"Monstress" Response

Because it's almost Halloween, and because I am just generally fascinated, I spend a lot of time thinking about magic. It's mostly hard to define what "magic" really is. Is it waving a wand and saying "bibity, bopity, boop?" Is it the alchemy of putting on an all black outfit and cape and swooping around on a certain night of the year? Can it be in a kiss? Can it be in the trees? Can you ever truly see it?

I thought about this while reading Majorie Liu and Sana Takeda's Monstress, a magical tale featuring witches, strange chemical substances, and large apparitions that streak through the sky unexplained.

This was the first graphic novel I've read in full, which is surprising to me given that I am a visual artist in addition to being a writer. The format has never really spoken to me, so I kind of shut it out. Despite this aversion, I was impressed by the beauty of the world the creators present to us over the course of this book. I am very invested in being able to work on my own world-building in my storytelling and this book was a good opportunity to observe this element of craft.

The first thing that caught my eye in terms of world-building were the various settings. The main city/town "Zamora" looked like a mix between Ancient Greece and Rome with some sort of citadel in the background. The forests and deserts and skylines were deeply colorful. The interiors of the buildings shown reminded my of Bruce Wayne's mansion in older Batman cartoons. In a way, being able to identify these visual markers of history, semi-familiar landscapes, and nods to other artists' aesthetics, made it easier to enter into the Monstress world. It gave the world enough believability and structure to guide readers.

It also made it easier to swallow when more fantastical elements like the large multi-eyed phantoms that travelled through the sky or walked in the distance showed up in the story. This was my favorite part, visually and otherwise of reading this novel. I loved imagining who these beings were and using the small hints the creators give us to guess at their presence. Are they gods? Are they another world layered on top of the one the Arctics and the Humans fight in? Can they see the people below? Are they dead as Maika suggests? It was fun to wonder about these.

I'm excited to see what other people thought about the experience of world-building in this book and whether they thought this crazy mix of recognizable and unrecognizable traits (in terms of the setting vs. phantoms) had the same effect I observed.

The one other thing that stood out to me about Monsters in terms of world-building was how there didn't seem to be many visual differences between the Arcanics and the Humans. Sure some of them had tails or blue hair, etc, but this seemed kind of like a minimalist way of distinguishing the two groups. I was intrigued to know more about the history of the world and when the separation began. For instance, what exactly happened at Constantine? The authors intrigued me with this but didn't pay it off.

Maybe this will be revealed in later books, but I wish I had more information on it.

 

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 24, 2017 at 10:41 PM

    I also really admired the worldbuilding in Monstress. It seemed to me that the authors used the visual medium of the graphic novel to its full extent, showing us the many facets of this complex world - as you say, they have many nods to other forms of art that give us a foundation. I also think the fantastical elements of the story are grounded in real-world societal issues, such as slavery, war, violence, religion, and so on. Because we understand how war works in the real world, we can understand how the Humans and Arcanics can go to war with one another.

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  2. AnonymousOctober 25, 2017 at 1:49 AM

    Lila,

    I was also intrigued by the gods. I believe they will be fleshed out more in future volumes and I'm very excited to know more about them. There are other questions the authors bring up in this volume that they have yet to answer so I'm curious about those as well. I think it's these unanswered questions as well as our desire to known Maika's fate that keeps the readers interested and waiting for the next volume to be released.

    As far as the visual difference between the Humans and Arcanics go, I think the Arcanics look humanoid because they are half Human. Their distinguishing features, often animalistic like tails, horns, or wings, come from their other half, the Ancients, who are also humanoid in their posture at least. These different races are just distinct enough for the reader to be able to identify which is which, but I agree that it's minimalist, which can seem kind of lazy or even unimaginative. However, I think the authors kept these races all with a fairly human appearance so that the readers would empathize with them, possibly fearing that if the main character looked too monster-like, then the readers would have a hard time relating. Another possibility is that the authors wanted to mirror the tension between our races, as if to say, we may look slightly different on the outside but we're all the same on the inside. Our races don't vary in appearance nearly as much as the races in Monstress, but by keeping them slight, they still create a good parallel. It could also be a plot device to have the Arcanics look so similar to the Humans, because there are points in the plot where it's imperative that Maika is able to pass as Human (and maybe that's also a statement about the privilege and safety that comes with being able to pass as white in our society). The authors' reasoning for the appearances of the different races in Monstress could be any, all, or none of the above; those are just my guesses.

    -Erin

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  3. ElmazwritesOctober 25, 2017 at 7:18 AM

    Someone talked about worldbuilding --thank you. I do agree with Erin, above. The parallel tensions are equivocating how close we are all. Sci-Fi makes races super distinct, but are they? The resemblance to dead kingdoms--yes!
    e

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