James Nicoll Reviews

2023’s Inferno is the eighth tankōbon (or ​“volume,” in the quaint American vernacular) of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s on-going Monstress graphic novel series. Liu is the writer while Takeda is the artist.

Mistakes were made, revelations were reveled, and Maika Halfwolf’s soul is no longer resident in her body. Fox girl Kippa, Master Ren, and others quest into astral space to locate and recover Maika’s soul. It’s probably for the best that they did not know where the quest would lead them.

Maika is still attached to her eldritch horror symbiote Zinn, but now the roles appear to be reversed. Where Zinn hid within Maika, only occasionally manifesting, now Zinn is the host and Maika — or at least Maika’s floating head — is the symbiote.

Zinn and Maika, not to mention Kippa, Red, and the others, are in a land of horrors, populated by several flavors of ​“Monstra” (as Zinn’s kind are called). One group would be called the Old Gods in Maika, Ren, and Kippa’s home world. The other group are called the Defiled. The Old Gods eat what prey they can find in this realm. The Defiled prey on the Old Gods.

As Zinn played a key role in trapping the Monstra in this prison world, it is not at all happy to discover where it is. Nor are the Old Gods happy to see Zinn and his passenger. Maika for her part hates everyone and everything and is not inclined towards productive contributions.

Elsewhere, Ren and company discover there are non-Monstra living in this prison realm. Long ago it was used by Ren’s cat people as a prison for cats. The prisoners were not cleared out before the Old Gods were imprisoned and sealed away. In addition, the crew of cats who trapped the Old Gods were caught on the wrong side when the world was sealed.

Can the rescuers find what’s left of Maika, find a way home, and escape through it without falling prey to the Old Gods or to the Defiled? Is Maika worth rescuing? And what will be the cost of success?

~oOo~

Well, I am officially tapping out on this series. It started off bleak, with weapons of mass destruction, child slaves, and worse, and somehow got even bleaker. I feel like real life is more than fully capable of providing all the grim pessimism I can stand.

In this volume, for example, it turns out that the Old Gods were themselves victims, enslaved and transformed in unpleasant ways by beings even more powerful than the Old Gods. When the slaves fled, it was to a world that they could not survive in in their original forms. Survival required even more unpleasant changes. This is like that elephant story, except instead of elephants, it’s generational trauma all the way down.

It doesn’t help that I spent most of the volume wanting to hit Maika with an oar, or that Kippa has drifted from plucky sidekick to someone whose relentless optimism in the face of all evidence is somewhere between saccharine and alarming.

On top of which, while the art is as exemplary as ever, it turns out I am astonishingly bad at telling one highly-detailed, betentacled horror from another. Visually, I found this particular volume hard to follow.

It’s frustrating to give up on the series. Viewed objectively, it’s clear that the creators know exactly what they want to accomplish and how they want to reach their goals. I am sure there are readers who will enjoy the books. At this time, I am not one of them¹.

Inferno is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books). If Monstress Volume 8 is available from Apple, I could not find it.

1: I know, it’s weird that I don’t have even one footnote.