Your Momma is a Little Blob Thing with No Lips

The sordid, bitter little world of Momma first came to life in 1970. Ever since, the titular character, Sonya Hobbes, has spread misery amongst her three children, her sparse circle of friends, and her poor, poor readers. Momma is never happy. She makes the people around her never be happy. She is tiny enough for her son Francis to pick up in his hands without discernible effort, but he has apparently never considered drop-kicking her and running gleefully away. It is incomprehensible to me why Momma is still running. Then again, on a comics page dominated by Crock, The Family Circus, and B.C., Momma fits right in.

In this strip, Momma sits around complaining to an equally tiny woman that her life is terrible and she is likely going to end up as a sort of geriatric Eliza Doolittle. Momma and friend richly deserve to visit the Middle Ages, though frankly, they never actually seem to have left. The whole "When I am old, I shall have to beg on the street" attitude expressed here doesn't really seem to have a hell of a lot to do with the Western world in the twenty-first century. Middle-Ages-wise, the only thing missing is Momma's griping about how she's such a poisonous shrew that no convent will take her.

I have renamed Momma "Sophie" for the purposes of this strip. "Sonya" does derive from "Sophie" and is not, moreover, a name that would ever turn up in medieval England.*



*I can't imagine why.