The nebulous pile highlights how convoluted time has become. That pile can hide a series I had almost completely forgotten about due to only being sent the first issue—fueling my blood-feud with Diamond further—and falling into obscurity on my bookshelf. But I’ve been clearing some things and, despite reviewing that first issue nearly five years ago, we can finally return to finish Sas Milledge’s Mamo.

Jo’s mother hasn’t been feeling well. She started feeling weak a few weeks ago and now can’t even open her eyes. She’s alive, but there’s something wrong. Since the passing of the town witch, Haresden has been without the magical intermediary that would normally help in these situations. But all the town has now is her granddaughter, Orla, and she’s only back for a little while. With some convincing, she does agree to help Jo and her family, finding the source of the affliction—a spirit in the attic and one of her grandmother’s bones in the hearth. We learn that Orla’s grandmother, the titular Mamo, had her bones buried improperly all over the town to sow all manner of chaos. There were no other witches to clean up after her mess, so Orla was inevitably drawn back. But with every proper burial of the bones, a line is being drawn on the outskirts of the town, one that will inevitably keep Orla from escaping again.

Time and its limits are all over this story. What Milledge does frequently is play with the boundaries of time allowed in the medium while taking full advantage of how time can work. Comics are in a unique position for visual mediums due to how time passes—so much of it is controlled by the reader—but what’s most interesting here is how this ties into the boundaries Mamo herself weaves into the story. For the most part, the events of the story take place over the course of two days—the first meeting our characters and helping Jo’s mom and the second is fixing the problems in town. The way the story collapses and expands on the time happening provides us with something akin to a montage of Jo and Orla becoming closer as the story goes on. And it’s here that time exists in a particular bubble for them, allowing the duo to trace the edges of the town in a day before our final issue.

Despite sitting idle on my shelf for too many years, Mamo is the kind of story that I did need to sink into. It shows so much of what a singular vision can do within monthly comics when simply allowed to explore their ideas fully. And, as it was a monthly comic, it does leave that crack in the door to allow a bit more story in should the world warrant a return. Mamo doesn’t want to be bound down as it’s giving us a world with so much more in its panels. 

Get excited. Get spelled.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.