Mary Takes Over - Day One: Good Mother

What happens when David is working too hard to actually churn out three good strips in one week? You get two good strips and one page of filler art by me, the strange, long-suffering girlfriend of the webcomic artist. W00t. You should all feel so lucky.

So yeh, Kali.

It’s absolutely no secret that I don’t particularly like Kali. She started out alright enough — well, okay, her little diatribe about T.A.T.U didn’t win her over with me as a person, but hey, that’s just me. Still, she was a decent enough person: girl from a weird family, rough ex, kid – that she kept it together well enough and made a living as an artist should win her respect, regardless of how annoying her introduction was.

But oh, times they are a changin’.

David quite likes Kali as a character, but me, I’ve always had a serious distaste for her. However in plotting out the rest of Year Two’s scripts a few months ago, I had to seriously work at writing for Kali. It was painful, annoyingly so, because David has this thing about bad girl characters: he adores them. When he writes a bad girl – and I’m not talking about naughty or bitchy, I’m talking pure, unadulterated evil -- he likes to let them get away with murder and have no repercussions what-so-ever, and by the end of Year One, Kali was just that – this evil bitch who was getting away with (almost) murder.

I feel I should point out here that Evil Bitches are fun to write. You can act out all of your revenge fantasies, kill and mutilate and maim, and do all sorts of wonderfully horrible things. But the problem I’ve always had with stories are that characters easily slip into being Cartoon Evil – just evil for evil’s sake, nasty because they can be, and I hate that. At the point where your character has less depth of character than a Disney villain, that’s when you are in serious need of some editorial help.

I digress.

So, when I took over writing plot, I decided to make a bit of a change. Of course, to do that, we’d have to change her a bit, make her a bit softer, a bit more sympathetic, and really, with how nasty she’s been, that was a lot of damage to undo. Not that I want her to be the soft, annoying Kali of pre-Milton Hoight. I’d rather her be damned for eternity with an anal-raping Judas in the deepest pit of hell than make her that whinny bitch again. But still, I’d like to see some humanity, something likable about her, yet to write that, I had to like her myself. So, I tried to find something about her, sat down with David and picked his brain, and came up with this.

Because, you see, in her head, she thinks she is a good mother, that everything she does (that isn’t petty revenge or strange, pervvy mask-related sex games) is about trying to do right by her daughter, even if sometimes she lets the revenge get in the way of better judgement. In her mind, she’s doing the best she can.

“I is good mother!”