Comic Book / Mommy Blog

1 Following

Mommy Blog is a one-shot Black Comedy horror comic written by Marguerite Bennett and illustrated by Eleonora Carlini. It was released by Image Comics under their horror imprint Ninth Circle in May 2025.

The story focuses on Astrid, an aspiring mommy blogger who desires nothing more than to be loved by the other moms in her gated community. When children start disappearing around the neighborhood and she's the only one who cares — and subsequently, the only one who realizes that a beloved local dentist may be to blame — she sees solving the crimes as an opportunity to raise her social status in the neighborhood. But Astrid isn't all sugar and spice herself, and she's willing to cross any line she has to to keep her family and community safe...

This comic contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: The Longmuirs' granddaughter Emily is abused by her grandfather, which gives Astrid another reason to go after him.
• Affably Evil: Astrid may be murderous, but she genuinely loves her children and can be friendly when she wants to be.
• Ambiguous Situation: Astrid claims that Dr. Longmuir was the dentist who molested her and he does turn out to have a long history of abuse, but the flashback to her failed attempt at telling someone about it reveals that said dentist had a different name. As such, it's unclear if Astrid is correct and he changed names, or if she's simply projecting her trauma onto a different abuser.
• Asshole Victim: All of Astrid's on-panel victims are shown to be awful people.
  • It's not specified what Coach Connelly did, but Astrid mentions some "unfortunate allegations" made against him; given what the rest of her targets are like, whatever he did is implied to be pretty bad. He's Astrid's first on-panel victim, kidnapped before the comic's start and later bludgeoned to death with a lawn gnome.
  • Thad McCubbin is a legal adult who pretends to be fourteen, forces his actually-fourteen girlfriend Valerie to make a video of them having sex, and blackmails her into continuing to have sex with him under threat of leaking the videos and claiming she's been making child porn of herself. Astrid tricks him into meeting her, and then hangs him up in the sewers and kills him.
  • Myra Harding is an Alpha Bitch and The Fundamentalist who tries to knock Peter out of the running for a college scholarship by accusing them of being a predator. Astrid ends up tanking her social media standing before kidnapping and dismembering her.
  • Astrid's husband Kenneth disparages her at every turn and forces her into BDSM sessions that leave her bleeding. She sets him up to die at Dr. Longmuir's hands.
  • Dr. Longmuir is a Villain with Good Publicity who abuses his granddaughter and has a long history of sexual abuse. Everything Astrid does is to take him down, and she ultimately crushes his skull and successfully frames him for all her crimes.
• Attention Whore: Astrid desperately craves love and validation from others. Her main goal in the comic besides taking out Dr. Longmuir is becoming beloved by the community's resident "supermommies".
• Babies Ever After: The comic ends with Astrid just having given birth to another kid.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Astrid gets everything she wants in the end — Dr. Longmuir is dead and taking the heat for her crimes on top of his own, everyone who's made her and her kids' lives hell are also dead, and she has all the adoration she wants. At worst, she notes that the newly-promoted chief of police is suspicious of her, but she's not worried about that.
• Bad Influencer:
  • Astrid is an aspiring mommy blogger and a deranged, murderous Attention Whore.
  • One of Astrid's victims, Myra, is an influencer who uses her social media standing to promote fundamentalist Christian views and accuse the nonbinary Peter of being a predator.
• Bondage Is Bad: One of the ways Kenneth abuses Astrid is by forcing her to do harmful BDSM sessions. It's downplayed a bit by Astrid making it clear that she's sex-positive and has her own fondness for kinky stuff; it's what her husband is forcing on her that she doesn't like.
• Cassandra Truth: Astrid's insistence that Dr. Longmuir is behind the child kidnapping cases is met with skepticism and scorn initially; it takes her killing a couple kids and spreading a few rumors for anyone to believe her. And in the end, it's revealed that the kidnappings are just another thing he's being framed for.
• Engineered Heroics: Astrid's ultimate plan is to make herself look like the hero who took down a serial kidnapper/murderer, by way of framing a serial sexual abuser for her own crimes and then "rescuing" everyone from him.
• Establishing Character Moment: We're introduced to Astrid when she's happily filming a vlog for her followers, during which she briefly mentions the disappearance of one Coach Connelly and the unfortunate rumors surrounding him. When she finishes the vlog, she stops smiling, grabs a weapon, and immediately turns to the tied-up Coach Connelly so she can torture him.
• Evil vs. Evil: Our protagonist Astrid is a murderous Attention Whore, and main antagonist Dr. Longmuir is a serial sexual abuser and child abuser.
• Foreshadowing:
  • One of the things in Astrid's search history is "how to induce vomiting", information that she puts to use during the climax.
