Monstress Volume 2: The Blood

NEW YORK TIMES -- This series is impossible to
classify; genre elements mingle in mythical and gleefully subversive ways. The
story's protagonist, Maika Halfwolf, is descended from an ancient immortal
called the Queen of Wolves - quite literally an anthropomorphic wolf. Maika has
only one arm, though sometimes she wears a magical clockwork prosthetic; hidden
in the stump is a squiggly, many-eyed monstrosity that periodically pops out and
eats people. Her companions include a talking cat and a child with a fox tail.
Yet the obvious parallels with our own world give this wildly imaginative
fantasy epic its greatest impact. The central conflict is between
"arcanic" people like Maika and humans who have developed a means of
extracting magical power from arcanic bodies - brutally, and fatally. This of
course evokes the politicized bodies of our own society, more so because so many
of the story's characters are visibly people of color. The war's proponents
deploy propaganda with all the loathsome rhetoric of the white supremacist
alt-right; the war's atrocities are Mengelean in scope and grotesquerie. That
the true monsters here include the hatemongers, and not just the tentacled
horrors running about, is never in question. Yet between Liu's lyricism and the
utter breathtaking beauty of Takeda's art, it's tempting not to care about the
story at all. It's a pleasant bonus, then, that Volume Two provides answers to
some of the crucial questions driving this in medias res story, and some
welcome character development for both Maika and her resident monster. New
mysteries appear as well, so readers can look forward to the continuation of
this macabre, masterly series.
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