The brand-new publisher AWA Studios, which kicked off its Upshot imprint just this year, has already established itself with a wide and diverse lineup of comics, ranging from a new twist on superheroes to Twilight Zone-esque horror to, even, a quirky interstellar general hospital. Now, the fledgling company has set its sights on yet another wrinkle, one that the likes of Marvel and DC would typically eschew: a crime story starring an utterly unremarkable middle-aged suburban mom.

Bad Mother tells the tale of April Walters, who is prompted to take action in her own hands when her teenaged daughter, Taylor, goes missing – a disappearance that would seem to implicate a large part of the small community around her, the police included. AWA’s chief creative officer, Axel Alonso (yes, the former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics), described it to Screen Rant this way:

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April is your average American suburban housewife/mother of two – unappreciated, invisible, not exactly overflowing with self-confidence. Her life is a silent scream. Then, one evening, her teenaged daughter, Taylor, stumbles home with a black eye, April goes to confront the guy who hit her daughter, and her entire world is turned upside-down. Her daughter goes missing under mysterious circumstances, the police aren’t helpful, and her husband is away on business overseas and incommunicado, so April is on her own. She has to rise to the challenge and save her daughter.

Screen Rant spoke with Alonso (who came up with the premise of the four-issue miniseries), writer Christa Faust, and illustrator Mike Deodato, Jr. about the evolution of Bad Mother’s creative process and what, if any, connection it may have to such cultural touchstones as The Sopranos and Taken. The full interview follows below:

Screen Rant: Bad Mother seems like such a risky title, given the (current) comics market. What was the appeal in doing it?

Axel Alonso: It’s a great story that presents an action hero unlike any you’ve seen before, a crime thriller that plays out like a contemporary Western. If you crossed Frank Castle with a soccer mom, with a heavy dose of Walter White, you’d get April Walters.

April’s search for [her daughter] Taylor pits her against a woman who is everything she is not – the lethal matriarch of an organized crime family with tentacles into drugs and prostitution. April is fighting way above her weight class, and she knows it. I mean, how can a soccer mom hope to defeat a mob kingpin and her network of killers?

That’s where April’s greatest weakness becomes her greatest strength. Like Walter White, April is mild-mannered and unamazing in every way. Everyone underestimates her. No one sees her, so no one sees her coming. The bad guys think she’s no threat, and they couldn’t be more wrong.

I know that Sister Global really responded to this title, and it helped them decide to invest in your company. Does this mean there's a higher likelihood than normal that we may see some sort of television or film adaptation of Bad Mother?

Perhaps. It’d make a really great movie or short season of cable TV. But first and foremost, it’s a great story, and the medium we’re working in is comics, so having Mike Deodato, a true master storyteller, providing the visuals is a great boon. He is doing career work here. It’s pitch-perfect neo-noir.

I really like the everyday, grounded feel and tone of this story, particularly when compared to the global superheroics of The Resistance or the creepy suspense of Hotell. But I'm having a hard time, as a reader, trying to figure out how all of these titles co-exist in the shared universe that is Upshot. Can you please help walk me through it (or am I overthinking it)?

Most times, it will be immediately apparent which stories were constructed to fit into the “Upshot Universe.” Other times, it will sneak up on you. And then there are a few series that weren’t necessarily constructed to be a part of the Upshot Universe that could easily be incorporated down the road. That’s the beauty of comics – I mean, you’ve got to wonder how April Walters would survive the zombie apocalypse in Year Zero.

What was the original spark of the idea that eventually became Bad Mother?

Christa Faust: When Axel came to me with the basic concept, I was really excited about the idea of a crime story centered around an ordinary, middle-aged woman. I pitched a set-up, outlining my idea of where the plot might go. Then we worked together on hammering out the details and sculpting the story into the finished product.

There is such a huge emphasis on the mundane in this title, almost to a Sopranos-esque level. Was there ever the temptation to try and "sex" it up, to increase the violence or sensational aspects of the story?

Not at all. In fact, we were adamant about going in the exact opposite direction. There are already a million and one sexy stories in which hot chicks kick ass in an unrealistic fashion or get exploited in lurid and gruesome ways. We wanted to tell a different kind of story – more personal, with small stakes that really matter to everyday characters who could be your neighbors.

