Monstress

"Monstress is not only a graphic novel, it’s also a graphic narrative, in that if you don’t like blood and guts, I don’t recommend this one for you. Everything else on this list is somewhat high flying, high spirited, positive adventure. Monstress is dark fantasy mixed with steampunk in a fantasy Asian world. It’s inspired by early 20th-century Asia. Very early in the process, Marjorie Liu was trying to work in alternate history. And I don’t know exactly what happened, I just know that she abandoned that to create this fully secondary world. I think one of the reasons might have just been that she introduced this whole race of magical creatures called Arcanics; and there’s a little fox girl, there’s people who have animal-like features… I don’t know her process, but Sana Takeda, the artist, draws in this very strongly manga style, so it’s got a lot of anthropomorphic animals or humanoids with animal features, which makes it utterly fantasy. Like Creeper in The Black God’s Drums , the main character of Monstress , Maika Halfwolf, is possessed or inhabited by a monstrous, powerful being. Her relationship with it is very dark. It is hungry, and needs to feed; she lets it out every now and again; and it gets very ugly…. The title alone is a piece of social retrofuturism. We’re in a matriarchal world, where Maika is a very powerful character. She’s missing half her arm, but she is not treated as less for that in this story. She’s an incredibly powerful woman. And the title plays on that – that a powerful woman is monstrous. I love the way that Marjorie Liu has pulled that in there. Even the villains are really powerful women, and they’re playing against each other in a very Machiavellian Game-of-Thrones -style chess game between these nations. It’s a very involved book, and the reason I chose it is not only because of its beautiful comic art, great narrative, and this really amazing female protagonist; but also because it’s such a good example of steampunk that goes fully into a secondary world. Marjorie Liu has really imagined this secondary world fully. If I started trying to explain the plot further than I already have, it would become like conversations over coffee with that friend who’s reading a really difficult political fantasy novel, where they’re saying, ‘There’s this faction and this faction…’ and you just think, I don’t know what you’re talking about anymore. It’s very rich. There are many volumes – almost all these books we’re discussing are in a series, and are gateways to much larger narratives. Except for The Black God’s Drums, much to my chagrin. I’m sad about that, I want a series. Yes. Graphic novels broke away from a lot of the conventional trappings of steampunk – so much so that when I say Monstress is steampunk, people will push back and say, ‘I don’t see any cogs and gears’. I just go through my three elements, and it’s all there. And the vintage look of it… The reason it might not look the way that we expect steampunk to look is because it takes place in this fantasy early 20th century Asia, as opposed to 19th century England or Europe, and that just admits that not everywhere in the world was industrialized at the same time. So again, attaching steampunk to a particular time period is very limiting. But there were prose publishing houses that flat out told their writers, ‘It has to be set in London or it isn’t steampunk’; while especially with Image Comics, who published Monstress, they’re not dictating anything to their creators, other than ‘Please make us a good product that sells well.’ It’s the same thing with one of their other graphic novels, Bitter Root , which took place in the jazz era in New York. It’s still steampunk – it sure looks like steampunk – do we have to change it again, and call it jazzpunk? These comics, at least, were unfettered by trying to be what everybody expected steampunk to be. That’s not to say that there weren’t comics that did more conventional things, but they didn’t do well – any comic that slavishly tried to replicate what was going on in the cosplay community, the fashion community, the scene of second wave steampunk around 2008-10, forgot that they needed to tell a good story. Monstress and Bitter Root told really good stories. Oh, yes. That’s also why, when I was doing my research, I kept shying away from calling it a genre. I wanted the framework I came up with to have utility beyond reading; I wanted it to be something that you could apply to any expression of steampunk, and especially with the maker movement, the DIY movement of steampunk. That was a big part of how steampunk sprang into the public consciousness. The second wave had makers like Jake von Slatt and Datamancer making beautiful art objects out of regular everyday furniture or your laptop or whatever it might be; taking things that had become perfectly mass produced and creating a veneer for them that made them somehow special and unique. So it’s not just narrative – it’s these other expressions as well. There are people who have done entire offices in steampunk style, you think you’re on the deck of the Nautilus going to work. People have started fashion lines, and we saw it show up at a couple of mainstream retail outfits too. So it definitely leapt beyond being just something we were writing about."