Judy Powell’s Ways to Kill My Mother’s Lover (With Limited Pocket Money and Minimal Mess) isn’t quite the comic with the longest ever title to be reviewed at Broken Frontier but it’s probably not too far off it. For those unaware of Powell’s work, she won the LDComics Rosalind Penfold Prize for “finding your voice over the age of 50” in 2021, and we have reviewed her comics at Broken Frontier in the past in such venues as the WIP Comics Tall Tales & Short Stories anthology and as part of the Colossive Press Colossive Cartographies zine series.
The title of Ways to Kill My Mother’s Lover (With Limited Pocket Money and Minimal Mess) is taken from the title of a poem by Briony Bax. This 40-ish page story compiles a small number of individually titled comic strips with interlinked themes into an overarching storyline. It’s autobiographical work which traces Powell’s childhood years within a dysfunctional family home, and readers should be advised there are depictions of abuse of both a physical and emotional nature herein.
The young Judy is the third of four children Anna, Nigel, herself and the youngest, Pip. From an early age she shares a special bond with her grandmother while her relationship with her mother is a fraught one. Things become ever more difficult when her mother’s lover Beryl, her dance class instructor, becomes an interloping fixture in the family’s life, with her father apparently oblivious to what is happening. Such is the children’s resentment of this unwanted presence that, while on a family holiday, they seek to remove it from their lives in a most dramatic manner…
Powell has much to juggle here in terms of tone. Ways to Kill My Mother’s Lover is both poignant and raw but with flashes of bleak humour. It also has to balance retrospective commentary with a re-creation of her child’s eye view of the world without the one compromising the other narratively. That she manages all of this while also portraying the complex relationships of three generations of women is a great achievement.
While the attention-grabbing titular “storyline” is at the heart of the comic it’s simply one facet of Powell’s account of life with a domineering and uncaring mother; one who eventually drives all her children away. Visually, Powell uses the book’s landscape format to strong effect, especially when breaking out into contemplative one-page full illustrations, and her artwork has a hazy, dreamlike quality that, while rooted in realism, seems to capture that slightly indistinct quality of memory as well. An emotionally charged study of family behaviour and recurring patterns across generations, Ways to Kill My Mother’s Lover (With Limited Pocket Money and Minimal Mess) underlines Powell’s distinctive artistic voice, as her catalogue of comics practice begins to build up.
Judy Powell (W/A) • Quindrie Press, £10.00
Review by Andy Oliver
