Monstress Volume 2: The Blood

NEW YORK TIMES -- This series is impossible toclassify; genre elements mingle in mythical and gleefully subversive ways. Thestory's protagonist, Maika Halfwolf, is descended from an ancient immortalcalled the Queen of Wolves - quite literally an anthropomorphic wolf. Maika hasonly one arm, though sometimes she wears a magical clockwork prosthetic; hiddenin the stump is a squiggly, many-eyed monstrosity that periodically pops out andeats people. Her companions include a talking cat and a child with a fox tail.Yet the obvious parallels with our own world give this wildly imaginativefantasy epic its greatest impact. The central conflict is between“arcanic” people like Maika and humans who have developed a means ofextracting magical power from arcanic bodies - brutally, and fatally. This ofcourse evokes the politicized bodies of our own society, more so because so manyof the story's characters are visibly people of color. The war's proponentsdeploy propaganda with all the loathsome rhetoric of the white supremacistalt-right; the war's atrocities are Mengelean in scope and grotesquerie. Thatthe true monsters here include the hatemongers, and not just the tentacledhorrors running about, is never in question. Yet between Liu's lyricism and theutter breathtaking beauty of Takeda's art, it's tempting not to care about thestory at all. It's a pleasant bonus, then, that Volume Two provides answers tosome of the crucial questions driving this in medias res story, and somewelcome character development for both Maika and her resident monster. Newmysteries appear as well, so readers can look forward to the continuation ofthis macabre, masterly series.