Monstress.

Monstress

            Before I started reading Monstress, I realized that I would need to expand my analytical vocabulary a bit in order to best appreciate the graphic novel form.  “The Five Choices of Comics Theory and What It Has to Do with You” was helpful in providing several basic concepts that are specific to graphic novels – choice of moment, frame, image, word, and flow.  Throughout my undergraduate years, I wrote a bale of papers analyzing how an idea or aesthetic expressed in the written word can be translated into a visual art form, such as book illustration, narrative painting, or film.  Then – *boink!* - I had a lightbulb moment when I realized that graphic novels bear a lot of similarities to cinema, particularly in terms of format and structure.    And so, a little embarrassed that it took me a while to realize what should have been obvious, I was able to read and “see” the story of Monstress in all of its dimensions.

            The craft of this graphic novel tells its story simultaneously with words and images.  One can’t exist without the other, but together they create a complete impression of the events, pacing, emotions, conflicts and the dramatic arcs of each character and of the novel as a whole.  Most of all, words and images work together to build the world of the novel, creating a highly imaginative, powerful world that is mythic, magical and demonic.

            One example would be the series of pages portraying Maika and Kippa escaping from the soldiers on horseback and planning their next move.  The text alone is as follows:

Maika:  Are you scared of me?

Kippa:  …Yes.

Maika:  We have that much in common.  I’m scared of me, too.  Don’t cry.  Once I get

            my belongings I’ll leave you with Emilia.

Kippa:  Where will you go, miss?

Maika:  When I was in the Cumaea compound, I found a photograph that had my

            mother in it.  And other people I don’t remember.  They were all together, years

            ago, looking for something . . .something that made me.  So I’ll go south to

            Thyria.  I know someone who might be able to tell me who else is in that

            photograph.

Kippa:  You shouldn’t eat people.

Maika:  Look, little fox.  Does your family pray to them?

Kippa:  No, miss.  But we left them offerings.  Miss?  Does it see us?

Maika:  No.  The dead don’t see.

The text and images required to tell this portion of the story fill sixteen cells and four pages.  They include:  pauses in the conversation (created by cells without any dialogue, showing a character(s) or scene who may or may reveal a plot development or gives us clues about a character’s reaction); large “splash” cells or long shots, revealing the characters in a huge landscape – in this case revealing an ominous bird-like god flying overhead; smaller, irregularly shaped cells that suggest an aside, or a hidden reaction.

Other ways in which the graphic novel form is used in unique ways to tell the story include other combinations of dialogue and images.  A solid black page at the end of a scene indicates a dramatic cut to a scene and a brief silence before we moved to the next scene, much like a cinematic black-out.   Another example would be when the authors insert a single page at the end of certain chapters, showing a cat giving a history lecture to a group of disinterested kittens. First of all, these pages give the reader a chance to catch their breath and absorb the events of the preceding pages.  More importantly though, these cat lectures provide the exposition necessary to give the reader more historical background at certain points in the story line.  These scenes break away from the world of the story making it possible to leave the storyline alone, without interrupting it while a character injects a bit of exposition in the dialogue that would not actually be needed by the characters in the scene.

Other visual expressions of the storyline are conveyed by the composition of the cells on the page: in cinematic terms, these include wide shots, extreme close ups, two-shots, reaction shots, and action shots. Moments capturing a reaction or act of violence or some sudden event  are often shown in an irregularly shaped cell(s) that disrupts the continuity of the page.  Even quiet shots may be shown by a wide shot in which the characters are nearly lost in a landscape, with only a brief bit of dialogue, and shown in a small font with a wavering “tail.”

            The authors use this interplay of words and images to create the intended rhythm of each scene, to show character and plot development, to build the world of the novel, and in these ways tell the story.   This also creates a canvas for suggesting or directly conveying the complex, highly imaginative backstory underlying the novel, with all of the physical detail and iconography that the backstory requires.

Ultimately, Monstress is the story of different races struggling for power, while one young girl struggles to learn her true origins in a complex, mysterious world. For such a story, so rich with imagination and drama, the graphic novel is the ideal form.