I’m going to make it through this pile this year if it kills me. So please be excited for more of these dives into the various piles I’ve created for myself and the series that have been sitting there for a couple years at least. And there’s one in particular that’s been sitting in the pile for longer that I’d want to admit as I had missed its initial release and have only now gotten to its first volume. It’s no surprise after all its awards that Monstress by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda, and Rus Wooton is good.

While the first volume of Monstress gives us the first tenth of the story so far, there’s quite a bit going on. Maika is an arcanic—a cross between humans and Ancients that maintain some animal aspect to them passed down through centuries from the Ancients. Despite this, the arcanic and humans have been in some measure of conflict for decades with the latest stalemate maintaining a kind of peace between them—a peace that still keeps the two walled from each other with frequent kidnappings of arcanics by humans. Maika, however, has seen a fair share of the stalemate and the tenuous peace it’s created, and doesn’t care if the search for her mother could break that peace over her leg. If getting scraps of information about her mother involves killing multiple high-ranking members of the Cumaea—one of the most influential groups among the humans—then that’s not a problem for her. 

When reading through Monstress for the first time, I hadn’t been expecting the density of world-building in these first six issues. While establishing a world early is integral to any series, the degree to which Liu and Takeda are able to weave the story around those details creates a sense of naturalism to its pacing. We learn when we need to learn, or we can at least infer until our speculation is confirmed. There’s a trust readers have with creators when world-building to this scale—creating something far beyond many fantasy comics of this century—and we see that trust rewarded continually as we get more pieces of the lore of this world. And there’s something clever the team does with Maika’s story and the ways that reveals more about the world at large or the conflict between arcanics and humans as her quest inevitably leads us to basic facts about the world that would feel like lore-dumping otherwise.

Shocking no one, Monstress is a good series. But it was one of those blind-spots that I had from that specific era of Image Comics after series like Saga and Pretty Deadly got my fully on-board for independent comics. Monstress sits inside the pantheon of Image comics we might loan to friends who don’t read comics, as an argument for the medium’s excellence.

Get excited. Get built.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.