Of Monsters And Men

Graphic novelist Marjorie Liu talks to Zara Zhuang about creating comic book universes, fighting for representation, and finding her voice in the male-dominated arena.

- Zara Zhuang

COMIC BOOKS WEREN’T a prominent feature of Marjorie Liu’s childhood in Seattle, but being treated differently due to her biracial heritage was.

Though she considered herself “very Chinese on the inside” from growing up among her Chinese cousins and spending weekends in her grandparents’ laundromat — “the Chinese-American stereotype” — she was rejected membership in her high school’s Asian-American club for not looking Asian enough. “That really stung,” the Boston-based author says when she dropped in for the Singapore Writers Festival last November. “I began to retreat and became defiant.”

That episode serendipitously led her into the world of comic books. Having grown up enthralled by the X-Men cartoon series of the 1990s, Liu popped into her university town’s comic bookshop for a peek, picked up issues of X-Men, Wonder Woman, Batman and Deadpool, and never looked back. “I became obsessed,” Liu says. “Part of what drew me to these stories, particularly X-Men, was the theme of otherness and what it means to be fully human and for others to see you as such.”

Liu is now a celebrated writer and graphic novelist. Monstress, her epic fantasy set in a matriarchal Asia, was nominated in 2016 for Eisner Award for Best New Series. She has written the Dirk & Steele paranormal romance novels and the Hunter Kiss urban fantasy series, and worked on Marvel titles such as X-23, NYX, Astonishing X-Men, Dark Wolverine and Black Widow.