Maika Halfwolf’s family and oldest friend all want to kill or control her, but she has the upper hand … at least for now. Monstress #33 is written by Marjorie Liu, drawn by Sana Takeda and lettered/designed by Rus Wooton.
Marjorie Liu’s work for Marvel is consistently fantastic, but Monstress shows us what she’s truly capable of, unleashed and uncensored. I only bring up the other company because it’s where I first fell in love with Liu’s writing, on Astonishing X-Men and X-23, and the contrast of what she’s able to do at Image is profound. Monstress can be found at the exact GPS coordinates for “up my alley.” Every detail — the tone, the voices, the pacing and the aesthetic — fits perfectly in the narrow taste window I have for fantasy stories. Sana Takeda’s gilded, art nouveau/deco-inflected artistic vision is sublime, rivaling my favorite JRPGs when combined with Liu’s deliberate plotting. Together, they’re building an epic, and to talk just about a single issue in isolation feels like madness. I’ll do my best to find a compromise.
Maika Halfwolf, our titular Monstress, is an orphaned child soldier who has a short life filled with war, slavery and pain. Though she appears human, she belongs to a lower-caste race of furry people known as Arcanics. Beyond humans and Arcanics are the godlike Ancients and their demonic adversaries, the Monstrum — both of whom may come from some other planet/dimension. A brief few years of peace has just been torn away again, and Ms. Halfwolf finds herself wrapped up in the middle of everything. Her body is inhabited by a Monstrum named Zinn, a being of great power with as many enemies as Maika herself. Though the two have struggled for control over Maika’s body, working together they are very, very dangerous. What else to know … almost every character is a woman, cats are their own significant race, and a sect of human witches called the Cumea are very bad.
This is a dense comic with a lot of information to keep straight. It’s most difficult earlier in the series, when the narrative cuts to multiple developing plotlines filled with so many different characters (some of whom look similar to each other). I recognize that can be an intimidating dealbreaker, but some of us want immersive worldbuilding. I appreciate that the comic doesn’t do much hand-holding in this arena, but having a wiki accessible can be helpful. Once that learning curve is surmounted, the rewards are bountiful.
Takeda’s ornate artwork is as intricate as the plot. It’s also economical, hitting a remarkable balance between lush, textured detail and quick, non-fussy drawings that must help meet deadlines. Her color range is an elegant palette of golds, grays and blues, giving the comic a soft atmosphere that heightens the story’s magic. Everything feels high drama in the most luxuriant way possible. Takeda and Liu know just the right proportion of darkness to dish out and still fit in notes of lightness and humor. Story elements like Maika’s friend, Kippa the little-fox-who-could, or the lectures by Professor Tam Tam (most learned of cats) that close every issue are great sources of joy. They help make the amount of bloodshed stomachable even as the atrocities mount.
Monstress takes pains to show the miserable cost of war in ways that are never triumphant and reveal the lows one will sink to in order to win. The growing conflict between humans and Arcanics has reached several bloody overtures over 32 issues, with no sign of slowing down. While fighting has stalled briefly in Ravenna, this issue shows the tides turning again. Maika has finally come face to face with the parties who have been hunting her — her oldest friend (lover?) Tuya, Baroness of the Dusk Court; her aunt, the Warlord of the Dawn Court (and wife of Tuya, gasp); and her grandmother, the Queen of Wolves, an Ancient who shares history with Zinn. Even as Maika and opposing Arcanic Courts start setting aside their in-fighting, the humans also overcome their ideological differences to better commit war crimes. They have a new toy, a chemical agent that turns the Arcanics into indiscriminate, murderous beasts (think the Rage virus from 28 Days Later). The implication is that this nerve gas is made from Monstrum somehow, and the human army wastes no time using it to continue their siege. Luck seems to run out when the Queen of Wolves falls under its power and turns on our heroes…
One of my favorite threads has been Maika’s relationship with Tuya — over and over we’ve seen Maika’s memory of their friendship as her one speck of hope, all while Tuya has been working against her. When they finally meet again, it’s devastating — Maika catches Tuya in flagrante delicto with Maika’s aunt (that pairing is its own scandal). I was expecting the reunion to be earth-shattering, and yet Maika undersells her reaction, resigned to her sense of betrayal — all she’s ever known is deceit, so why should her best friend treat her any different? As she says, “Trust only gets in the way” when it comes to family, but this series has been showing us the hard-won trust between her true friends, like Kippa. There’s a great satisfaction in seeing Maika resist and outmaneuver those who would conspire to use or destroy her, and this issue shines in that regard.
One of the series’ strengths is how the various wheels within wheels of the story reveal themselves over time. As some mysteries are resolved, others are just beginning to come out from behind the clouds. I started reading Monstress last winter, and I’m so thrilled to be caught up at a time when new chapters are dropping monthly. The fun I get from reading this comic is similar to what I get from watching Killing Eve, but through the lens of Final Fantasy Tactics. The real question is, “where is the Square-Enix game based on this world?” Where are my Monstress action figures and key chains? While there are times I wish Liu would write the X-Men again, clearly she and Takeda are making exactly what I need.
Karen Charm is a cartoonist and mutant separatist, though they’ve been known to appreciate an Eternal or two.
