative online, that’s very different from being someone who writes novels or whatever.”

But that personal connection across Mimi Green goes even deeper. Through their collaboration, Goldsmith and Cornillon have become even closer friends, and that camaraderie is very much a way to grapple with this growth and its larger impact.

“We’ve become a singular mind,” Cornillon said. “We’ll go out with friends, and then immediately somebody will say something, and I’ll say, ‘Well, that’s an Ashley line.’ And then the two of us will have to talk about that.’”

Added Goldsmith, “You’ll just overhear a snatch of conversation that’s a bit odd or something, and we’ll turn to each other. But I think that that’s part of what’s made it feel so alive to me – working with someone on this project for so long and building it from the ground up together.”

And, just like any such important friendship, they can tap into one another and uplift their collaborator in a way that may cut deep, but is largely a good thing for the story.

“For Connor, my initial notes were like, ‘Let’s come to this with your voice,’” Cornillon said. “People run to your podcast because they enjoy that unfiltered, slightly sharp but still welcoming and inviting community. But none of that’s taking away the veneer of intelligence, quickness, sharpness, and a little bit of brutality.”

Added Cornillon, “So all of that was stuff that I wanted to make sure that Connor wasn’t self-censoring away – in the same way that he was encouraging me to keep pushing. So I think the reason that we feel so passionate about this is because it is such an artistic level up for both of us. Like, I will be forever changed as an artist because I did this book.”

Is Society Punitive Just For The Funsies?

Perhaps as a result of filtering so much of themselves/their friendship into Mimi Green, Goldsmith and Cornillon feel a deep attachment to the characters at the heart of the story.

“I do feel like these are real people that we’ve had intense conversations about,” Goldsmith said. “Like, do you think that Mimi is OK? Like, I’m concerned about her. It’s like, ‘Well, we did this to her. It’s on us.’”

In turn, they can use that awareness and intimacy (with the characters and also each other) to really lean into their skillset and make something that really resonates.

“Josh is so gifted with facial expressions, and so I write a lot of these scripts with a thought toward what’s the five big facial reactions in this issue,” Goldsmith said. “I know that Josh will deliver on that when I get to them. I want to have five really iconic panels of a face in this issue somewhere reacting to something. Or, knowing what Josh tends to do with color, the way I have thought about when we move from the more neutral beige pastel world of the retreat to whatever’s going on underneath.”

But loving and caring for these people doesn’t mean that anyone gets off easy at all.

“Mimi Green is not a nice person,” Goldsmith said. “She says as much in this [first] issue. But she is someone who I want the reader to, if not necessarily find interesting, to want to hear from at least. They’re intrigued at what she has to say, even if what she has to say is going to come out and sound crazy.”

Cornillon is very much of the same mind: He wanted these very questions baked into the heart of each character.

“For me, artistically approaching these characters, there was never a debate in my mind as to whether or not they were worthy of the reader’s love,” Cornillon said. “I think that those are going to be really interesting questions that I really hope that the readers pick up the ball with and run and make their own decisions. I truly don’t mind if you walk away from this and go like, ‘Mimi is just not a person that I like.’”

That’s why Goldsmith made clear that across all four issues, we will “never get to see what it is she said that made people so mad.” Sorry, drama fanatics.

“I didn’t want people to be analyzing Mimi’s writing,” Goldsmith said. “You can get the vibe that it was some 2010 nasty LiveJournal post. But I don’t want it to become a debate about whether she’s talented. I don’t want it to become a debate about whether she deserves this. It’s like ‘OK, maybe this was an overreaction, and she didn’t deserve all this hate.’ Or maybe she said something so atrocious that she should never get to write anything again. That’s your call.”

Again, it’s about raising those complicated, occasionally thrilling questions for readers.

“But even if she was that bad, is this really what should happen to her? I want us to be questioning, if anything, our desire to see people we don’t know punished,” Goldsmith said. “To do that, I needed her to be someone we accept is an influential person…is an influencer and is a writer with a point of view and a sharp voice that people respond to, whether they respond to it positively or negatively.”

