#monstress comic

[fallowhearth]

Monstress, which takes place in an art deco alt-East Asia, is so thematically rich on so many levels. Just a few dot points on societies and parenthood in the world of Monstress:

- a human religious group obsessed with bloodline purity, who have successfully argued that murdering and eating children is a protected expression of their religion

- that same religious group get their supernatural powers by literally consuming the corpses of mixed-Arcanic children

- the Arcanic Empire, which is opulent and ostensibly a haven, but which is in practice ruled by ancient purebloods who are at best disconnected from the struggles of their mixed descendents, and at worst actively discriminatory against their children who turn out too human

- in another faction of the Arcanic Empire, a society that raises clones of a ruling member so that they can be forcibly possessed by the personality of the Ancient to perpetuate her existence

Not to even touch on everything going on with Maika and her parents.

#monstress #monstress comic

[sunfishsiestalah]

the ancients: no you can't do that

the shaman-empress: don't worry, i have a permit

#and she's real for that #we don't talk about marium here #the latest story arc got me acting up #can't wait for issue 44 at the end of this month #my art #monstress #monstress comic #the shaman-empress #shaman-empress #stupid memes #im begging y'all to read monstress #it's so good

[dragonpunkwriting]

I find it so funny the spectrum of media that I enjoy. On one hand, we have Berserk and Monstress. Violent comics about warfare and brutality. On the other, Ascendance of a Bookworm and Wolf Children. Which are not.

Very interesting. I have no point to make, just making a note. Either give me gore or give me medieval diplomacy and the intricacies of money lending, I guess.

#berserk #monstress comic #ascendance of a bookworm #wolf children ame and yuki

[uponashensands]

I was thinking about how like, people will rail on and on about media with very sparse almost nonexistent queerness in it (I like some of that stuff too!) and ignore media with some very explicitly queer content. Anyway go read Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda's Monstress! It goes to very dark places but it's not ambiguous, you can just see sapphic women on page and they're Big MESSY emotionally. It's great. Eventually I'll make more posts about how much I love Maika being an unrepentant mean bitch who kills people, and pushes people away. I love her.

#monstress #monstress comic #image comics #comics #marjorie liu #sana takeda

[kingdomcomicscenter-blog]

#Monstress #Monstress Comic Preview #Monstress Comic #Monstress Preview #Image Comics Preview #Image Comic Preview #Image Comics #Kingdom Comics Center

[every-character-ever-poll]

MAIKA HALFWOLF - Monstress Comic

PROPAGANDA:

Maika is hardcore

#poll #maika halfwolf #monstress comic #image included #has propaganda #mod found image #week three

[the-night-puncher]

#monstress comic #every time they reunite i cry more #just like them

[enixamyram]

This whole page is just too sweet! I was so happy for them to be reunited!!!

#Monstress #Monstress Comic #Maika Halfwolf #Kippa

[blood-starved-beast]

The inherent pettiness of Tuya refusing to remove her desiccated arm cause replacing it with a prosthetic would remind her too much of Maika, whom she just fucked over immensely not like, 3 hours prior. 

#Tuya (Monstress) #Monstress comic #insanity!

[fallowhearth]

Monstress does have some absolutely top tier character design. Old Tooth, shark butch! She's a salty old seadog (seafish?). Her bulging muscles. The cool scars. The piercings on her dorsal fin. And she is helping Kippa learn to swim!

#monstress #monstress comic #this is somebody's ideal waifu and/or queer rep #I'm sure of it

[sunfishsiestalah]

"...What are the limits of vengeance?"

"What are the limits of pity...?"

#monstress #monstress comic #maika #maika halfwolf #im sooo rusty omg #we eating good this month girliessss (gender neutral) #2 new issues in the same month #my art #doodle

[tashisha]

The art of Monstress is so pretty but I haven’t been able to connect with the characters so far. Maybe it’s because I happened to pick up the Spanish editions for the first 3 volumes. If you’ve read this series let me know if you think it’s worth finishing!

#monstress #sana takeda #indie comics #monstress art #monstress comic #comics #comic art #dark fantasy #steampunk #image comics

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #3 – Monstress Volume One: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Monstress is one of about three comics I’ve ever considered myself an unequivocal fan of. I, alas, lost track of things during a hiatus a while back, and got to the point where I barely remembered where I was or what was happening. So, as a palate cleanser between longer books, I’m making it a project for the first chunk of the year to reread this from the start until I’m caught up again.

This is a very high concept series – a matriarchal dieselpunk fantasy world vaguely inspired by 1920s/30s East Asia with a strong art deco aesthetic. The world is divided between the Arcanic Courts – kingdoms ruled by the animalistic ‘Ancients’ and populated by the Arcanic descendants of their half-human children – and the Federation – a human nation-state dominated by witch-nuns who derive their influence from being able to render down the corpses of said Arcanics into magically potent ‘lilium’. Also there are insubstantial projections/ghosts of titanic tentacle-ey monsters that wander across the landscape sometimes. And a genocidal war ended in a stalemate a decade ago after a city was destroyed by something that no one on either side understands. Oh an in addition to the anthromorphic animal Ancients there’s also just normal cats, except they’re sapient and capable of speech and also necromancy. The book really throws you into things and a decent chunk of the first volume is just introducing and establishing the rules of the world.

