The manga this week
Monstress
By Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, translated by Yukari Shiina (Seibundo Shinkosha Publishing)
The winners of the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, considered the Academy Awards for comics, are announced every summer as part of Comic-Con International in San Diego, the world's largest comic convention. Attracting the most attention this year was an original work called "Monstress," which won prizes in five categories, including best continuing series.
Artist Sana Takeda won four prizes, and writer Marjorie Liu won the best writer prize, which was presented to a woman for the first time.
In the world of American comics, where most creators are men, it is already unusual to find a comic for which both the writer and the artist are women.
Moreover, learning that Liu is Chinese-American and Takeda is Japanese further sharpened my interest. A Japanese translation is available up to Volume 2, so I decided to read them.
"Monstress" turned out to be a heavy dark fantasy, a subgenre rarely found even among Japanese manga. The story is about human beings and a half-human race called the Arcanic, who fought each other in a tragic war.
As the world tries to recover from the war's aftermath, an Arcanic girl named Maika, who is missing part of her left arm, begins a journey to find out what really happened when her mother died. Maika is inhabited by an "ancient god," or a monster in the form of tentacles that sometimes emerge from the stump of Maika's left elbow to devour her enemies.
Maika's very existence is thought to hold a secret that may destroy the whole world, leading human witches who crave power and nonhuman forces to writhe about in a complex conflict.
I can easily imagine that the high praise for "Monstress" in the American comic industry is probably due to its unique essence. The main characters are all women, and most of them are nonwhite. The outlook on the world is Asian steampunk.
The lines spoken by the protagonists and the flow between panels are in American comic style, but the delicate facial expressions of the characters that reveal their inner emotions remind me of Japanese manga. The female characters are violent and distinctively individual, while the male characters in general do not have much of a presence. In a nutshell, all of the elements are original.
Takeda lives in Japan. She used to be a designer with computer game company Sega and then became an illustrator for Marvel Comics. It is fascinating to learn that Takeda felt that there would be no market in Japan for her work because, she said, "My drawings are old-fashioned," so she marketed her skill in the United States.
As a proud and brilliant achievement of global manga style, this work deserves to be more widely known in Japan.
Ishida is a Yomiuri Shimbun senior writer whose areas of expertise include manga and anime.
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