Momlife Comics creator Mary Catherine Starr ‘07 knows the power, and pain, of viral success

For Mary Catherine Starr, finding her audience has meant finding support to help with the tough moments in life, including the backlash that too often comes with viral fame in the internet age.

Starr ’07 first started cultivating her audience shortly after she graduated from Centre with degrees in art and English. While beginning her career in marketing, she continued to flex her creativity on the side. In 2010, she made an abrupt change, leaving her corporate job to teach yoga and pursue art and graphic design professionally.

While she was building her yoga practice and art career, she also created a blog to share an inside look at her life. Through a decade-long dedication to that blog, Starr began building the foundation of her audience — a group of readers in the same age range sharing similar life experiences.

That proving ground demonstrated an audience hungry for honest, authentic storytelling about life’s ups and down. Over the years, Starr merged that storytelling with her art background, creating Momlife Comics, which now boasts more than 300,000 followers on Instagram and netted a book deal. 

“When my first comic went viral, there was this energy that I came out of nowhere,” Starr said. “I always want to remind people that I spent 10 years blogging and building an online presence.

“It absolutely was what taught me how to share my story and be more open on the internet and try to build that community. Everything that I'm doing now on a much smaller scale.”

As she and husband Ben Vanaria ’05 started their family, Starr began posting comics depicting the challenges of motherhood on her Instagram page. They were a hit with her blog followers, who reshared them widely on their social media accounts.

“The response to those was so much bigger than anything else I was posting,” he said. “I started to realize this is something people want more of.”

She created a dedicated Momlife Comics account on Instagram and the raw, honest nature of her work continued to draw fans who could identify with those topics. Ten years of blogging helped Starr learn how powerful that honesty could be.

“When you start a blog and no one’s reading it, it’s very easy to be vulnerable, right? It’s like, ‘Oh well, my 10 best friends are gonna see this so I can say whatever I want.”

Starr’s following really took off in January 2022. HuffPost featured a comic highlighting the double standards of parenting — the ways moms and dads are treated differently or seen differently in society. As it went viral, other media outlets wrote about Starr’s humorous but pointed critique of sexist attitudes that exist around parenting roles. Starr’s comic shows a dad bearing a bag of fast food, noting he’s seen as a “fun dad,” while a mom with the same bag is seen as a bad mom. Other panels in the comic focus on how dads can be celebrated for the same actions expected of moms, or they may even be criticized for. 

After the HuffPost piece, the blog Cup of Jo also featured the comic and a Q&A with Starr, providing another viral boost in the following.

“Between those two, it then went all over the world,” she said. “It’s changed everything.”

Starr has maintained her graphic design business but devotes more time to the comics now. Her book, Mama Needs a Minute!: A Candid, Funny, All-Too-Relatable Comic Memoir about Surviving Motherhood, is set to be published in March 2025.

But viral success, particularly in emotionally changed areas such as gender roles, can also bring backlash. Starr experienced it in full force after another comic, poking fun at her husband for using a perfectly ripe peach she was saving for their children to enjoy in his daily smoothie instead of using the frozen peaches. It was re-shared on Twitter and Starr found herself targeted by those who decided he was anti-man or hated her husband — even though he sees the comics before they are published and often helps poke fun at his own habits and blind spots.

What had been a constant trickle of trolls turned into an “onslaught” of hate, she said.

“It was a very different beast,” she said. “It was very scary. I got lots of horrible death threats. It was very aggressive and it was everywhere — in email, social media, to my husband. It was scary and also just really disheartening.”

The hate has ebbed back to the normal trickle, which Starr can handle. The worst of it made her consider pulling back from the comics, but the audience she cultivated over the years was there to lift her up and give her reason to keep creating.

“I know it sounds silly because they're just comics, but I get so many messages from women saying how my comics have really encouraged them to speak up for themselves in their workplace or in their home life or to say, ‘Hey, this is too much,’ and ask for help or to outsource tasks. The amount of people who've told me that comics have helped them make a change in their life is, like, really encouraging.”

Those positive interactions outweigh the bad ones, Starr said.

“The question is, ‘Is it worth it?’ The answer is yes. It’s worth it because I hear from people saying it’s worth it. Saying this matters that what you’re saying needs to be said.”