#Marjorie Liu

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #3 – Monstress Volume One: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Monstress is one of about three comics I’ve ever considered myself an unequivocal fan of. I, alas, lost track of things during a hiatus a while back, and got to the point where I barely remembered where I was or what was happening. So, as a palate cleanser between longer books, I’m making it a project for the first chunk of the year to reread this from the start until I’m caught up again.

This is a very high concept series – a matriarchal dieselpunk fantasy world vaguely inspired by 1920s/30s East Asia with a strong art deco aesthetic. The world is divided between the Arcanic Courts – kingdoms ruled by the animalistic ‘Ancients’ and populated by the Arcanic descendants of their half-human children – and the Federation – a human nation-state dominated by witch-nuns who derive their influence from being able to render down the corpses of said Arcanics into magically potent ‘lilium’. Also there are insubstantial projections/ghosts of titanic tentacle-ey monsters that wander across the landscape sometimes. And a genocidal war ended in a stalemate a decade ago after a city was destroyed by something that no one on either side understands. Oh an in addition to the anthromorphic animal Ancients there’s also just normal cats, except they’re sapient and capable of speech and also necromancy. The book really throws you into things and a decent chunk of the first volume is just introducing and establishing the rules of the world.

The actual plot follows Maika Halfwold, an Arcanic who can pass for human except for the giant occult tattoo on her chest. The story follows her abandoning her girlfriend and voluntarily getting herself enslaved and brought to the mansion/mad science laboratory of a powerful witch-nun so she can break out, fight her way through it, and interrogate her at gunpoint for information about the giant gaps in her memory of when as a child her mother worked with the witch on an archaeological dig. Things escalate from there due to a shard of an enchanted mask and an eldritch abomination that had been slumbering with Maika’s body who is awoken by it. The balance of the volume is spent with her, an incredibly untrustworthy cat, and a vulpine arcanic child who she more or less accidentally rescued from slavery as they try to escape the manhunt after them.

So there’s a lot here, and I really do love almost all of it. Most obviously, the art is just gorgeous – I mean, I’m an easy sell on dieselpunk/fantasy 20s stuff, but genre trappings aside the detail and use of colour is just incredible, and even the less detailed panels do an amazing job capturing expressions and emotion. Basically every aspect of character and environmental design is just very deliberate as well – aesthetics reflect character, and scenes are full of little background details that help sell and fill in the world. But fundamentally just very pretty, an aesthetic pleasure to behold.

Of course, one of the things a whole page of artistic flourishing is devoted to is a flashback of Maika – a starving enslaved orphan during the war – eating the stomach of another child who’d died before her to keep herself going. This is a book that just about exults in brutality and brokenness – ‘there is more hunger in the world than love’ is basically the tagline of the entire volume. This is a world on the verge of a genocidal total war, rife with slavery and human sacrifice, and it pulls absolutely no punches about depicting that (so, so many dead children). With, like, one-three exceptions everyone is flawed and compromised and betrays something they care about when their backs are against the wall. You really and truly can’t trust anyone.

You can see this clearly with Maika herself. She’s just, genuinely an incredibly unpleasant person to be around. Responds to feeling unsure or anxious by lashing out, all but incapable of showing affection in any legible way, too wrapped up in her own mountains of bullshit to even notice what anyone around her has going on until it’s shoved right in her face, paranoid and suspicious and more comfortable with violence than uncertainty, has 100% gotten people killed multiple times due to lack of ability to get over her own (mountains, abyssal, soul-crushing) trauma – really the list just goes on. In her defence basically everyone is actually out to get her (sadly the paranoia and suspicion do not in any way actually make her more difficult to deceive or betray). Anyway, I obviously love her, and the supporting cast is very nearly as good.

Just, generally this is not a series where suffering is ennobling – fear and shame and trauma and a desperate need to cling onto what power or privilege you can drive people as much or more as sympathy for or solidarity with others going through the same things they have. The fact that the Federation is run by a bunch of genocidal religious fanatics doesn’t mean the Ancients ruling the Arcanic Courts are good, or even necessarily that they care about the lives of their subjects beyond their own power and pleasure. It could easily tip over the edge into monochrome nihilism, but it actually manages to toe the line very well.

Though like, despite everything I just said, it does do the oddly common modern genre fic thing where there’s brutal unsparing depictions of colonial plunder and oppression but also everyone’s an intersectional feminist. Not as much as some, but the race-war is between humans and arcanics with no one seeming to care on whit about intraspecies ethnicity or race, and the setting is matriarchal in the modern implicit glass ceiling way a modern American corporation is patriarchal, not the way a midcentury warlord state or fascist empire is patriarchal (not that this means there aren’t graphic threats of rape or depictions of what’s clearly sex slavery just that being the one holding the lash isn’t really gendered).

So yeah, overall happy to report that the first volume of this still absolutely and entirely holds up – and considered as a work on its own the first volume really coheres far better than I’d realized when I was first reading this in one mad rush. Very much looking forward to continuing on to volume 2.