We wanted to give a voice to forgotten women, the kind of women you don’t even notice when you pass them on the street. The point we were trying to make is that a “strong female character” doesn’t need to be physically strong in a traditional action-movie style; a woman’s strength can be her fortitude, her relentless will, and her desire to protect her family at all cost. All those mundane mom skills she was already using to handle the endless, unpaid labor of raising kids and keeping a home could also be used against her enemies.

Bad Mother, to me, seems to be such a meditation upon the role or level of violence in our modern suburban existence. What was the genesis behind and your approach to such a theme?

I’m a huge film noir fan, and some of my favorites delve into that darkness lurking just beneath the sunny suburban surface. Films like Acts of Violence and The Prowler or the novels (and subsequent film adaptations) of James M. Cain are some great examples and provided inspiration for me on this project.

It’s funny, because I grew up in New York City and only moved to the suburbs of Los Angeles later in life. Maybe that’s why suburban horrors still seem so exotic to me.

Going hand-in-hand with that thematic motif is another: self-destruction, right?

Storytelling is a two-way street. Once you let something you made up go out into the world, people will have all kinds of ideas about it and reactions to what they perceive beneath the surface. That being said, the theme that we had in mind while creating this series is one of self-actualization, not self-destruction. The main characters of April and Taylor both have to dig deep within themselves and become more than the sum of their parts. Rather than transforming into different, more heroic people, they must become fully realized versions of who they were all along.

One thing that was very important to me from the start was that I never wanted to do a simple, gender-flipped version of Taken. I’ve opined endlessly about what I refer to as the Sad Daddy trope, one of several Dead Girl variations in which a woman’s murdered and/or violated body exists solely to motivate a man – in this case, her father. I didn’t want to write a “Sad Mommy” story, and so Taylor had to be more than a damsel or a goal to be achieved. She had to have agency. She had to find ways to participate in her own rescue. The bone-deep mother/daughter bond she shares with April motivates them both and gives them the reserve of strength they’ll need to survive.

Is there a particular challenge to bringing such a story to life as opposed to one that's more rooted in the medium's superhero foundations, like, say, The Resistance?

Mike Deodato, Jr.: I have spent 26 years or so of my career drawing superheroes. Their very concept is interesting enough to hold the attention of the reader – they have powers, they are like gods, beautiful, strong, a sight to behold. But what about a common mom? A soccer mom, with no powers, old, overweight, which the only thing remotely related to a superpower would be her being invisible to her husband and her children? Making a character like that interesting is quite a challenge.

You've said before that, "This is one of the best crime stories I have read, and I feel like I was born to draw it." Was there a specific element in the story that spoke the most loudly to you?

A common person, with no superpowers, no martial arts background, not an ex-cop, fighting to save her daughter was the first thing that caught my attention. The suspense is unbelievable, the cliffhangers, the natural, real dialogues, and, most importantly, the emotions – this book has it all.

But it was the ending, the beautiful, lovely exchange between mom and daughter in the final pages, that really hooked me. I felt like I had just watched a great movie.

Likewise, was there a specific element that proved to be more challenging to realize than you at first thought?

There are lots of details that are important to the story that were a bit hard to bring to life, but it was worthy and satisfying to see all the elements come together.

All the selfies that Taylor took really feel spot-on (and, to my Gen X sensibilities, a bit satirical – though that could just be my feelings toward social media creeping in). How fun was that for you to do?

I loved doing them. They felt real and very in tune with our times.

That two-page spread where April is going through her daughter's phone and trying to connect the dots (almost literally, the way you drew it) – it's so fun and spot-on and, of course, a bit ominous, given what we know befalls Taylor. Can you please walk me through your approach to doing that?

That was another great idea by Christa. I must confess that it was very hard to do because of all the details. All the avatars, pictures – putting all of that together took me about three days, but it was worth it. Luckily, I had a little help from my friends at the AWA production team who provided me kind of a "map" that I could follow.

Bad Mother #1 launches on Wednesday, August 5, 2020.

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