Tag Archives: graphic novel

Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

A world that vaguely resembles Industrial-Revolution Japan reels from the aftermath of a cross-continental war. Humans, demons, half-demons, and cats are all nursing old wounds and scheming against each other. Meanwhile, a young half-demon, Maika Halfwolf, has an eldritch abomination in her arm that’s getting more powerful by the day. She has to cut it out of herself before it causes a fate far worse than another war.

Monstress is produced by a creative duo, Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. As you can tell from my description above, the plot is kind of all over the place. The first volume of Monstress especially takes us a long time to figure out what is going on, because there are so many flashbacks to catch us up on all the political machinations. Takeda, the illustrator, is the real star of this show. Her rendition of the Monstress world is lush, and culturally rich, and full of visual background jokes. She make herself a professional challenge in Monstress to draw three-quarters of the characters as women, no explanation. It is so refreshing to see regular old palace guards as women! And they wear proper clothes!

Palace guards losing a battle
Palace guards losing a battle

The gender ratio makes me curious about the social structure of this world. I get a vibe that women marry women for life mates, and consort with men for babies.

Maika Halfwolf ties the story together, as the character trying to prevent the end of the world. But the side characters are even more interesting than her. Kippa is a genuinely good person, despite the scars of war. I especially enjoy Sir Corvin, who dresses like a tormented emo vampire but enjoys excellent mental health. When he witnesses a pair of eldritch abominations fighting each other, he decides he has no skin in that game!

Sir Corvin enjoying a waffle
Sir Corvin enjoying a waffle
Cover of Watchmen

Watchmen by Alan Moore

Minor spoilers.

A work that gets a lot of hype, especially in the graphic novel community. Is Watchmen the greatest graphic novel ever written? I dunno. But it is damn good. Good enough that you could have a healthy discussion of it in an English Literature class.

Watchmen is set in an alternate universe where, like in our world, superhero comics hit the newsstands around the time of WWII. But then in their world people take it upon themselves to actually do masked crime fighting and the fictional heroes fade away. None of these masked heroes has superpowers (except for one of them), they have all too human failings, and they may have wound up doing more harm than good.

Watchmen was published as a serial in 1986-87 and as such captures the very essence of Cold War paranoia. It’s strange to think that a couple of years before I was born, people were walking around thinking that they could be vaporized at any moment. The moment when I most felt like an alien reading about another planet was during a phone call. One of the characters has to button the call off because calling California is so expensive.

Gosh, it’s clever. I recommend reading it over twice so you catch all the sight gags. The Indian restaurant where some of the characters meet is the Gunga Diner. A retired heroine is hanging out at the Nepenthe Gardens. One of the masked heroes names himself Ozymandias and fails to see the problem with that.

You’ll also want to see the ending. There’s a subversion of the villain’s monologue of epic proportions.

I have a couple of quibbles with the text. Dr. Manhattan regains interest in life on earth because every person born on earth is a statistical impossibility. They’re not. Once life gets started, it makes damn sure it keeps going. I also don’t buy the plot to make him leave Earth in the first place by convincing him he’s giving people cancer. All anybody had to do was hold a Geiger counter up to him and they’d see he’s not radioactive.

On the whole, though, it’s delicious with literary references, shocking, and will never really let you think about superheroes the same way again.

Next Town Over by Erin Mehlos

A bit of the artwork from the comic

Like a twisted version of Coyote and Roadrunner,* Ms. Vane Black is chasing John Henry Hunter across a magical version of the American Southwest, and she will stop at nothing until she kills him.

The visuals for this comic are gorgeous.  Just look at this.  Mehlos does something with the coloring so the grasses and live oaks of the Old West seem to glow from the page.  There’s a lot of fire magic involved in this story, and it sure benefits from the treatment.  Even if this comic didn’t have any plot to it, I’d recommend people go look at it just for the pretty colors.  There is a plot, though.

The other thing I like about this comic is that Vane is a badass, but she isn’t a babe.  In fact, she looks kind of sick and the other characters notice.  But Vane doesn’t need to be gorgeous to show people who’s boss.

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* I’m not kidding about the Coyote and Roadrunner.  There’s a bit where Vane tries to lure Hunter into a cart full of dynamite.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

A wordless graphic novel that seems to tell the story of an immigrant arriving on Ellis Island, except that this new country is like no place we’ve ever seen before.  Giant crockery dominates the landscape, trollies fly, and people keep strange animal hybrids for pets.  And yet the people in this alien landscape are familiar.  The Arrival is warm and human in the same way that impressed me so much with The Graveyard Book.  To use too many words to describe it would disturb its Zen-like quality; instead, see these excerpts for yourself.

The Arrival has won the New South Wales Premier Literary Awards’ “Book of the Year” prize and the Children’s Book Council of Australia “Picture Book of the Year” award.