Blood

Somehow this feels totally different from the first volume, what with the pirates and the very specific goals, but it's still fantastic. Love to find out more about the old gods, the politics of the world, and the borderline excessive variety in arcanics. The worldbuilding just layers more and more goodies on with each volume.

This time with more pirates. What if Lovecraft rewrote the rime of the ancient mariner and wasn't a massive racist? This is a solid second volume and starts to answer some of the questions set out in the first.

I find it hard to review graphic novels. The drawing in this one is just so captivating, that I sometimes loose track of the story, which remains quite confusing...

In this one the monster is ever more present. And Kippa is still my favorite. But I have this feeling that thanks to Kippa's unwavering support Maika will prevail... but not all foxes are as nice as Kippa.

Cat necromancers > all :) If nothing else, I am reading this for the cats.

And we get to find out who Tuya is. In a most beautiful drawing, too.

Monstress: The Blood is the second volume of these beautiful comics by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. Maika joins a pirate crew to beg passage to the Island of Bones, with the hopes of learning more about her mother. Obviously, lot's of people still want Maika dead or captured and there's new beasts in the deep. This was more of a straightforward story and wasn't quite as strong as the first but I'm still looking forward to the third instalment later this year.

Volume 1 served as a good introduction to the protagonist Maika Halfwolf and the dizzyingly fantastical world she inhabits; now, Volume 2 goes into more detail on her origins and the origins of the thing inhabiting her body. Needless to say, there are some twists and surprises, and many of them are delightfully awful. If there's anything bad to say about this second volume, it's that it feels noticeably shorter than the first one. I want more!

One of the things I most enjoy about Monstress so far is Maika herself, and getting to know more about her backstory and see her slowly come to terms with the thing haunting her in Volume 2 is really engaging. This is definitely a more focused volume, all of it structured around an expedition to a single cursed island in search for answers - and boy, are there ever answers. The art continues to be eye-catching and emotive and haunting and occasionally gruesome in the best way, and the interludes between chapters from the cat professor Tam Tam remain to expand on the world and add a tiny bit of lightness to an otherwise richly dark tale.

This is the first comic book I've really committed to, and I'm definitely hooked. Eagerly looking forward to what Liu and Takeda will deliver next!