Another Image Update: Mythic, Monstress, Luminae.

Mythic is just super fun. An ordinary guy discovers that there is a super secret agency responsible for policing and cleaning up magical disturbances. There's an immortal seer named Cassandra, a Native American Shaman who's twin brother is a hell beast, a fertility goddess, and that's just for starters. The whole lot is led by a gigantic baby who is. you know, life itself. They're generally pretty competent and good at sorting out all the problems. I mean, Nate's first job on the team is helping a couple of elemental beings through some couples counselling so that it will stop a drought. Because, of course it does.  The elementals get it on, it rains, they all have drinks.

The big problem is that all these mythic being, mythic wars, mythic problems are all just so irrational. And there is a force at work that is willing to go to war, to mix magic and machines in order to take out all the magical beings. They even take all the mythical figures prophesied to end the world in Ragnarok and turn them into magic/ machine hybrids. As you do.

Volume one is issue 1-8. I'm hoping that there will be more. It's clever, gory, funny, and a 7/10 for me. 

Now, Monstress was actually a bit of a mistake. I thought that all of the issues for the first TPB has been released and I WAS WRONG! Enter tears and trauma. 

However, It's brilliant. It gets described as steampunk kaiju, which is pretty apt. It's so much more though. It has a fantastically feminist dealio going on, It's kind of an alterno history with a matriarchal as well as a magical twist. The idea is that The Ancients are immortal, all powerful, god-like beings. Whilst living amongst the humans, they, umm, made babies with said humans. Thus was born the Arcanic's, who are monstrous, and beautiful, and powerful, and scary,  sometimes winged, clawed, furred, and sometimes human-looking. Which the humans find scarier. Of course there was a huge war.

                                      

Then, of course, there arose a religious order of scary freaking nuns with psychic powers known as the Cumaea. SCARY NUNS! SCARY PSYCHIC NUNS. Who capture Arcanics and torture and experiment on them for their intrinsic magic, which they distil as "lilium" and use to improve their own powers. Gross. I mean they, and their brutal, all-female, soldiers seem to think that they're doing their duty to save the humans from the evil Arcanics, but......UGH.

Enter crippled, mysterious, teenage Arcanic, Maiko, who has herself sold to the evil Cumaea in order to discover the truth about herself, her mother, and about the strange demonic power living inside her.

Extra feminist points for the demons, ghost demons, living demons, and the one living inside Maiko having that monstrous-feminine, vagina dentata (I love you Barbara Creed, and one day I will sneak into your film studies lectures, 'kay)  bodily horror of the power of female genitalia.

(Extra points also for the multiple-tailed, talking cats who consider themselves the children of the gods.)

Tentative 7,5/10. TBD once I read the final part of the story arc (grumble, grumble...)

Last up, Luminae. I wanted to love it. A group of mystical female warriors? Check. A strange, female, messiah who must be protected at all costs? Check. An evil darkness infiltrating and hunting them throughout the lands? Check,

Incredible beautiful and detailed art work that you could just stare at? Check. Coherent storyline? Depth of character? Logical worldbuilding?

Not really. 4/10. Which makes me feel like a bitch "sigh"

Two too perfect to bother really reviewing

There a list that I have in my head of all the books I'll be buying the nieces. And the nephews, we don't gender bias in my family. Watching age two and age almost four run around quoting The Paper Bag Princess, and  yelling "hey dragon" at each other makes my pretentious, academic, feminist, intellectual shiver in delight.

Little sister/ Fellow Aunt and I have this thing about "curating your own media", and choosing the texts for yourself that make you feel good, rather than misanthropic. I read Twilight to see what the fuss was about. I read "some" of 50 Shades for the same reason, but couldn't do it (it's not just the content. It's the terrible writing). I wouldn't do up again. Life is too short to read bad books. Life is also too short to not eat the dessert, and not drink the wine.

So when I find books, Graphic or not, that make me genuinely excited to share with the nibblets, I get so happy. So, here are two of them.

Lumberjanes is what happens when you send a whole bunch of girls off to summer camp, and you DON'T make the beautiful and blonde, or make it all about boys and bullying. Or finding your heretofore unknown identical twin sister. If you take a bunch of girls and make them clever, and brave, and silly, and scared, and cranky, and chubby, and aesthetically and sexually diverse, and full of interesting, layered, REAL qualities. You make them real friends, full of loyalty AND disagreements, love AND impatience. And then you let them have all the adventures. Did you get lost in the forest after dark and find some kind of mystical weirdness? You'll get through it together. Have the boys from the all male camp across the lake been possessed by something kind of evil and/ or gross? You can do it together. Three eyes shape-shifting bears? Magical foxes? They deal with it like they deal with canoeing, and crafts, and transgender campers. Like hard-core lady-types, Like Lumberjanes.

This is a camp for hard-core lady-types, complete with instruction manuals (like, literal pages included in the comic) and I freaking LOVE it. Vol 1 and 2,as well as author Noelle Stevenson's Nimona are 10/10's from me. Hello, freaking brilliant gender politics, feminist tropes, and plain old fun. The fact that they swear in punk rock goddesses (What the Joan Jett!) and believe in "friendship to the max" just makes me love them more. Even without added dinosaurs.

Volume three, now in my hot little hands, will be part of our family history and heirlooms. 

Next, Princeless!!!!!!!!

Imagine a kick-ass, clever, fabulous, mixed race Princess whose family shoves her into a dragon guarded tower so that she can be rescued by some stupid, ridiculous, shiny-armoured prince that she'll be forced to marry. Yeah, NO. This Princess is going to make friends with her (female) dragon, rescue herself, and then set off to rescue all of her elder sisters. Hells, Yeah! 

Princeless questions ALL of the fantasy tropes. She goes off to find armour, and finds a half-dwarf best friend (maybe more) Bedelia, who has been stuck under her fathers thumb in his shop pretending to be the dutiful daughter who never wanted anything else. Pfft.

They are both freed from who society wants girls of their sex and rank to be. And they just want to help other girls escape. And not just girls. Princess Adrienne's twin brother, Devon, the only male in the entire family, is as trapped by his circumstances as his sisters. His father wants him to be manly, princely, kingly, and warriorly. And he's not. 

Add in the kind of fuck-ups that 16 year olds get into, the kind of mistakes that people make regarding societies equation of beauty and goodness, werewolf maiden-warriors, pirate princesses, and its a whole lotta fun. Even Adrienne's parents get into the action. The Father who thinks he knows best is going to get his preconceived notions shattered, and mother? Well, I have a strange feeling about the super, secret, black knight who was the Kings mysterious ally way back when. 

10/10. Read it. Buy it. Love it.