The simple pleasures of decorative steampunk matriarchy

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I don’t often buy and read a book on impulse, simply because I have such a gargantuan mountain of past impulse buys awaiting my attention already, and such a huge list of things I need to read for creative or intellectual purposes. This one looked un-taxing however, and I felt like I could do with an intermission comic as I work through Alan Moore’s latest prose opus. I picked this one simply because Amazon suggested it to me, I liked the sound of the premise, and the cover has a rich, decorative quality that appealed to my mood at the time. Monstress is the work of an American writer and a Japanese artist, and it is deliberately positioned outside the usual touchstones of an Anglo fantasy comic: its world is a magical steampunk one which has lots of European visual cues, but which is equally inspired by the Far East, and Sana Takeda’s art is clearly a child of the manga tradition. I’ve always had a bit of an issue with the manga style, with its over-sized eyes and its dominating idiomatic conventions with regard to mouth-shape, movement and so forth. However, I’m sure the conventions of British and American comics or European bandes dessinées look just as stylistically mannered when viewed from the outside, and I figure it’s about time I got to grips with what is probably the most prolific field of global comics. As a way in, Monstress is not particularly demanding: Takeda’s backgrounds are detailed, illustrative mandalas of psychedelic visual pleasure, and her figures obey manga conventions more or less in proportion to their smallness and their cuteness. As most of the characters are more epic than cute, mimetic faces and figures predominate (although there is plenty of cute as well). The thing that kept bringing me up short was the glossy highlights on dark hair, as though the characters had escaped from a Timotei ad, but I got used to it soon enough. Marjorie Liu’s script is a tale of epic powers lurking in apparently normal human bodies, which is a fairly manga theme, and this is not the low-key sort of fantasy, where magic gradually emerges into a pseudo-medieval setting. Improbable steampunk technologies, magical beings and earth-shattering metaphysical forces are everywhere, in a world whose political powers seem more reminiscent of Wuxia martial arts fantasies than anything else. The world is a matriarchy, which makes a welcome change from the norm, and although there are powerful male characters, the vast majority of characters are women, be they powerful or insignificant: men are only seen in subservient or subordinate roles. The story is pretty daft, and follows mainstream fantasy conventions in its representation of magic, but it tackles some interesting ethical questions; it examines the fear in its characters’ lives in ways that could offer insights into the presence of anxiety in contemporary culture – we’ll have to see how the series pans out. As Vol. 1 of a new Image Comics series this is as promising and as tantalising as you might expect, and it’s an essay in pure professionalism, which is probably also its principal weakness. With writing and graphics as slick as this, there is little sense of artists on a mission, pushing at the limits of their abilities, and I didn’t feel especially moved by this book. Monstress has clearly been written to a brief (even if it is a self-defined one), and is intended to address a market, rather than a creative agenda. However, I was entertained, and I derived a lot of pleasure from simply soaking up the complex patterning from which many of the panels are constructed. This is a very accomplished commercial comic, which should appeal to readers who, like me, have had about enough of the superhero premise.