(If it helps, Goldsmith has an idea of just the kind of online personality Mimi Green might be comparable to: “I would say…she’s sort of a Cat Marnell who’s trying to rebrand herself as a Jia Tolentino. And even further than that, because she’s also trying to do kind of an Instagram influencer sort of thing. She’s trying to write that Tolentino book, but she’s also trying to do the Caroline Calloway Instagram influencer thing.”)

Just because someone’s famous and talented, are they above reproach? When they mess up, is there a way forward? Or is it just about their suffering for our own amusement and self-stoking?

“Whatever one thinks about public shaming or whatever…something about the way that this woman is going through life is disordered and she should fix it in some way,” Goldsmith said. “There is a journey that she should be going on here. And the question is whether the way we hold people to account sometimes is productive or not.”

Goldsmith added, “And whether what we really want in the end is for it to be productive. Do you want Mimi Green to be a better person and to understand her role in society better? Or do you want to watch her be punished? Or is it both? And I think for many of us, it’s both, and that’s OK, too.”

Cornillon said it’s less about choosing what’s right or wrong. Instead, he was more focused on being “as faithful as possible to the fact that this is their story that I’m representing, whether or not they are worth love or protection or whatever.”

Cornillon added, “So I have no leaning in terms of where I fall with them besides that I really love watching these characters experience these events, and that leads the readers toward stimulating conversation.”

Seeing any personal affinity in the art, then, means Cornillon did his job.

“It’s been so rewarding that the first time that I sent pages off to my color assistant, Alex Buckland…they responded, ‘I can tell you love Ashley so much,’” Cornillon said. “It’s just because I have to love these characters to be drawing them, and to be endorsing their actions in some kind of capacity as much as…things are just going to happen.”

Has Social Media Become The Only True God?

And tackling the big, multi-tentacle beast of “cancel culture” is just such a massive happening. But Goldsmith especially had some insights into the idea that really seemed especially vital.

“I think that a lot of the reaction to ‘cancel culture’ is this very mimetic idea at this point, and that often gets used as a dog whistle for people not wanting to be held accountable for doing anything, no matter how outrageous it is,” Goldsmith said. “But I think that comes from fear, right? Because there’s this idea that it could be you. And what if the most innocuous thing that I didn’t think was a big deal destroys my life because everyone gets mad about it?”

Goldsmith went on to say that “we’re all in a bit of a Faustian bargain with each other now after social media.” And those religious/spiritual connections are deliberate: This “process” has, in many ways, become the closest thing to true spiritual justice (again, for better and worse).

“The panopticon of social media has almost replaced God in a lot of ways,” Goldsmith said. “Culturally, there’s this idea, in most world religions, that a higher power will pass judgment upon you if you’re not righteous, if you’re not a good person. And I think that now the hell that we all fear, if we are public-facing people, is this idea of a hell on Earth where the higher power that is the world and it’s gazed upon you turns on you because you’ve done something wrong.”

But don’t for a second think that this is Goldsmith and Cornillon turning into Joe Rogan-esque, anti-cancel culture hacks or something.

“And some people do things that are objectively wrong and they should be deplatformed,” Goldsmith said. “I’m not in any way suggesting that cancel culture is the greatest threat facing our society today. But I do think that the way that fear can rule artistic expression as well is something that is interesting.”

It’s about understanding what’s the right move to make and what causes undue fear. How do we maintain accountability and personal responsibility for our words/actions, and what goes too far into controlling or influencing what we put out into the world.

Even Goldsmith was fearful that “readers might attribute that opinion to me, or they might say this comic’s misogynist because this character said this.’” But it’s been about breaking through that trepidation.

“The fact of the matter is people are allowed to think whatever they want,” Goldsmith said. “You have to write the thing that is your thing and you can’t think too much about that. But I think we’ve been trained, particularly when we are public people and when you are in the arts…it’s very easy to start performing for the imagined audience, even when they’re not there.”

By finding ways to connect further with his co-creation (and co-creator), Goldsmith also uncovered ways to initially address if not outright overcome those very same fears.

