What writer Marjorie Liu tells about her career
Grimdark Magazine interviewed Marjorie Liu, the writer of a comic called Monstress, and she told them about how she's built her career. First:
Marjorie Liu is a New York Times best-selling author and comic book writer best known for her grimdark fantasy comic series, Monstress, which is set in a darkly beautiful alternate version of Asia circa early 1900s. The war-torn world of Monstress is matriarchal and infused with elements of steampunk and psychic magic. Like the best works of grimdark, Marjorie Liu’s story is rich and dark, balancing external conflict with an equally devastating internal turmoil. Liu won the 2017 Hugo Award for her first Monstress collection, and in 2018 she became the first woman to win the Eisner Award for Best Writer. We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Marjorie Liu regarding her approach to storytelling, her influences, and her projects beyond Monstress.Make it matriarchal if you must, but if it comes at the expense of patriarchy, as though that's inherently bad, that's a poor view to take. And darkness is a cliche that has to be distanced from. She does raise an interesting issue that long haunted mainstream comicdom, however:
[GdM] The graphic novel and comic book industry has long grappled with the fridging of female characters, a practice of harming or killing them to advance a male protagonist’s story. Monstress challenges this norm and presents us with richly layered and powerful female characters. How mindful are you of steering clear of such tropes in your storytelling, and what do you believe the industry needs to do to address this issue more broadly?I've long realized myself that the whole notion the problem will just go away isn't going to happen so easily. Even worse is when honest female characters are forcibly turned into villainesses for the sake of additional cheap sensationalism, and that's easily sicker. Just look what happened to Jean Loring in Identity Crisis, Scarlet Witch in Avengers: Disassembled and even Dr. Leslie Thompkins in Batman. But if Liu's going to emphasize darkness, that's still a mistake, and Simone, unfortunately, never proved herself capable of reversing what damage occurred to the mainstream's lady casts in the past 2 decades. Probably because her far-left politics were impeding upon her ability to demand the creative freedom to make repairs to what DC/Marvel did under DiDio/Quesada, though chances are even she wouldn't be granted said creative freedom. It is told here though, that Monstress at least has some positive qualities amidst the darkness:
[ML] I’ve been mindful of it for as long as I’ve worked in comics— thanks to Gail Simone—and I addressed it directly during my Black Widow run, specifically creating a scene both to confront and subvert the trope of fridging female characters. Is it still a problem? Absolutely. I see it in comics, film, tv, novels—women are killed left and right so that men can be freed of domesticity and have their adventure. As for what the industry needs to do to address this? There’s no easy fix. It’s part of a much larger problem around all the blind spots that people have regarding who matters to a story, whose stories are worth telling, and who deserves to exist in the imaginations of those who consume stories.
[GdM] While Monstress is often described as grimdark, it balances its dark themes with moments of hope and resilience. The protagonist, Maika Halfwolf, operates in morally gray areas, and Monstress is rife with dark themes, brutality, and corruption. How do you navigate this balance to keep the story captivating without becoming overwhelmingly bleak?Those may be redeeming qualities on the surface, but there's unfortunately fishy allusions to leftist politics here, more on which anon, but even so, whether she emphasizes hope and resilience in her stories, it's still no excuse for the cliche she follows. And then:
[ML] Monstress juggles a lot of ideas—from the darkness of war, racism, colonialism, family trauma, to the struggle to retain one’s humanity (or Arcanicity) in a world that demands far too many compromises—but despite the brutality and moral ambiguity of Monstress, I always write the story from a place of hope, a belief that spiritual wounds can mend, if not outright heal—and that people can change for the better. That is always at the forefront of my mind, which I center in the bonds between the characters—because I also believe that people can’t heal alone. And it’s from the relationships in Monstress that its introspection, humor, and tenderness emerge. But just as important to the balance of the narrative—more so, actually—is Sana Takeda’s brilliant, beautiful art, which is endlessly alive with the world’s pathos, love, compassion, and savagery—art that always invokes the larger mysteries of the world, its ancient truths, forgotten histories—woven into the backgrounds of each panel, or the clothing that characters wear, and the cities they walk through.
[GdM] How do you ensure that marginalized voices—such as people of color and queer individuals—are represented authentically in your storytelling?If she follows that kind of leftist playbook that insists LGBT ideology must be emphasized and represented at all costs, she's only undermining her GN in the long run. Wokeness does not a good story make. At the end, she has the audacity to note:
[ML] I write all my characters with as much genuineness, candor, sincerity, and truth as I can, as much as I bring to my own life, both public and private (and I’m very private). But I’ll say this much: I grew up as a mixed-race girl in the Pacific Northwest, in the 80’s, with a white mother and a Chinese father, spending almost every weekend with my Chinese grandparents at their laundry in Vancouver. I’ve always been surrounded by strong women, always sought out and loved strong women, always been embraced by strong women. And even though my experiences have been specific to me, and me alone, my career has been a twenty-year evolution of me bringing my authentic self and all my experiences to my characters. I don’t know if I always did it well—but I tried.
[GdM] What projects are you currently working on, and what can your fans look forward to in the near future?I'll give her some credit for not making a series for younger consumers dark, but if she takes a left-wing approach to the subjects, she's not improving the situation much at all. Building on personal experience can be a great way to develop a story, but injecting bad ideologies isn't. And if she can't produce a tale that's bright and fun front-and-center, she's still failed to rise above the cliche many creators are still sticking by in the mainstream.
[ML] I’m writing the tenth arc of Monstress—with no end in sight— and my other series with Sana Takeda, The Night Eaters, will release its third volume in April 2025, called Their Kingdom Come.
Wingborn, the second in my Wingbearer series for younger readers, came out this last October. Those books are not grimdark by any stretch of the imagination, but they do deal with the aftermath of an ancient war ,and the story is about hope and resilience—and how the strength found in friendships can change the world for the better.
Labels: golden calf of LGBT, golden calf of villainy, history, indie publishers, msm propaganda, violence
