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 Gizmodo 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 Gizmodo. “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.” 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 per cent of comic artists working today. The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night will debut on October 11 through Abrams ComicArts.
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