Monstress

For me, Monstress offered an escape from reality, and I found myself hiding between its pages.  I felt like I had dropped into an alternative reality, my task being to try to make sense of this other world. 

Immediately we know that the world in Monstress is as equally cruel as our own; Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda situate us in a slave auction in an opulent mansion.  Men are the bidders, but right away Sophia outmaneuvers them.  So the first thing we learn about this alternative world is that women wield the power.  But many of these women are sadistic.  The female jail guard talks about raping prisoners with her cattle prod.  So women are empowered, in fact, they are in power, but they abuse their power.  Liu and Takeda don’t hold back on the cruelty.  Children are tortured and dismembered.  It’s a terrifying alternative reality, and the flashbacks offer much appreciated relief from the in-your-face violence. 

While I found the flashbacks helpful, the lectures by Professor Tam Tam felt disruptive and not well integrated into the text.  I’m curious if they were really needed to complement the world building that goes on in the rest of the text.  I think they would have worked better if they had not appeared first in the middle of the book but had served as a frame or were introduced earlier on.  Also interesting was Liu’s choice to include the investigation of the Zamora Massacre as the script from an investigation.  I suppose this is a way to insert information for the reader without dialogue, although, like the lectures by Professor Tam Tam, I felt it needed more context or at least justification for its insertion into the story. 

This brings up the issue of point of view in a graphic novel.  At first we are with Maika, I think for the entire first chapter.  We don’t see things through her eyes exactly, but we never stray far from her side.  We are not in her mind quite yet, but neither do we see scenes that she doesn’t have access to.  I suppose it’s very difficult to keep a graphic novel going from one character’s point of view and that is why Liu strays to other scenes, such as when we drop into a scene with Sophia and Atena even after Maika has escaped into the wilderness.  Even so, the story keeps coming back to Maika and we get access to her thoughts as well as her words.  Her character certainly gains our sympathy from the beginning when she is auctioned and then thrown in jail.  We want her to escape and so we are sympathetic to her use of violence to do so.  She is actually a very violent person, just as much as any of the characters who are framed as the enemy.  But because we get her flashbacks early on, because we get access to her mind and her struggles against the monster in it, because Little Fox seems to see the good in her, we tend to too.

I found the parts of the book about the relationship between Maika and Tuya and between Maika and her mother to be the most interesting.  Basically, the parts that weren’t action/violence driven.  Takeda keeps these slower parts dramatic by creating intense backdrops.  The skies are beautifully rendered, especially when the gods come out at sunset.  Takeda devotes full or near full pages to these scenes.  The skies are stormy, the gods almost penciled in.  For me, these pictures capture the feeling at sunset so much more accurately than any photographs or realistic drawings.  I always think of sunset as a very spiritual time.  Since I live on campus, I have to climb a tree to watch the sun set over the bay.  Tonight everything turned orange and red, the water and the sky and the mountain on the peninsula where I grew up, and I swear the gods poked their heads out over the hills, their three eyes the brightest three stars in the handle of the big dipper.

I only wished Tuya was there sitting next to me.  She appears to betray Maika at the end of the story.  As Maika starts thinking of her “dearest friend” who she promises to find again, we jump scenes to Tuya standing under the same sunset.  Her green cloak and gloved hand seem to indicate that she was the baroness who deactivated Maika’s life support.  But Lord Corvin is clearly lying, so what’s to say Tuya isn’t too?  Maika’s “dearest friend” is followed by Tuya’s “no worries, my friends.”  Is Tuya talking to us, the reader?  This final frame has her eyes wide and worried, surrounded by a magnificent sunset like those she used to share with Maika.  What a cliff hanger ending.

I think the ending battle scene does well to alternate pages between the action and hidden memories buried in Maika’s mind.  In these memories, the lines separating frames are blurred.  Maika and the monster, in the rest of the book so full of life and action, are subdued in white, ghosts in the colored memories they inhabit.  They are on equal grounds; they must come to some sort of agreement, all this while the action rages on around them.  Clearly, the battle within is more important.  The frame I appreciate the most is the last time Maika’s mother whispers in her young daughter’s ear.  We see the mother’s face in silhouette, just her mouth and her hair, and then on the other side we see Maika front on, her younger self in full color (in the previous frame) merging into her ghost self.  In the next scene both the monster and Maika are back in color.  Something has changed, although we don’t know what.

This book made me question my own assumptions, such as when I was mildly surprised when the captain of the airship and the wrestlers at the pub are female.  And the cat professor.  I realized how ingrained my own understanding of gender roles are even as I try to resist them.  However, I so appreciated reading a book in which love between women seems to be normal.  I think the author and illustrator do well in suggesting these attractions and tensions without making them overly obvious.  I’m so curious about the relationship between Tuya and Maika.  Also interesting is how race is so important in this story, but it’s not the races we are used to.  The races we know seem to be unimportant to the plot, while new races (ancients, arcanics, humans, cats, gods) define all relationships and are the reason that the world is on the brink of war.  And I'm guessing that it is our world, the Earth, seeing as the full moon has the same crater pattern as our own, only it revolves more slowly, as it might someday in the future. 

 --Gina