Spending 7,434 words talking about one miniseries is certainly one approach to quality reporting.
But when it came to actually edit my feature on Did You Hear About Mimi Green, old hat felt like this singularly unmanageable task. Not just because Connor Goldsmith and Josh Cornillon were hella charming and personable, or that the book itself is well done. It’s that when we talk about Mimi Green, we’re talking about something so much more than a good story — we’re talking about something with the depth, heart, intellect, and efficiency to become an important comics work about and for 2026. Hell, an important fictional work in general, with so much teeth it needs two dentists.
So, then, what’s another 1,171 words between friends?
Main cover by Josh Cornillon. Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.
Perhaps the thing that is most compelling about Mimi Green is that it absolutely didn’t have to work out whatsoever. Telling a story about a niche internet celebrity waiting out her “cancellation” in some posh rehab (and it turning into a tumble into a body horror rabbit hole) could have been hokey and irksome. There’s a million alternate scripts of this very story that approach cancel culture like some bad joke, and these tales wouldn’t just be annoying, but they’d read as soulless. They’d likely even feed into all the bad stereotypes that inform our notions of accountability and the larger social contract.
But Goldsmith is this thoughtful, massively excitable nerd, and you feel that ample love in the script. The creators don’t just talk about the nature of fame and social responsibility, and the evolution of these parasocial relationships — they make it deeply personal. We feel Mimi struggle through this entire journey so far, trying to balance her personal needs with the thing she’s been working toward, and what happens when you’re held accountable for your actions (for better and worse in equal measure).
Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.
You can absolutely decide how to feel about Ms. Green on your own, but Goldsmith translates these huge, sometimes nebulous ideas into a real person who knows they need to change but can’t fully accept the process. It’s a massively relatable notion, and all of us at one time or another have come to this personal crossroad where we have to become someone we don’t know or even fully understand. The fact that Mimi’s journey also has so many other socio-political implications is just icing on the cake.
And yet this book isn’t just the story of Mimi Green’s final meltdown or eventual resurrection. Both creators told me that they took pains to make Ashley and Natalie standout, and they absolutely do, with both readily existing on their own while serving as these interesting contrasts to what’s going on with Mimi. As the cloying, obsessive weirdo roommate, Ashley is such a great foil — Mimi both demands her energies and resents the resulting attention, and in that way Ashley represents the very humanity that Mimi is struggling with right now.
Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.
Natalie, meanwhile, may be the only decent person (so far), and her devotion is both misguided but endearing, a hero type that frankly drew so much of my attention over our lead for her deep, abiding humanity. Both play their roles perfectly, but they’re as alive and important as Mimi, and having this rich cast only makes Mimi Green bigger and more important. It’s another way the many, many nuances of these themes land in the most engaging and endearing manner possible.
And speaking of “this worked but it absolutely didn’t have to,” translating Mimi’s story through the lens of horror was another quite daring move. In our chat, Goldsmith made a couple references to horror’s thematic connection to social media, and how so much of the gore is intended as a way to cut to the center of this debate around social systems (while emphasizing more personal elements). But it’s Cornillon who really brings a lot of these ideas home in a way where the connection isn’t just conceptual or theoretical, but something very, very real.
Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.
A big part of that is the sense of timing across Mimi Green #1 — we see the facade of the rehab center slowly start to break, and rather than leap onto our faces right away, the creators’ own “delicate” approach is quite significant. It’s a way for us to get our feet planted in a rather involved story (that’s still quite efficient and streamlined) as much as it is a story that never lets you forget the reality of its intentions. The blood and guts will pour, but we must never over-indulge ourselves and forget the true value of Mimi Green. (It’s not about the scares, but what comes after the blood’s congealed.)
At the same time, issue #1 delivers the gross-out goods. There’s make-out sessions with bloody, burnt out ghouls, a whole pocket dimension of blood and viscera (that gives this book a slight Stranger Things-esque quality that could be actually interesting), and this unshakable sense that the walls are about to melt into unfettered chaos. Again, though, Cornillon is always measured, and whether it’s the slow turn of the bland walls into a crimson hell, or the way the art pokes our own sense of reality, the art delivers with true intent. And part of that is that the world itself, with guided yoga and painful therapy sessions, is enough on its own.
Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.
Cornillon is such a master at both character development and general human anatomy that seeing people experience even the aforementioned talk therapy is gripping and effective, with ample tension preparing us for the horrors. In fact, it’s often more compelling than the body horror, and as weird as it for even me to say that aloud, it’s just more proof that the world is all we need to feel this story in our very marrow. Everything else, folks, is a couple extra layers of paint that push this world from undeniable to existentially consuming. (I also want to shout out Ariana Maher, whose multifaceted lettering — across everything from social media posts to floating mantras — only pushed the core themes even deeper.)
Even writing as much as I have across various pieces, I still don’t think I’ve done Mimi Green the justice it’s genuinely due. Goldsmith and Cornillon have something special here — a slice of Grade A genre storytelling that’s so much more important and inventive than what we’ve seen in some time. A story whose teeth is both the bloody horror in which it’s adorned itself but also the sharp social commentary at its core. Sure, we’re still quite early into Mimi Green’s “recovery,” but there’s already so much here to get us thinking about society, communication, and even the stories we tell ourselves just to get by.
I could go on for another 1,000 words or so, but let’s leave it with the following 12 words: Mimi Green will scare, engage, and generally affirm your weird modern life.
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