Monstress #45 // Review
Somewhere in the past, Zinn is getting...modified. It’s not a pretty process. It’s agonizing. There are a couple of women looking on as the process continues...perhaps trying to offer some sort of moral support to the afflicted as he undergoes excruciating modifications that will leave him looking like a monster. This is all in the past for Monstress #45. Writer Marjorie Liu continues her dark fantasy saga with artist Sana Takeda. The gorgeous dark fantasy dives into some pretty horrific places as Liu and Takeda continue to pull a captivating ensemble through their own distinct kind of hell.
Maika is a disembodied head floating around a realm with Zinn and a few others. The realm in question is a prison specifically built for them. Maika evidently doesn’t feel a whole lot of sympathy for them given what she’s been through. One of the inmates of the realm clarifies things for her...tells her that living in the realm meant learning to survive by cutting off all their own limbs and learning how to eat rocks and mud. Still...Maika is a disembodied floating head at this stage, so it might be a bit difficult for her to feel sorry for them.
Liu’s work is deep and resonant. There’s strange poetry to the talk of the flesh-mortals and an artifact somewhere in another realm. It’s all immersed in the concerns of beings from another plane of existence who all have their own issues to deal with as Maika and Zinn try to gain some footing in a very ethereal and difficult drama. Maika had to come a hell of a long way to find out the nature of her own role in an awful moment in her own past...and she had to find out as a floating head in a world of beings that only look vaguely humanoid. It’s a very dark and fantastic horror drama.
It’s easy enough to try to visualize a different plane of existence. It’s another thing altogether to try to bring another plane of existence to the comics page in a way that feels truly new and different from anything else that’s ever been. Ditko did a pretty good job of that with Marvel’s astral plane back in the 1960s. In the pages of Monstress, Takeda draws the visual reality of something else altogether...a misty swamp of a reality that seems to breathe directly on the page from cover to cover as Maika is put in touch with horror from her past. It’s deeply powerful and resonant visually.
Monstress continues to be a thing of terrible beauty that is drawn straight out of another realm in ways that so many other comics are only attempting. The darkness is overwhelming, and the heroism of the central characters rests on a towering level as they confront so much on so many levels...many of them scarcely able to be articulated in any kind of coherent language. It’s like nothing else being done in any other format.
