Fantasy is a funny beast (ironically). It’s easy to dismiss it as dragons ‘n’ arrows; the land of a thousand quests, where you can’t have a word without starting it with s. But when you find someone who gets it right, it’s like finding – oh, I don’t know – a mysterious golden ring or something far-fetched like that. It has a power that sucks you in.
The Hugo award-winning Monstress is a fantasy graphic novel that does it right. The world-building is superb, leaving few cracks in its foundations, and you’re aware of the wider plot in the same way as, when you’re on a train, you’re aware of the rails.
That said, this isn’t for everyone. The world that Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda have painstakingly constructed is grim and gritty. In the words of a film about milkshake: there will be blood. There’s really quite a lot of it, revealed in all sorts of interesting and violent ways. There’s also a fudge-ton of swearing. These don’t feel particularly gratuitous, for the most part – they serve to ground you quickly, to help you figure out exactly what sort of world this is. Hint: it’s not Center Parcs.
One thing that’s immediately obvious is that this world is matriarchal. Almost every character in the book is a woman, barring a few non-descript guards and a couple of semi-major characters. It feels deeply refreshing to see women inhabiting a wide variety of roles within the story – villains, heroes, wrestlers, children, gods.
And these characters are filled with nuance. Our hero, Maika Halfwolf (which would win an award for ‘the most fantasy novel name ever devised’, but you quickly forgive it) isn’t a simple hero. She is impulsive, selfish and angry as well as driven, powerful and brave. This applies across the board – there are no moral black-and-whites here. Everything is on an ethical grayscale.
Takeda’s artwork is stellar, beautifully rendered, and drawn from both Eastern and Western influences to match the similarly-inspired dual sources of storytelling that Liu draws from. The detail is vivid and palpable. Her attention to focus is brilliant too – in frames with so much detail in can sometimes be different to know where to put your attention, but that’s never a problem in this.
This feels like the beginning of a much longer story, as you’d expect from a genre where a standalone novel is considered the outlandish freak cousin of the family. I’m definitely going to be following it.
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