Augustus’s mom

Augustus's mom
Gender	Female
Species	Cat
Family	Augustus’s dad (Husband) Augustus (Son)
Debut	Ten Seconds to Midnight, page 1 December 3, 2012 (2012-12-03)

Augustus’s mom is Augustus’s mother, who lives with Augustus’s dad in the run-down Augustus’s house on the far side of town. Across her three on-panel appearances in the main comic, she is never once seen awake.

Personality

In Trapped, Augustus quietly endures what his mother cannot.

Whenever the comic stops by the house, she is out cold, and there are usually empty bottles somewhere in the frame. The one time she is awake, she is a voice through a wall, shouting at her husband. She has never been drawn conscious, and she has never been shown speaking to her son or so much as looking at him. Augustus himself sums the household up in the Trapped flashback with the observation that there wasn’t much back home.

Appearance

She is a cat, and every panel she appears in has her unconscious. In Ten Seconds to Midnight she is asleep on the floor among strewn bottles and clothes, in Trapped she lies splayed along the couch, and in Escape Route she is passed out upside down with one leg hooked over the back of the cushions.

Significant events

Her earliest scene in story order is a childhood flashback in Trapped, where she is passed out on the couch choking on her own vomit and it falls to a very young Augustus to deal with it. Years later, in the Escape Route flashback, Augustus brings Lucy home and tells her his parents won’t mind. His mother does not notice them as they walk past her snoring upside down on the couch, and Lucy just stares. While Lucy sits alone in his room, a fight breaks out downstairs between the parents, and she hears every word of it through the wall.

Lucy gains a fiercely protective mother, just as Augustus’s own remains absent.

On New Year’s Eve in Ten Seconds to Midnight, she is asleep on the floor of the dark, bottle-strewn living room while her husband snores on the couch and Augustus lets himself out. Later, in Love Again, Lucy’s parents offer Augustus their guest room until graduation and Lucy’s mom, holding his filthy jacket, swears she is going to have some words for his mother.

Major relationships

Augustus

Augustus rolls his mother onto her stomach when she begins choking, because apparently someone has to.

As a small child, Augustus has to take care of his mother. In the Trapped flashback, little Augustus rolls her onto her stomach and holds her back while she retches over the edge of the couch, then sits on the floor beside the mess hugging his knees. Veronica’s commentary calls it nice that he learned how to deal with this, and difficult times for the kid. That same lack of any curfew or attention is what Alejandro seizes on when he recruits him. By high school Augustus walks past her without a glance, and when Lucy remarks that his parents fight a lot, he tells her that this is all “pretty ordinary.”

The neglect is severe, but Veronica has clarified that Augustus’s birth parents do care about him. She describes them as being in a very bad state mentally and financially, accustomed to Augustus disappearing for days, and focused on keeping themselves alive; Augustus also helped them with groceries a lot of the time. She imagines him visiting them again when he is older and no longer feels he has to run away.

Minor relationships

Augustus’s dad

She and Augustus’s dad are both asleep in her debut, and the one time she is heard awake, they are fighting. In Escape Route he asks what’s for dinner and she tells him to make it himself. Something smashes, and he screams at her to shut up. Lucy, listening from upstairs, is the one who says out loud that his parents fight a lot.

Quotes

Make it yourself! Augustus’s mom, her first words in the comic, answering a request for dinner in Escape Route

Leave me alone!! Augustus’s mom, to Augustus’s dad, just before something smashes in Escape Route

Trivia

• Her debut in Ten Seconds to Midnight is silent and unmoving, and she does not get a line of dialogue until Escape Route, more than five years later.
• Veronica has said the parents are “not just alcoholics”, and that the bottles are a symbol they’re Not Doing Well, adding that she didn’t really want to research how to shoot up heroin when she drew them.
• Her earliest appearance anywhere is in the non-canon Another Chance, where she stumbles around the kitchen with a bottle while a young Augustus watches, nearly two years before her main-comic debut.

See also

• Augustus
• Augustus’s dad
• Augustus’s house