The actual plot follows Maika Halfwold, an Arcanic who can pass for human except for the giant occult tattoo on her chest. The story follows her abandoning her girlfriend and voluntarily getting herself enslaved and brought to the mansion/mad science laboratory of a powerful witch-nun so she can break out, fight her way through it, and interrogate her at gunpoint for information about the giant gaps in her memory of when as a child her mother worked with the witch on an archaeological dig. Things escalate from there due to a shard of an enchanted mask and an eldritch abomination that had been slumbering with Maika’s body who is awoken by it. The balance of the volume is spent with her, an incredibly untrustworthy cat, and a vulpine arcanic child who she more or less accidentally rescued from slavery as they try to escape the manhunt after them.

So there’s a lot here, and I really do love almost all of it. Most obviously, the art is just gorgeous – I mean, I’m an easy sell on dieselpunk/fantasy 20s stuff, but genre trappings aside the detail and use of colour is just incredible, and even the less detailed panels do an amazing job capturing expressions and emotion. Basically every aspect of character and environmental design is just very deliberate as well – aesthetics reflect character, and scenes are full of little background details that help sell and fill in the world. But fundamentally just very pretty, an aesthetic pleasure to behold.

Of course, one of the things a whole page of artistic flourishing is devoted to is a flashback of Maika – a starving enslaved orphan during the war – eating the stomach of another child who’d died before her to keep herself going. This is a book that just about exults in brutality and brokenness – ‘there is more hunger in the world than love’ is basically the tagline of the entire volume. This is a world on the verge of a genocidal total war, rife with slavery and human sacrifice, and it pulls absolutely no punches about depicting that (so, so many dead children). With, like, one-three exceptions everyone is flawed and compromised and betrays something they care about when their backs are against the wall. You really and truly can’t trust anyone.

You can see this clearly with Maika herself. She’s just, genuinely an incredibly unpleasant person to be around. Responds to feeling unsure or anxious by lashing out, all but incapable of showing affection in any legible way, too wrapped up in her own mountains of bullshit to even notice what anyone around her has going on until it’s shoved right in her face, paranoid and suspicious and more comfortable with violence than uncertainty, has 100% gotten people killed multiple times due to lack of ability to get over her own (mountains, abyssal, soul-crushing) trauma – really the list just goes on. In her defence basically everyone is actually out to get her (sadly the paranoia and suspicion do not in any way actually make her more difficult to deceive or betray). Anyway, I obviously love her, and the supporting cast is very nearly as good.

Just, generally this is not a series where suffering is ennobling – fear and shame and trauma and a desperate need to cling onto what power or privilege you can drive people as much or more as sympathy for or solidarity with others going through the same things they have. The fact that the Federation is run by a bunch of genocidal religious fanatics doesn’t mean the Ancients ruling the Arcanic Courts are good, or even necessarily that they care about the lives of their subjects beyond their own power and pleasure. It could easily tip over the edge into monochrome nihilism, but it actually manages to toe the line very well.

Though like, despite everything I just said, it does do the oddly common modern genre fic thing where there’s brutal unsparing depictions of colonial plunder and oppression but also everyone’s an intersectional feminist. Not as much as some, but the race-war is between humans and arcanics with no one seeming to care on whit about intraspecies ethnicity or race, and the setting is matriarchal in the modern implicit glass ceiling way a modern American corporation is patriarchal, not the way a midcentury warlord state or fascist empire is patriarchal (not that this means there aren’t graphic threats of rape or depictions of what’s clearly sex slavery just that being the one holding the lash isn’t really gendered).

So yeah, overall happy to report that the first volume of this still absolutely and entirely holds up – and considered as a work on its own the first volume really coheres far better than I’d realized when I was first reading this in one mad rush. Very much looking forward to continuing on to volume 2.

#book review #monstress #comic #sff #lesbian space atrocities #Marjorie Liu #Sana Takeda

[st-just]

And we have the volume's theme delivered nice and early.

#Monstress #comic #pg

[kingdomcomicscenter-blog]

#Monstress #Monstress Comic Preview #Monstress Comic #Monstress Preview #Image Comics Preview #Image Comic Preview #Image Comics #Kingdom Comics Center

[every-character-ever-poll]

REN MORMORIAN - Monstress Comic

PROPAGANDA:

He's a Nekomancer. He owns his mistakes. He's cute!!

#poll #ren mormorian #monstress comic #image included #has propaganda #mod found image #week three #(mod comment disclaimer) #kibby :3 #(also on the wikia where i got this picture from the first line about this cat is 'ren is a dubious two faced cat' which is hilarious to me