“Part of doing this has been freeing myself of that,” Goldsmith said. “I’m obsessive compulsive, much like Mimi. I gave her that because I was like, ‘I don’t know that anyone’s going to understand her thought process unless I just put that on the table immediately because she processes certain anxieties much like I do.’”

Goldsmith added, “I’m always worrying about what’s the worst thing that could happen in any given situation? And what I’ve learned from writing this, especially writing a monthly where when the issue’s done and you send it to your artist and he starts drawing, is that you’re done. It’s that feeling of, ‘I did something scary and the world hasn’t fallen down around me.’ That has been very freeing.”

What’s The Body Mean in The Digital Age?

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For Mimi, the process of accountability doesn’t just come with hiding in rehab for X amount of time. She quickly finds herself grappling with some very horrors in the facility. It’s what takes Mimi Green from just being a mediation on celebrity culture and being canceled into the realm of brain-meltingly great body horror.

That began, of course, with some very deep realizations from Goldsmith.

“When you’ve chosen to make pining online your bread and butter, then you’ve put a lot of opinions out there,” Goldsmith said. “And people may agree or disagree. You may agree or disagree with your own self from however long ago, but it still exists. It’s something that’s coming home to roost for a lot of people as they get older and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I got into a fight with someone about Glee in like 2011 or whatever.’”

Added Goldsmith, “Someone came up to me at a con a few years ago and said, ‘I’ve been following you since LiveJournal.’ And my blood ran cold.”

Goldsmith isn’t just further reconciling with the permanent nature of online discourse – he’s grappling with its larger, often deeply effects on a person.

“The things that we dash off on Twitter or wherever else, we don’t necessarily think of as revealing,” Goldsmith said. “But we are exposing the mind in the same way that body horror exposes the body, whether we understand it or not. And so I’m having this process where I’m wrapping my brain around being at peace with the complexities of yourself, of the self. As someone who is a public-facing figure with a platform that is dependent on people liking me to whatever extent, I think when you sit down to write a horror story, you have to write about what scares you.”

For Goldsmith, there’s an added wrinkle: his personal weight loss journey. When you undergo so much change in a relatively short amount of time, it makes you re-examine the self and the body and its place in our very specific, very odd world.

“Since 2017, I’ve lost 180 pounds,” Goldsmith said. “I had bariatric surgery and it’s been a whole process of getting a better understanding of my body and how I feel about my body and why I did those things and how people feel very entitled to comment on the choices I’ve made about my own body. And how that makes me feel about presenting myself. Like, what’s it like to take a photo for Instagram when you know that everyone looking at you is thinking something about the way you look in an image because it’s different from how you looked before?”

Even if you haven’t gone through a similar journey, there’s something we can all glean from being massively online at all times. Namely, this idea that the World Wide Web demands so much of us, and as a result, things get very complicated very fast.

“There’s room for you to be smart and stupid at the same time,” Goldsmith said. “And I think that we all are at different times, really incisive and really ignorant. And just thinking about how complicated people get boiled down into uncomplicated perceptions in the same way that complicated bodies can get boiled down to a selfie on Instagram.”

Wait, What About Grant Morrison?

It’s worth pausing for a second (or maybe 70) to talk more directly to hardcore comics fans.

Because while Mimi Green is meant for every kind of reader to think about ideas of accountability and the punitive nature of social structures, telling this story via a comic means engaging with the medium’s history of facilitating (or not facilitating) similarly complex conversations.

“I think that those debates…the fact that we’re all still arguing about “The Dark Phoenix Saga” 40 years later, that’s what I think keeps these worlds alive,” Goldsmith said. “And when we were creating something that doesn’t have the 60-year buy-in of an IP like X-Men, I felt like we had to go balls to the wall immediately and insist upon provoking conversation.”

Being fans of something can, in fact, make you almost blind to certain elements. In turn, that makes people come to stances without a lot of thought beforehand. And Mimi Green is, if you hadn’t already guessed, all about making us think real hard.