#book review #monstress #comic #sff #lesbian space atrocities #Marjorie Liu #Sana Takeda

[hunkahulkaaburningfudge]

Black Widow (2010) #4

#natasha romanoff #bucky barnes #buckynat #black widow #winter soldier #marvel comics #black widow comics #616 natasha romanoff #616 bucky barnes #winterwidow #marjorie liu #daniel acuna #black widow 2010

[haveyoureadthiscomic-poll]

#daken: dark wolverine #daken #daken akihiro #daniel way #marjorie liu #x men #x men comics #marvel #marvel 616 #marvel comics #poll

[undefinedbehavior]

Monstress remains impossibly good.

#monstress #sana takeda #marjorie liu #AND ITS ON HIATUS UNTILL FEBRUARY ; ;

[omercifulheaves]

Monstress #47 Art by Sana Takeda

#comics #image comics #monstress #marjorie liu #sana takeda

[uponashensands]

I was thinking about how like, people will rail on and on about media with very sparse almost nonexistent queerness in it (I like some of that stuff too!) and ignore media with some very explicitly queer content. Anyway go read Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda's Monstress! It goes to very dark places but it's not ambiguous, you can just see sapphic women on page and they're Big MESSY emotionally. It's great. Eventually I'll make more posts about how much I love Maika being an unrepentant mean bitch who kills people, and pushes people away. I love her.

#monstress #monstress comic #image comics #comics #marjorie liu #sana takeda

[saintoflostmonsters]

X-23 (2010-2012) #12

Written by Marjorie Liu

Art by Sana Takeda

#marvel #comics #x-23 #wolverine #logan #laura Kinney #jubilee #gambit #Marjorie Liu #sana takeda

[notos-black-widow]

some of my fav outfits from the 2010 black widow: name of the rose comics, issues #1-5. written by marjorie liu and duane swierczynski

#comics #marvel #black widow #natasha romanoff #natasha romanov #marjorie liu #duane swierczynski #name of the rose #black rose #outfits tag

[newx-menfan]

…little did Liu know…that tanking this relationship would lead to Laura being put in crappy relationship after crappy relationship. 🥴🫠🫠

#LIU!!!! #Marjorie Liu #Hellion #Julian Keller #Laura Kinney #x23 #x 23 #laura x23 #x men #new x men #new xmen #academy x #new x men academy x #Marvel

[fantastic-nonsense]

Monstress is finally coming back to me in January...it's been 84 years

#CAN'T WAIT FOR IT TO BE BACK! #monstress #marjorie liu my beloved writer..... #marjorie liu #image comics

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #18 – Montress Volume 3: Haven by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

I have been reading one volume of this comic a month, in part as a way to force myself to take it a bit slowly and appreciate the issues and volumes as distinct arcs and works in their own right instead of archive binging, and in part because a volume of comic books being more than ~20% of my reading goal for the year feels like cheating. This has accomplished both of those goals splendidly, but it is making it increasingly hard to come up with different ways of talking about the basic premise of the story. So I’m just not going to.

The plot picks up fairly directly where the last plot dropped off – with Maika having escaped the last maratime city-state she’d found refuge in (now wanted fugitive) and settling into the next one. To secure safety for herself and her little crew of misfits (eldritch god-monster her mom bore and raised her to be a host for, adorable fox-child she treats like shit, terrible cat who betrays everyone, improbably hot noble magic assassin whose technically supposed to be murdering her), she’s conscripted by the royal engineer to assist in repairing the ancient magical shield which protected the city during the last war – which, due to her heritage and the aforementioned eldritch god, she might be the only one capable of safely accessing. That (literally) blows up in everyone’s face just about immediately, and the remainder of the arc is spent scrambling to deal.

Dramatically the volume works very well as a self-contained narrative, though a decade of marvel movies have left me kind of incapable of taking a big climax involving an apocalyptic glowing hole in the sky that seriously. Beyond that though, this is definitely a Lore volume, digging deep into the history of the Shaman Empress, her relationship with Zinn, and what the other Montrum are or want. It also, if my memory is right, marks the point where Zinn finishes transitioning from this terrible quasi-unknowable parasite ruining Maika’s life and turning her into a walking atrocity to just, like, Some Guy. They’re a little shit with an improbably amount of flattering amnesia and also murder a bunch of people but like, they’re a character now. They banter with Maika constantly, and also keep fucking up and being wrong about things. Deeply endearing tbh.

This also marks the point where The Doctor and Maika’s paternal family more broadly starts being a lot more plot-relavent which, going to be honest, I’m kind of dreading. Can’t remember any real details but my memories of the whole upcoming arc basically boil down to ‘at least Maika got that badass clockwork prosthetic out of it’.

