#marjorie liu

[lakecountylibrary]

Read what the librarian is reading!

Here's Kate's current TBR pile:

Honey Lemon Soda (volume 3) by Mayu Murata

Taran Wanderer (book 4 of the Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander

Sweet Valley Twins Volume 4: The Haunted House by Nicole Andelfinger

Uprooted: A Memoir about what Happens When Your Family Moves Back by Ruth Chan

Noodle & Bao by Shaina Lu

Twenty-four Seconds from Now by Jason Reynolds

Ditching Saskia by John Moore

Thief of the Heights by Son M.

This Land is our Land: A Blue Beetle Story by Julio Anta

Girlmode by Magdalene Visaggio

The Strange Case of Harleen and Harley by Melissa Marr

Wingborn by Marjorie Liu

Full Shift by Jennifer Dugan

The Terrifying Tales of Vivian Vance by Josh Ulrich

See more of Kate's recs

[theforswornelite]

ITSSSSSSMAHHHHHHHGURLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

[tinkerbitch69]

X-23 #11 by Marjorie Liu with art by Sana Takeda

Jubilee: Is Laura gonna be ok? 🥺

Wolverine: don’t worry about your sister, kitten. Drink your blood.

Jubilee: ok. yay! 🧃🩸🧛🏻‍♀️

Wolvie bringing along blood juicebox’s for his adopted vampire daughter 🥹

[burninblood]

X-23 (2010) #11

The dynamic really was

Remy 🥰

Jubes 😆 (🧛‍♀️)

Laura 😔

Logan 😠

[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.

[comicsreading]

Monstress 1-6.

A beautiful violent story of a woman trying to find her mother and about the best inside her while a world war rages on.

[leer-reading-lire]

Monstress

[burningfudge]

Black Widow (2010) #4

[undefinedbehavior]

I am begging you all to read Monstress already.

[newx-menfan]

Liuuuuuuuuu!!!!!

Bonus Edition:

[nfcomics]

MONSTRESS no.52 • cover art • Sana Takeda [June 2024]

[smashpages]

‘Monstress’ wins this year’s Dragon Award

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s long-running title from Image Comics takes home another award.

[burninblood]

beautiful Phil Noto art from X-23 (2010) #21

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #57 – Monstress, Volume 9: The Possessed by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

I have, for the year so far, been reading one volume of the Monstress a month as a sort of regular treat or change of pace. And so after nine months, I’ve finally caught up with just under a decade’s worth of narrative. Which is, honestly, largely a matter of falling entirely in love with the first few volumes, and then progressively falling out of love over the last plot arcs. It never becomes dire – this volume is honestly rather better than the last, at least for y tastes – but the magic is very thoroughly gone.

After their dream sojourn in Golga, the prison-planet of the Old Gods, Maika, Zinn, Kippa and Ren awaken to discover that a full year has passed while they slept – and that in the meantime, Maika’s father has somehow cut Zinn out of her and bound him to his will. With the armies of the Blood Court and the power of an Old God, he’s well on his way to conquering the whole continent – or at least the specific cities with laboratories and relics of the Shaman-Empress he requires to reassemble the Mask and – well, that’s unclear, but something bad. Combined with the news that he’s taken her godfather Seizi hostage, it’s’ more than enough for Maika to leave the remote island sanctuary she awoke in and jump back into the wolf’s jaws, dragging everyone else along with her. Returning to the city of Thyria and her mother’s home and library, she just about has a plan going when – well, when the world seems to start ending, as Old Gods suddenly follow the protagonists back from Golga and begin possessing every host they can.

I’m not entirely opposed to big timeskips to shake up the setting and let the plot develop, but this one really just completed the process of shaking things up by shoving all the parts that every really compelled me as far to the side as can be (okay, not entirely fair – it is nice to see Seizi again). The Lord Doctor’s the most offensive part of this, not because he couldn’t be an interesting character in his own right (parts of him are pretty compelling!) but just because he’s such an utter comic book villain. Deep ties to the Lore and a personal connection to the protagonist, but seemingly untied to any of the actual politics and context of the setting, tossing aside the carefully arranged political status quo into just being a cackling cannibal mad scientist cult leader megalomaniac who suddenly has the capacity to conquer the world. He could be fighting Captain America and no one would blink an eye. He’s just very emblematic, I suppose.

And maybe I’m looking at the earliest volumes with rose-tinted glasses here, but I can’t help but feel like at some point over the writing process the shape of the story Liui and Takeda wanted to tell has changed substantially, and the dream-world diversion and year of table-setting were necessary to make the plot they wanted more practical. Which is probably inevitable when you’re doing 6 issues of comics a year, but that doesn’t mean I need to enjoy the shift or the obvious artifice of it.

The art of the series was always reliably stunning even when I was getting irritated with the writing, and that’s still largely true but – look, after years of teasing and buildup, the fact that Maika’s deadly loyal-to-her-father sister just looks like someone’s Hazbin Hotel OC on Deviantart really just feels bathetic.

So yeah, the series will continue next year – will have to, with that sudden cliffhanger – but I feel pretty confident in saying I’m not going to pick it up when it does.

[random-bookquotes]

I can't abandon people because they make mistakes-- I would have to abandon myself.

Marjorie Liu, Monstress Issue #24

[petrichor-poet]

The Hunger

Do you hear that?

I know you can.

Something else, 

Is in these woods

Something more…

Appropriate…

You can taste it,

Can’t You?

It is already wounded…

It is dying.

Will that satisfy…

Your risible morality?

I thought…

As much

This meal will do…

For now…

– Marjorie Liu

(This was taken from Marjorie Liu's comic/graphic novel Monstress Volume 1)