“It is funny coming from the fandom space that we are just speed running the current literacy crisis that people are having with these characters that we know and love,” Cornillon said. “But how often are the past actions of Emma Frost or Jean Grey or Kitty Pryde being held against their current norm? I think a lot of fans can reconcile all of that; it adds to the tapestry. But there’s people who are going to kind of say, ‘No, I’m not moving forward because she killed that horse and I’ll never allow [Frost] to be a superhero.’”

But Goldsmith and Cornillon aren’t trying to hate on their fellow uber fans. They’ve very much leaned into some “elemental” pop culture to extend the power of Mimi Green‘s story. And by doing so, they can show people that these stories can do so much to push people’s creative and personal boundaries.

Cornillon said that three such influences have served as “load-bearing walls in this project”: 9/11, Silent Hill 2, and the Grant Morrison-penned New X-Men. Yes, you read that right, folks.

“Those really reshaped my brain in a lot of ways,” Goldsmith said. “It’s that feeling of ‘Wow, anything can happen.’ But also, lots of things I thought couldn’t happen are happening, or the way that the world can just shift that way. There’s also the idea that everyone has something waiting underneath that can come out if it’s exposed by a trauma – America had something exposed by that.”

Yet it’s not just about that sense of exposure. These three “pillars” also touch on another important idea within Mimi Green. They’re big, powerful artifacts and stories, and they draw us in not just with razzle dazzle, but a kind of moral imperative that demands our attention.

“When we invoke these like millennial touchstones…I bring up Silent Hill 2 because I admire that element in Eastern horror in particular where it’s often about the fact that anyone who’s been called into this story, there’s a reason they’ve been called into it,” Goldsmith said. “There’s something in them that has pulled them to this place. And whether that means they should be damned or should be saved, or should save themselves or should succumb, is up to them and up to the story.”

Goldsmith added, “But this [Mimi Green] isn’t a story about innocent victims thrown into a scary scenario. It’s a story about complicated people who you might not like thrown into an impossible scenario and trying to survive it and you deciding how you feel about that as you go along.”

How Much Blood Will Cover The Earth?

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While so much of Goldsmith’s own journey influences key ideas of Mimi Green (the body horror turn, the social media commentary, etc.), it was also also a chance for Cornillon to undergo his own transformation, as it were.

“I know how his characters tend to be a bit softer and more human than the house style comic book art that people expect,” Goldsmith said. “One of the things that’s been fun about that is figuring out what horror looks like in that style, particularly doing something like body horror with an artist who people have historically associated more with cuter, more pastel kind of stuff. It was really fun to think about how could I create a nesting doll where you get the sweet Josh art on top, and then you open it, and you get the gross Josh art underneath it.”

For his part, Cornillon said that across his books (including Godzilla Rivals: Mothra Vs. Hedorah), he’s enjoyed fostering a “veneer of shiny, happy, smiling people.” But he’s also a “nasty, evil person” who deeply loves horror, and Mimi Green has been the perfect project to really, truly cut loose.

“I think the same guiding sentiments that I bring to drawing anything are what I’m also bringing to drawing horror, which is that this should look like a soft world, even with the horrific bulging and rotating and growing bodies that you’re seeing, and the things that Mimi is running from,” Cornillon said. “But my horror was never going to be like Jock on Wytches or something. It’s never going to be inky and heavy and freaky in that regard.”

(Added Goldsmith, “I knew I wasn’t writing for Bernie Wrightson, you know what I mean?”)

As an extension of that, Cornillon hopes readers “really do linger with some of the line work, a lot of the guts and stuff. That’s where all of that ooziness lives for me.”

But while he’s proud of his efforts, Cornillon knew that such a story would be a huge ask for any reader. But that big ask comes with the questions of growth and development that are very much also central to Mimi Green.

“I knew going into it that it would be asking people to engage with a different side of horror,” Cornillon said. “And I also knew that I can’t become a different artist overnight. So, I’m never going to lose the part of me where these characters still do feel inviting and welcoming.”

And that artistic balance has been vital to the book’s early reactions.

