If you’ve read Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s award-winning, New York Times-bestselling fantasy comic Monstress, you know two things. First, it’s an incredibly rich world as epic as Game of Thrones but even more imaginative, and second, it is gorgeous. Now Liu and Takeda have combined their immense talents again for a new comic trilogy called The Night Eaters, about an immigrant mother who forces her adult children to clean up the house across the street only to spend the night battling supernatural horrors—and io9 has your first look.
The Night Eaters will be a trilogy beginning, appropriately enough, with a volume titled She Eats the Night. Here’s the synopsis:
“Chinese American twins Milly and Billy are having a tough time. On top of the multiple failures in their personal and professional lives, they’re struggling to keep their restaurant afloat. Luckily, their parents, Ipo and Keon, are in town for their annual visit... When Ipo forces them to help her clean up the house next door—a hellish and run-down ruin that was the scene of a grisly murder—the twins are in for a nasty surprise. A night of terror, gore, and supernatural mayhem reveals that there is much more to Ipo and her children than meets the eye.”
“Early on in our second collaboration (after X-23), when Sana was designing Monstress, she’d send me gorgeous sketched pages of characters and landscapes that were haunting and evocative—scratchy lines and watercolor washes that seemed coiled to spring off the page,” Liu told io9. “A banquet for the eyes—deeply inspiring—and inspired. A completely different and wonderful style of art ended up in Monstress, but I’ve always been in love with Sana’s looser hand—her jazzier free-flowing ‘voice’—and when I was writing The Night Eaters, that’s all I could see in my head. I knew it had to be her who drew this book, or it wouldn’t live. And so I’m incredibly excited to share this exclusive preview with you. Here, we first meet Ipo, both in the past and in the present— and we lay the foundation for this story about an immigrant mother who, like many immigrant mothers, has secrets—and who really, really, dislikes the house across the street—not just because it’s an eyesore.”
“After discussions with Marjorie we came to the conclusion that for our new work we should go for a more simple and flat drawing style than Monstress,” Takeda added. “I also love the style of Monstress very much as a way of depiction. But to be quite honest, the style is a bit too gorgeous for me, that there is a lot of information in it. For this reason, I felt that the work was far away from my experiences in my real life. That’s why I’m working on this new work with a style that is closer to my format, and still accessible to all of you.
Those who like the gorgeous style of Monstress might be surprised by the simpler drawing style at first. However, Marjorie’s brilliant way of driving the story and depicting depth have become even more powerful and fantastic than ever before. Therefore, I am convinced that you will enjoy the work.” So, without further ado...
I would like to point out that Saneda’s “simpler drawing style”—her words, not mine—is still more beautiful than about 95 percent of comic artists working today. The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night will debut on October 11 through Abrams ComicArts
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