#marjorie liu

[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 😠

[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:

[newx-menfan]

….

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

[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

[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.

[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.

[leer-reading-lire]

Monstress

[nfcomics]

MONSTRESS no.51 • cover art • Sana Takeda [April 2024]

[burningfudge]

Black Widow (2010) #4

[burninblood]

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

[newx-menfan]

It wasn’t “retconned”…but close enough…

[smashpages]

‘Monstress’ wins this year’s Dragon Award

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

[thelog]

ear worm of the week: