#marjorie liu

[theforswornelite]

ITSSSSSSMAHHHHHHHGURLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

[omercifulheaves]

Monstress #60

Art by Sana Takeda I should get back into reading this series.

[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 🥹

[newx-menfan]

I think the Gambit interaction with Hellion would've gone a lot better if he just stepped into tell him to leave her alone and not threaten to blow his legs off

Again- almost NO ONE says Julian handled it well. Like not even Hellion fans agree with him blowing up.

Everyone’s argument is essentially THIS- Hellion was a traumatized teenager who just lost his hands and is showing very CLEAR signs that something is wrong. All of his relationships besides Laura are essentially falling apart because of depression and isolation.

If you WORKED at a high school, and a teenager was showing clear signs of neglect and mental illness- what would you do?

Talk to the school counselor and have them speak to him… Talk to him to see if everything is okay…maybe reach out to his parents?

The answer is probably never- threaten a child.

People’s argument is essentially that Julian was aggressive and “refused to back down”- which I just don’t think that’s true. Julian isn’t a MONSTER. He’s literally just a depressed kid struggling to cope.

He’s wasn’t going to “hurt” or “force” Laura- that’s just bullshit fans use as an excuse. He is literally in that scene just trying to voice that he is struggling and wished that she had been there for him as a friend. And then he gets upset when she is showing him she doesn’t care by walking away and deflecting his questions.

Gambit could have MEDIATED the issue- he could have had them sit down in some classroom and talk it out. He could have been a TEACHER and TAUGHT kids how to handle difficulties in social emotional relationships- which is essentially THE JOB of a teacher.

That would have been “supporting Laura” and giving her autonomy to voice directly TO Julian that she did not want a relationship with him anymore, without taking the situation over.

Honestly I would say his response was actually negative FOR LAURA- instead of GIVING LAURA a chance to express what she was feeling and TEACH HER to state her OWN boundaries- he essentially swoops in for his own ego and threatens Julian. It’s essentially Gambit talking FOR Laura- which isn’t actually healthy for her.

Gambit stepping in and saying “stop” is reasonable. Gambit threatening a minor is not.

[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

[chernobog13]

EXCELLENT SUPERMAN ESSAY

Marjorie Liu, the Eisner Award-winning writer of Monstress, has written the foreword to the Folio Society's new book DC: Superman, a collection of essential Superman stories.

Ms. Liu's essay explains what Superman means to her, and why he is the greatest superhero of all. It's well thought out, and a helpful reminder to those who cynically believe Superman has no place in the modern world.

In fact, right now is when we need him the most!

Read the essay here:

[burninblood]

X-23 (2010) #11

The dynamic really was

Remy 🥰

Jubes 😆 (🧛‍♀️)

Laura 😔

Logan 😠

[ilikedetectives]

if anything happens to Kippa I will quit comics istfg

[farsight-the-char]

X-23 (2010) 🤝🏻 Batgirl (2000)

Key works in their character's history, thematically rich, and generally self-contained works which improve accessibility. Focusing on former "living weapons" finding their place in the world as heroes.

Works you can tell when a writer (both fanon and canon) have read or not.

Works that despite being accessible, a number of these characters fans (and current writers) do not actually read, because they go against the popular/marketable "fanon" versions.

[super-hero-confessions]

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #51 – Monstress Volume 8: Inferno by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

This is the last volume of Monstress that’s currently published and (since vol. 9 is coming out in November) the second-last I’m going to read this year. Which could be either a good or a bad thing, I suppose. This is the first volume I can say I genuinely didn’t enjoy, not even grading on a curve fro the highs of the rest of the series but in general. Not awful, but not good either – by far the most ‘comic-bookey’ plot arc so far, and I really don’t mean that as a compliment.

Through a variety of contrivances involving Maika’s friends journeying to the centre of her mind to try and wake her up from her coma and finding a massive and seemingly living statue of Adara Farclaw – the previously semi-mythical ancient hero-sage of the cats – our main cast (plus the ghost of Maika’s childhood self created by the sheer intensity of her own self-loathing) find themselves on the prison world where Zinn trapped all his kin to keep them from devouring the world we’re more familiar with back in pre-history. They’ve adapted surprisingly well, adopting humanoid forms and farming for the food they need. Immortal but sterile, their history since has been dominated by an endless race war between the first generation Fallen Houses (Zinn’s peers) and the second-generation and much reduced in grandeur (but increased in numbers) Defiled. Zinn, Maika, and the fragment of the Shaman-Empresses’ mask they brought with them are a chance to upset the balance of power, or perhaps even escape – and both sides are willing to do anything it takes for that chance.