“What does it look like to put those characters through hell? And I think that that’s been the thing that most excites me when people react to it,” Cornillon said. “Going into a Josh book, you don’t necessarily know what you’re coming out of this with because of what I’ve done in the past. And then people come out of this and they’re like, ‘Oh, you tore people up that is not something I’ve seen from you.’”

The blood and guts, though, isn’t just about freaking out your audience. It’s also pushed the narrative in new and interesting ways, and that furthers a core theme of growth/change within Mimi Green.

“We don’t want to tease too far ahead, but I’m really excited for what folks are going to see in issues #3 and #4 because it catalyzes a lot of what I was doing stylistically,” Cornillon said. “And then Connor is now picking up on that. And there’s a lot of surreal visual beats in the book that then become literal [story] beats in such an interesting and fun way. So I’m really excited for people to see how those mesh together.”

It’s also very much an “inversion” of your traditional horror stories, a way to play around with structure to get at those big questions of accountability.

“The history of horror so often relies on the most likable person surviving, or even being in these scenarios so that you can go, ‘God, this is bad. And it’s worse that it’s happening to her, somebody that I love,’” Cornillon said. “The most virginal character makes it out at the end because we don’t want to see harm happen to her. So I just love the idea that we’re kicking off with, like, what if this happened to a person that you kind of have to ask, ‘Is it so bad if she gets attacked?’”

Cornillon added, “It’s the most extreme version to say, ‘This person who said something problematic on the internet should be attacked by monsters.’ But that is the heightened comic realm that we’re living in. And we’re basically speed-running, giving her this lore of just knowing that she’s starting off on the wrong foot.”

Does Everyone Really Love L.A.?

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Of course, not everyone in Mimi Green is necessarily “starting off on the wrong foot.” Because while Mimi herself is the focus of the book, the story gives just as much time and space to other characters to explore its themes and messaging.

There is, of course, the aforementioned Ashley, who rooms with Mimi at the facility and has her own reasons for seeking treatment.

“Ashley is someone who has followed Mimi’s work for a very long time,” Goldsmith said. “Mimi’s constantly reinventing herself the way that writers and public figures are expected to. But Ashley…the body keeps the score as they say, right? And Ashley is someone who remembers that blog post because she read it when you posted it. She doesn’t think it was such a big deal, but she’s also, as she tells you the first time you meet her, a bit of a people-pleaser.”

For Mimi, Ashley doesn’t just “keep score”; she’s also a force that transcends the public record in some important ways.

“If you’re Mimi, and you don’t feel that you have to be accountable to the mob who are responding to an article on Page Six or whatever, you do now have to be accountable to Ashley because you live with Ashley,” Goldsmith said. “You now have to interact with someone who is very aware of everything you’ve ever written because she’s a fan. And that was an added horror layer that was very personal.”

Still, don’t for one second think that Ashley is somehow innocent in all of this.

“She’s f**king annoying,” Goldsmith said. “She is perhaps nicer than Mimi, but the conversation I was talking about, she’s trying to impress a famous person that she’s a fan of – that’s manipulative as well, right? There’s that scene where they’re having a cigarette in the courtyard, and Ashley is just desperately trying to say anything that maybe we’ll latch onto as a conversation. She keeps trying entirely new conversations because she’s talking to herself.”

Goldsmith eventually said that “there’s no one here who’s guileless.” And I’ve got to partially disagree: Natalie. The aforementioned girlfriend that Mimi’s been hiding, Natalie tends to talk less and rely more on actions. So even if her lover did try to deny her, Natalie can’t help but play the “Prince Charming that could storm this castle to save Sleeping Beauty,” according to Goldsmith.

“That the love between them, that I don’t have time to show you in detail, has to feel real and has to underpin the story,” Goldsmith said. “And the fact that Natalie loves this woman, even though she is kind of a b**ch. Natalie gets why people might be put off by this person, but she knows her in a way other people don’t. I wanted to convey that pain of being close to someone who has been declared a persona non grata and feeling the urge to defend them.”

Added Cornillon, “She represents the Mimi before Mimi tried to become Mimi Green. It’s the person who loved you for who you truly are is the person that’ll save you.”

