Comic Review: Mamo OGN (BOOM! Studios)

BOOM! Studios bring you a magical adventure comic about two girls who are about to exorcise a small village in Mamo the graphic novel.

Now am I missing something? There are a lot of comics that focus on witches and stuff as if I’m looking into some games that can kill Chaos, which I’m currently playing Final Fantasy origins. But this comic is giving you a magical adventure just to make the ghost of the past go away which is for everyone to read, with a little LGBTQ+ content. The story is created by Sas Milledge, she’s an artist and an animator based in Australia. She has done a few freelance jobs with some design, comic, and illustration work for DC Comics, Boom! Studios and such. However, in her spare time, he works independently on her own illustration and comic projects such as this comic that she worked on.

The front cover is just showing the two main characters and a cat climbing on top of the tree. But either way, they can fall off so easily with some skinny tree branches. The cat, however, just sits there watching her owner climbing. If it were a vibe cat, well just put some music and see him vibing. I had to say about the background, these are the prettiest trees that I’ve ever seen. It’s more likely how these branches connect to each other. But the tree branches that I’m currently drawing are nothing more like lines connecting to the tree.

The story starts when a girl named Jo who came out of nowhere, looking for a witch in her town. Apparently, the witch is becoming so paranoid that she refuses to help her fix the magic in her town, even her mother is sick, right until a black butterfly just sprang into the witch’s chest as if the darkness is trying to eat her heart and made it change her mind. So the plot of the whole story is that the town Jo lives in is actually cursed by some dead old witch of Harlesden who actually spread her magic around the town which is Orla’s grandmother. Orla’s background is different from any townsfolk, so now and then she stayed away from the town and ventures around with her cat. Even though Orla has social issues around the town, she avoids any human interaction in town. Orla manages to save Jo’s mom by exorcising an evil spirit that lives in her attic which Orla called that spirit Mamo, Orla’s grandmother. It’s strange that a dead woman is now wandering in town as a ghost or something, but that doesn’t explain why her dark magic just cursed around the town. What makes the town under a curse is that Mamo just scattered one of her bones through death, that is almost like finding one of the body parts of a vampire. Let alone the spirit of the witch is making havoc on the town. But there’s more to that. The problem is that when Orla spends her time with her grandmother in that town which is sometimes easy to come by, but suddenly she tries to attempt to trap Orla by using her magic, and she never wanted Orla to leave her town for some inheritance. But the witch’s darkest secret can be so terrifying it would make you want to flinch. At the end of the comic, Orla encounters the ghost of Mamo who actually persuades Orla to admit that she came back for her, but all that she did is doubt the truth that her magic is different, however, she claimed that Orla came back to the town because she cares about it. Jo came around and rescued her, but somehow Orla’s resolve is that she cares about her friend more than her grandmother and the village. And then after that Orla left the town and her cat stays with Jo, right until she pays a visit.

The story is quite nice for something like that, the fact that this story is going over the town, looking for some dead old lady’s bones just to have her rest in peace and lift the town’s curse, which would be a magical adventure between the two girls. Dealing with an old witch’s curse and going over some personal grudges must be tough for Orla, and somehow it makes the story more meaningful to live that way. The art is somewhat cartoony, but what I’ve seen so far is more in composition between the characters and the backgrounds. The character’s facial expressions are like what I saw from a creepy anime series which I don’t know the name, has that kind of expression of their eyes which is very dark, to begin with. But I’m far more impressed with the backgrounds because somehow the landscape seems to be very real, even in the scene when they were walking through the forest, the greenery just moved me. I can’t think of any other scenery such as beautiful as the forest scene. The shadows though, the design is more like something that is coming out of the darkness, which Orla calls the spirit Mamo, which is an evil spirit. The spirit is all shadows and suddenly the design of the monster almost looks like one of the fiend monsters from Yu-Gi-Oh, which is a ghost but, it’s all covered in darkness. Still, the only thing that I got impressed with was the backgrounds that she makes, it’s very beautiful and very rare to see insight. So this comic is not that bad, even if it’s about witches, it’s also about overcoming your fears and social issues between family, but you people want to see more of some of that content, just read until the end.