  • While discussing the missing kids, Astrid can be seen running into an old tunnel with a box of supplies. The tunnel is where she's keeping the missing kids.
• Framing the Guilty Party: Astrid knows Dr. Longmuir is a serial sexual abuser and pedophile, having (possibly) been one of his past victims, but he's too well-respected by the community for her accusations to have any weight. So she decides to frame him for her own crimes, including murder and kidnapping, in order to make sure he's taken down for good. It works, with the allegations only strengthening when other past victims of his start crawling out of the woodwork.
• Freudian Excuse: It's implied that Astrid being molested by her dentist and having her accusations dismissed is a major reason why she became an unstable Attention Whore in adulthood.
• Gaslighting: When going to "rescue" the missing children, Astrid responds to one's protests that she put them in there by claiming that they're just confused from trauma.
• Girlboss Feminist: One of the mommy archetypes Astrid lists is "the power mommy", described as a businesswoman who "broke the glass ceiling, only to pull the ladder up after them".
• Granola Girl: One of the mommy archetypes Astrid lists, "the granola mommy", is a negative example — a social media influencer who refuses to get her kids vaccinated and carries essential oils with her everywhere.
• Good Stepmother: For all her faults, Astrid loves her stepchildren as much as she does her biological son; in fact, two of her murders are done to protect them.
• Gossipy Hens: All the moms in Astrid's neighborhood are this; she takes advantage of the rumor mill to start casting suspicion upon Dr. Longmuir.
• Harmful to Minors: Downplayed; Astrid brings baby Connor along for some of her kills, but usually makes sure he's sleeping and/or wearing soundproof headphones when she does the deed.
• Mama Bear:
  • This is one of the mommy archetypes listed by Astrid, though in practice she's an example of My Beloved Smother instead.
  • Astrid herself is one to her children, going out of her way to kill those who hurt them.
• Missing White Woman Syndrome: Astrid's well aware of this trope; she's the only one who cares about a recent spate of child kidnappings because said children are from poor, non-white families, and it takes the disappearances of two privileged white youths for other people to take notice. It's eventually revealed she deliberately invoked this trope; she kidnapped the children herself to frame Dr. Longmuir, and specifically chose these kids because no one would pay wider attention to them at first. In her own twisted mind, she's doing them a favor — after she "rescues" them, she notes that these underprivileged kids are now getting "scholarships, trips to Disney World, [and] therapy for life".
• Noodle Incident: There’s occasional mentions of some past "unpleasantness" that forced Astrid's family to move and Kenneth to cover things up for her.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Astrid is a mommy blogger who acts like a helpful, concerned woman who only wants what's best for her community and family, but she's actually an Attention Whore who desperately craves adulation from the other moms, and she's willing to do anything to get it. She's fully aware of this, and lists herself ("the try-hard mommy") alongside various other entitled housewife variations.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Invoked; one of the things Astrid uses to take down Myra's social media standing is a picture of her, a white girl, wearing a Braids, Beads and Buckskins costume. That she was nine at the time doesn't matter.
• Painting the Medium: Astrid's darker thoughts are depicted with red text boxes rather than yellow.
• Pedophilia Is a Special Kind of Evil: Two of the Asshole Victims Astrid goes after are Dr. Longmuir, a serial sexual abuser and pedophile, and Thad, her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter's boyfriend who turns out to be both nineteen and an abusive prick.
• Politically Correct Villain: Zig-zagged — it's unclear how much of Astrid's political correctness is genuine and how much of it is performative. On the one hand, she goes out of her way to use they/them pronouns for Peter even in private; on the other, she muses that she should get a Token Black Friend to up her social status.
• Stepford Smiler: Astrid is seen smiling on a near-constant basis, but that smile's hiding a lot of baggage.
• Trans Tribulations: Astrid's eldest Peter is nonbinary, and faces accusations of being a predator and "freak" from a local Alpha Bitch. Astrid takes care of her for them.
• Trophy Wife: Astrid is blatantly this for her wealthy husband Kenneth, who tends to mistreat her and put her down. Astrid realizes near the end that she doesn't really need him in her life and sets him up to be killed by Dr. Longmuir.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: There's a lot of uncensored vomiting in this comic.
• Wham Line: Spoken by one of the kidnapped children: "But lady, you...you...you put us in here." With this, it's fully established just how far Astrid went to make sure Dr. Longmuir was caught.
• White Man's Burden: Astrid, a white woman, champions the investigation into the missing (non-white) children. Later, she wonders if killing her non-white stepdaughter's abusive boyfriend would deprive said daughter of her own agency before going ahead and doing it anyways.