Though all that plot aside, the actual point of the volume is to a) provide great reams of lore on the Monstra in general and Zinn’s past and present relationship with the rest of their species in particular and b) give Maika a chance to work on her self-esteem issues and guilt over accidentally killing and eating her mom as a child by providing a tulpa of 10-year-old her to scream at, protect, and reconcile with. Also a bunch of stuff about cats.

I can see the version of this story that works for me, at least in broad strokes. But yeah, the one that actually exists really didn’t. The largest part of that is just allocation of narrative resources, I think? As the book goes on, it has become steadily less interested in the themes and aesthetics I find more compelling to focus on it’s deep lore mythohistory and melodrama among the elder gods, to the point of just leaving the actual setting with its fascinating politics and societies entirely for basically the last two volumes. It begins to make me question why I’m still reading. Maika as a character is profoundly interesting, but having her just clearly announce her issues to a literal embodiment of them is not, to me, particularly compelling reading.

On an aesthetic level, the strange and alien prison planet let me deeply unimpressed. It was all so..familiar. Even the two warring nations of eldritch god-monster have ended up basically human-sized and human-shaped, farming and eating and using tools and building structures in instantly recognizable ways. There’s an excuse offered, but I’m still left wondering why even bother if it’s going to be so unspectacular.

I also found myself disappointing in how...monotonous, I suppose? The aesthetics of technology are growing to be. The guns, tools and armour of these cat worldwalkers who’ve been living underground on this prison world for centuries look almost identical to what technology of the Shaman Empress and the toys the Blood Court uses and- Even if you can torture and justify it all to make sense, it just gets boring and samey eventually, you know? Makes the world feel small.

Which is related to my thematic issues with the volume, in a way. The story is clearly much more interested in the grand, superhuman drama of the monstra, the exploration of multiple worlds and lost continents, space age high technology, more species and relics and myths and just – it all piles up so much that the result just ends up feeling more generic and boring than the more focused and detailed world of the first few volumes was. This is made far worse (for me, anyway) by the fact that Zinn seems to have been personally involved with literally every major historical personage that was mentioned at any point.

The most concise way to put it is that at the start of the story Maika et al really felt like people inhabiting a world, and now it’s at Star Wars levels of the world feeling like a canvas for a specific set of people’s melodrama. Nothing wrong with that, in the slightest – I just prefer the other, and feel a bit cheated by the shift.

On a different thematic level I kept waiting for some real, like, narrative pushback or reversal about how the Defiled are treated as these disgusting morally abhorrent abominations for the fundamental crime of being genetically impure and ‘spiritually mutilated’ and...never really got it?

Anyway, pacing wise the arc is much too short to be a complete, satisfying version of the story it wants to tell, and much, much too long to be a part of the longer story it is a detour from. The story never becomes offensively bad, but I am honestly reading as much out of inertia as anything by now.

[undefinedbehavior]

I am begging you all to read Monstress already.

[zephyrprince8]

I'm on a roll with reading trashy genre/franchise novels this year. The latest is the X-Men prose book, Dark Mirror, which I picked up because it's by Marjorie Liu, about whom I had heard a lot but I really got exposed to her work through my NYX read.

What I love about Liu's writing is that it's just so absolutely clear that it's woman-authored, which just isn't something you get all the time with these types of stories. In this case, she does a lot of cross-gender body swapping and writes it in a way that I just eat up.

[newx-menfan]

….

I *SWEAR* I am just joking around Liu fans and am not serious before you scream at me lol 😝

[geekcavepodcast]

"Monstress" Gets Compendium Edition for 10th Anniversary

Image Comics has announced a compendium edition to celebrate Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's Monstress. Monstress Compendium One paperback will contain issue #1-48 of the series.

"The richly imagined world of Monstress is an alternate 1900s Asia, with an art deco-infused steampunk aesthetic that's brimming with arcane dangers. Within it, a teenage girl struggles to overcome the trauma of war, a task that's made all the more difficult by her mysterious psychic link to an eldritch monster of tremendous power—a connection that will transform them both, and place them in the crosshairs of both human and otherworldly powers." (Image Comics)

Monstress Compendium One goes on sale in comic shops on September 24, 2025, and in bookstores on October 7, 2025.

(Image via Image Comics - Cover of Monstress Compendium One)

[leer-reading-lire]

Monstress