Monstress Volume 1: Awakening (Marjorie Liu)

Monstress Volume 1: Awakening
The Monstress series, Issues 1 - 6
Marjorie Liu, illustrations by Sana Takeda
Image Comics
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Graphic Novel
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Maika Halfwolf lost her arm and her most important memories as a child, bearing only a strange, eye-like scar and a terrifying, hungry something inside her skin to remind her of what she doesn't know. Her search for answers takes her into the human-held city of Zamora: a dangerous journey for an arcanic like herself, as the powerful matriarchal Cumaean witches derive lilium, source of power, magic, and miracles, from the rendered bodies of her kind. But she must know what was done to her, what the strange entity in her wants - and how to get control of her life back, before the thing's hunger costs the lives of the handful of people she cares about. Little does she suspect that her quest for answers may well trigger another war between humans and arcanics, and may even reanimate the long-dead gods whose shadows still stalk the evening skies.

REVIEW: I had a mixed reaction to this graphic novel. On the one hand, it's undeniably imaginative, set in an alternate steampunk version of Earth where a matriarchal society rules in what we would call Asia. On one side of the Great Wall are the humans, and on the other all manner of strange, semihuman beings out of legend, from winged people to fox-girls to multi-tailed talking cats, while vast echoes of supposedly dead gods periodically appear. The style evokes an art deco aesthetic with heavy influence from magna. It's a complex, many-layered world, often grim and grotesque but not without the odd touch of levity. On the other hand, it's a little too complex, especially at first, throwing the reader into the deep end with characters that can be hard to keep straight and are often harder to care about. By the end, I still felt like I was missing large chunks of information, though at least I'd come to find the story interesting, even if the characters often struggled to evoke sympathy. Maika herself is often dark and broody to the point of repulsion, prone to kicking would-be friends in the teeth (figuratively, usually.)
It's definitely a different tale, I'll grant it that, and something about it intrigues me enough I might read the second volume. Ultimately, it's just not quite up my alley.

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