Monstress #63 // Review
The citadel is under attack. They need reinforcements. There have been explosions inside the citadel. Perhaps the worst thing about it is the fact that they have no idea who is attacking. The Lord Doctor is missing. Sacerdos are locking-down the city and commanding the Blood Court soldiers under an assumed authority that they simply don’t have. Things are looking pretty bleak in Monstress #63. Writer Marjorie Liu continues a remarkably dense horror fantasy with illustrator Sana Takeda. There are some particularly dark moments in a particularly dark series that march slowly across the page as a bloody war continues.
Confusion and panic lead to death. Obviously, confusion should be avoided at all costs. The war-master was overcome with berserker rage at the audacity of the sacerdos. She needed to be restrained until she could be calmed down. Of course...that could likely be a lie. So many things get lost in the fog of war as the Lord Doctor is nowhere to be found. These are the conditions under which power is usurped and its very difficult to tell who is really in charge. Yvette seems to be more or less in control, but how long will that last?
There’s a thick haze of high fantasy clinging to the edges of the narrative. All too often that sort of thing feels more than a little bit tedious. On the whole, though, the decorative background moments on Liu’s story feel like poetic, little flourishes that all seem to deliver a profound sense of epic scale, volume and intensity about what’s going on in the foreground of every scene. It all fits together so very, very well on the page as Liu marches the narrative through some pretty nightmarish terrain. Some of the details on the flashback at the beginning of the story are particularly intense as well.
The flashback at the beginning of the issue features a remarkably cute baby Beast. She’s one of the more visually striking characters in the entire series. It’s cool to get a chance to see her as a little kid as she gets her cybernetic prosthetics worked-on by the Lord Doctor. The scene where she sees Lord Doctor eating human flesh for the first time is placed very precisely on the page in a way that reveals deep visceral and tonal complexity in Takeda’s art. So much of what the artist is being asked to bring to the page can get lost under so many layers of magical complexity that it can be difficult to feel much of anything in it. It’s nice to see Takeda given the occasional chance to explore something a little bit more intricately textured emotionally.
Over the years, Monstress has fallen victim to the numbing complexity of so much high fantasy. Its greatest strength is its deeper darkness, which is embraced quite well in the 63rd issue of the series. There’s still a lot of clutter in the narrative that really could be removed to allow the more powerful moments more of a chance to resonate, but it’s a fun 63rd issue.
