First Impressions Review: Monstress (vol 1), by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda
The author of this graphic novel describes its genesis like this: “I had this image in my head of a battered girl standing alone, absolutely furious, and behind her a battlefield that stretched for miles…the root of my desire, I finally realized, was to tell a story about what it means to be a survivor. A survivor, not just of a cataclysmic war, but of racial conflict and its antecedent: hatred. And to confront the question: how does one whom history has made a monster escape her monstrosity?” Well, with this volume, I believe Ms. Liu and the illustrator, Ms. Takeda, have made a brilliant beginning!
When we meet Maika Halfwolf, a one-armed arcanic1 girl, she is naked at a slave auction, a strange eye-shaped brand on her chest. But we quickly learn that she put herself there, hoping to gain access to someone within the fortress of the Cumaea – an order of witches that are a major enemy to arcanics – who knew her mother and who therefore might also have the information Maika seeks. This is a risky plan, as the Cumaeans extract “lilium”, a substance with various useful magical properties including healing, from the blood and bones of their arcanic prisoners. But Maika knows there is some strange power inside her that tends to come out when she is in danger.
1. Arcanics are hybrids and backcrosses between humans and “the ancients”. One can think of them as sort of like “half fey”.
The little fox girl in that sequence, Kippa, ends up sticking with Maika for the rest of the story, at first because Maika is scarier than the humans then, after Maika accidentally kills one of their companions, in spite of her scariness. She realizes that Maika may be a monster…but that’s what the Cumaeans say about all of them, and Maika is at least trying hard not to be a danger to her friends. Even so, Kippa is quite glad they have another, more stable companion: a two-tailed talking cat named Ren Mormorian. These cats are their own people, calling themselves “children of Ubasti” – a reference to the Egyptian cat goddess Bast. We get periodic “excerpts” from the lectures of a future historian, Professor Tam Tam, explaining features of the world to his class of kittens: An exposition dump, but an adorable one!
Besides humans, arcanics, ancients, and talking cats, another feature of this world are the Lovecraftian figures known as monstra or “the old gods”. Most are huge ghostly figures that move across the landscape not really interacting with anything. Some of the arcanics worship them. But it turns out that the force Maika has sensed within herself is one of them. He has the power to make himself at least partly physical, causing black tentacles to shoot out of her arm stump. But Maika has no intention of letting this thing take control of her body; if he wants the two of them to survive, he has to let her drive! I really liked the depiction of the battle of wills between them.
And that is a challenge, because Maika is being hunted by pretty much everyone because of her strange powers. Moreover, most of the parties seem to be double-crossing one another in one sense or another. A lot of this seems to trace back to a particular event: the battle of Constantine where a whole human army got wiped out by some kind of mysterious explosion…which Maika seems to be connected to in some way.
Overall recommendation: If you like dark fantasy, this is a very intriguing story – and I will be interested to see where it goes!