Kippa and Ren are basically irrelevant to the actual plot this time, which is totally fine because I love them both dearly and would have happily read an entire issue of them going shopping and having a nice day in the market. Kippa, besides being adorable, does actually get some pretty meaty scenes providing the view from the gutter here though – Maika gets scooped up by a scheming vizier engineer as soon as she walks into town, and also hates people, but Kippa is absolutely the sort of person to go wandering through a sprawling refugee camp doing whatever she can to help. Which is both good worldbuilding and characterization and provides some desperately needed grounding to keep the whole story from vanishing entirely into mythic freudian psychodrama.

Speaking of preferring the social and political storytelling – I’m not sure they ever actually matter, but I do love the two bit characters who occasionally get scenes of their desperate heroic spycraft and diplomacy as they try everything they can to prevent another war breaking out. Their little bit in this volume also does a great job illuminating what a broken mess the politics of the Federation is – given the incredibly vague 1930s-East-Asia analogy underlying the story’s geopolitics, I like that the genocidal power about to plunge the world into war is riven with internal contradictions and five minutes away from a coup with the army and navy barely able to stand in the same room without gunfights breaking out).

Anyway yeah, it’s still Monstress. Still good! I probably sound like a broken record saying it at this point, but the character design remains just sublime, even for very thoroughly secondary characters. Speaking of, my favourite one has now shown up!

#book review #comic #monstress #sff #Marjorie Liu #Sana Takeda

[hunkahulkaaburningfudge]

👀

Black Widow (2010) #4

#lmao #natasha romanoff #bucky barnes #buckynat #black widow #winter soldier #616 natasha romanoff #616 bucky barnes #marvel comics #black widow comics #black widow 2010 #marjorie liu #daniel acuna #winterwidow

[haveyoureadthiscomic-poll]

#the night eaters #night eaters #marjorie liu #sana takeda #titan #titan comics #graphic novel #graphic novels #horror #horror comic #horror comics #poll

[undefinedbehavior]

Monstress is so fucking good and I feel like not enough people are aware of that.

#monstress #marjorie liu #sana takeda #comics

[torbooks]

Hey beautiful! Do you have any recommendations for supernatural horror with lesbians? Thank you for considering!

Hey there 😉

tysm tysm for asking this bc do we ever! Okay so literally just off the cuff, if we're talking movies we HAVE to plug Jennifer's Body (2009) and the Fear Street films. If we're talking shows, it might be redundant to call The Haunting of Bly Manor absolutely bone-chillingly haunting, but if by chance you haven't watched yet, it's gorgeous and beautiful and gay, which seems kinda like ur forte!

If you're into graphic novels...one-million-hundred percent please check out Monstress by Sana Takeda & Marjorie Liu! Adventure with hefty horror seasoning. Girl's arm is a monster and likes to eat people. Cruel world, good friends, and not-so-good friends! Chef's kiss of a series. C'est Magnifique~

Audio horror... The Magnus Archives written by Jonny Sims and produced by Rusty Quill has some wlw ships, though the cast doesn't really start pairing off until the later seasons. If you're willing to wait for your gay, check this one out! It's so so so so so so good. Pseudopod is an incredible podcast for short horror fiction and has a dearth of queer stories of every kind, but two recent ones that float to the top of the head are Episode 807: The Bleak Communion of Abandoned Things by M. A. Blanchard, and Episode 775: Miss Mack by Michael McDowell (screen credits include Beetlejuice and collabed on The Nightmare Before Christmas).

Okay. Now books because we are Tor Books lmao. While not expressly horror, more space opera with decidedly horrific elements, Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir and the entire Locked Tomb series about gay space necromancers kick so much ass! Also check out Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin—it's a gloriously gory genderplague apocalypse story about exhausted, desperate, often despairfully horny trans people fighting zombies and militant terfs.

As for upcoming books?? We are blessed, truly. The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown is horror with space lesbians. Camp Damascus by "World's Greatest Author" / almost black belt / dinosaur erotica extraordinaire Chuck Tingle is a story about a conversion camp designed to help steer those gone-astray queers back to holy God via means truly devilish. Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt is a gay AF story about trans identity and a house haunted by fascism. Good things are coming! And by good things, I mean bloody horror!

Wishing you a big sapphicly gay day 🌈

#lesbian books #wlw #monstress #sana takeda #marjorie liu #gideon the ninth #locked tomb #tamsyn muir #tlt #the locked tomb #manhunt #gretchen felker martin #the scourge between stars #ness brown #camp damascus #chuck tingle #tell me i'm worthless #alison rumfitt #horror #lgbt #lgbtqia+ #lgbt reads #gay #gay horror #georgie x melany #the magnus archives #the bleak communion of abandoned things #miss mack #m a blanchard #michael mcdowell

[pithia]

Love is divine. That is the answer to every tale we tell. What sleeps can always be awakened with love.

—from "The Briar and the Rose" by Marjorie Liu (The Starlit Wood)

#quotations #Marjorie Liu #love #answers