Natalie also represents another important idea within Mimi Green: As a native, she’s not “glamoured by L.A. culture in that way as an idea than Mimi or Ashley has been. They came to L.A. for something like many people do.”

Added Goldsmith, “Natalie’s just trying to live; this is her home. So she has antibodies in a way that other people don’t. The New York to L.A. pipeline and vice versa…it’s a game of Red Rover half the time. There’s this idea among people from New York and from L.A. that those are the only two cities that matter in America, which is not true obviously. The thing that you are talking about when you talk about L.A. is not something L.A. natives brought to L.A. That’s something all you weirdos brought here and then fought amongst yourselves about.”

Again, it’s something the creators are acutely, often painfully aware of already.

“As we record this, I’m packing up my apartment right now, because I’ve moved back to New York from L.A.,” Goldsmith said. “I didn’t always feel like I fit [in L.A.] because there’s a certain expectation of being able to hang and be normal in very un-normal situations, like an Oscar winner is sitting at the next table.”

It’s a great representation of the idea that “horror is other people a lot of the time,” Goldsmith said. Because you may be sociable, but that “fear of how will this person react to me is always the scariest thing about any human interaction, right?”

Added Goldsmith, “And so putting these characters in close quarters where their idiosyncrasies and their personality quirks are going to butt up against each other, and then throwing them from there into a tenser situation where it feels more like life and death, I think is a fun way of exercising that impulse in myself. What would it be like if you and that person who you embarrassed yourself in front of had to run away from a monster?”

Could You Cull The Same Dark Magic?

As much as of themselves and their lives as they fed into the book, Goldsmith and Cornillon had some restrictions. For instance, the pair had pitched five issues, and only ended up getting approved for four issues. There’s also some lingering fears about the final product; Goldsmith, for instance, hopes Natalie (as the “book’s only person of color”) isn’t relegated to a “B story” because of the space available.

Regardless of those, both creators are wildly happy with a project that’s taken them several years of their lives to complete.

“If I never make a comic book again, I’ll feel very good about this one,” Goldsmith said. “And that was what mattered to me – I needed this to be something I felt very good about no matter where the future takes me.”

However, they want to keep working together, and to see what their friendship/collaboration can really muster.

“I can already tell that the next one we work on together, whether it’s in this world or something completely different, will be even sharper,” Goldsmith said, “I’m starting to feel more confident in my ability as a storyteller and in my ability to work with Josh to convey what we’re trying to convey. And I think that when you can stand behind something, it doesn’t matter if everybody else likes it because you like it.”

So, then, would they suggest to any “amateurs” out there to put down their favorite books and pick up the pen? Oh, you betcha.

“I don’t think a film critic has to make a movie, but I do think that if you are a critic, it is worth at least trying at one point to make something in the medium that you are analyzing,” Goldsmith said. “Because now I have thoughts like, ‘Well, this subplot feels under-baked.’”

Cornillon added, “So I also really encourage it for anyone who’s doing these creative thought experiments – just make a script and dick around. Maybe pass it off to your one friends who can draw well and see if you guys can make something fun together. Because it just gets the ball rolling in such an interesting way and adds a new wrinkle to the way that you interact with stuff and the way you see other people’s choices.”

If you do pick up the pen, you likely won’t create the same kind of story as Mimi Green. Ya know, a book with as many questions as it does answers. A story about figuring out not only who are the real monsters, but what we do about ’em. A miniseries with layers of personal and cultural history baked right into every page. And, of course, a project where the creators are just as real as the characters they’ve depicted.

Your own story may not check any of those boxes, but you just might answer the one question that actually matters in all of fiction, including Mimi Green: Can you change someone else’s life, even in the smallest way possible?

“The idea that we’re shaping a character that people might argue about amongst themselves as fans is something that, to me, is very exciting,” Goldsmith said. “[Cerebro] is all about spending four, five, six, 18 hours trying to get the larger mystery of why a fictional character is compelling, of what they’re doing structurally and narratively as a fictional character, but also who they are if you were to treat them as a real person in the context of the story.”

Did You Hear About Mimi Green? #1 is due out May 27 via Dark Horse Comics.