Marjorie Liu’s Monstress is a study in dichotomy. At once beautiful and savage, richly illustrated and totally unknowable, its genre-spanning plotline builds a lush world all its own while using the medium of the graphic novel to explore some of the most intimate and brutal aspects of the human experience. Among the stunning art deco illustrations, steampunk tech, and Asian-influenced design and mythos, Monstress seeks to uncover the ways in which war and trauma change us, and how our identity as survivors does not have to define us — all from within the panels of Sana Takeda’s alluring illustrations.
Monstress follows the tale of Maika Halfwolf, an orphaned girl whose lineage marks her as an “Arcanic” — the hybrid child of a human and a powerful Ancient. Driven to find out the truth about her mother’s mysterious death and to avenge her own mistreatment in a slave camp, Maika infiltrates a human compound run by the “Cumaea” — a religious group with incredible magical and technological prowess. Maika escapes with her life, but she awakens a slumbering eldritch being that resides within her. Caught between warring political factions, Maika must discover the truth of what lies within her as she seeks answers about her past.
From its decidedly mythic origins, Maika’s tale unfolds in episodes marked by extreme violence and dream-like reverie and reflection. Takeda’s design approach speaks volumes — making it easy for the reader to decipher past from present, even as violence permeates throughout the story. With full-bleed illustrations, Takeda relies less on innovative panel placement or exposition (though many of the flashbacks are accompanied by captions indicating time) for more subtle color cues to alert readers to temporal shifts. For instance, Maika’s flashbacks are all accompanied by black gutters — it’s a simple technique that not only indicates the flashback, but imbues each scene with a somber tone without drawing attention to itself. This technique is also used when Maika interacts with the creature inside of her. With the precedent set by the flashbacks, the reader can infer that any instance of the black gutters represents a moment removed from the current chronology of the plot. Instead, it’s something internal that Maika is reflecting on or processing.
Takeda’s design work does more than slow the passage of time — it also breaks the confines of individual panels to highlight the fluidity of a single action in an instant, and later in the novel it uses this to reflect the overwhelming violence of combat Maika faces in her final stand-off. When portions of a single image break out of the panel’s lines, the reader’s eye is naturally drawn to that moment, even as the flow of the panels becomes somewhat fluid between the images. At the end of the novel, this technique creates a frenzy of images with few guiding lines for the reader to follow, mirroring Maika’s furious and chaotic struggle for her life.
Of the supernatural powers illustrated in Monstress, none is so terrifying or nebulous as the strength and hunger imbued in Maika from the eldritch god within her. Depicted as dark, flowing tentacles dotted with eyes, the eldritch being is both literal and metaphorical, occupying a liminal state in the novel. Takeda indicates this through transparent phantasms that sometimes only Maika can see, but when her inner rage is provoked and the monster awakens, physical tendrils burst from the remains of her amputated arm. In these moments, the being speaks to Maika and the two can converse. To differentiate the two characters (since they both share Maika’s physical form), the monster’s speech bubbles are a deep green with jagged edges — a visual cue that not only differentiates the two, but evokes Lovecraftian themes in its design.
While Takeda’s imagery for the monster inside Maika is visceral and easily conveys the emotions and trauma of the story, its downfall is in its tendency to sometimes reach a level of artistic abstraction at which it is difficult to fully understand what is literally happening to the characters. Maika’s flowing tentacles (and later — the extending tendrils of the Mother Superior) often evoke a sense of movement or an emotion, but the minutia of their movements within the sequence can be hard to follow.
In fact, much of Monstress depends on readers accepting outlandish concepts or murky history without question. While the novel does include sections of exposition about the world and its history delivered by intelligent cats, these excerpts interrupt the flow of the narrative in a tell-not-show manner that is also visually incongruent with the rest of the novel. Moreover, though Monstress is visually stunning with perfectly drawn characters and rich settings, the beauty of the novel may actually detract from the themes of survivor’s guilt, internal vs. external monsters, and the cost of revenge.
The thing that keeps readers turning the pages of Monstress is not its innovation, as Liu and Takeda seem more interested in experimenting with style than form, but its mythic and multicultural visuals. With nods to Asian culture found everywhere from the characters’ clothing to the presence of a nine-tailed wolf, to the steampunk weapons and art deco decor, to the pervasive and subliminal eyes placed throughout the novel, Monstress is a feast for the eyes — and one that can’t be consumed in one sitting.
