Writer: Marjorie Liu
Artist: Sana Takeda

It’s certainly welcome to see the team of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda return to comics. For anyone who was reading comics back in 2010, they were responsible for the X-23 ongoing series. Which as anyone can tell you was a treat at a time when there was a dearth of comics featuring female characters, much less with female creators. That being said, it’s a welcome surprise to see them back after so long. That being said though, Monstress itself is a very different animal from the adventures of X-23.

Monstress wastes no time in throwing readers into what’s very clearly a meticulously crafted world from the bottom up. The story despite being 66 pages long does not take any time to ease readers in. There’s a wide range of different characters, terms, and concepts introduced in the first third alone, and it doesn’t stop. That has both its strengths and drawbacks. While a story shouldn’t be faulted for attempting to build as much as possible on the first issue, it leads to a reader being potentially overwhelmed or lost, much less navigating the sea of different terms and getting the sense of the world.

That said, complicated doesn’t equal bad. As said before the book is definitely not made up on the fly, as we follow the lead Maika from the very start as she’s auctioned off into imprisonment. Through her eyes we’re introduced to a world that’s very much on the razor’s edge of war, and that non-humans are not welcome in that world. Where the issue succeeds is in making Maika sympathetic despite her extremely bloody actions, her stated origin as a survivor of war is apt cause for her actions both past and present.

It would be undue to finish up this review without praising Sana Takeda’s artwork. In lesser hands, the execution would not have worked quite as well as it does. The wide range of people, men, women, and inhuman alike all stand apart, this isn’t a series that reuses faces or body types. That the first issue clocks in at 66 pages with no loss of quality is a testament to the people involved. While the first issue is a bit of a rough landing story-wise, that the creators give so much with 66 pages at what’s increasingly a common price point for a regular Marvel comic is something else entirely. This is still a comic worth giving a go for any readers looking to check out a new series, or see work from such a fantastic team.
3 Arcanics out of 5