Marjorie Liu's monsters: The Night Eaters author discusses the year's spookiest new horror comic

It's autumn, so monsters are in the air. As if the annual arrival of Halloween weren't enough to conjure up creepy creatures, the changing seasons and shortening days just seem to beckon scary visions out of the twilight.

But what are monsters, exactly? If anyone knows a good answer to that wide-ranging question, it's writer Marjorie Liu. For the past six years, Liu has been writing one of the most acclaimed comic books on stands: Monstress, an epic steampunk fantasy-horror saga about a young woman with a hungry demon inside of her. Illustrated by Sana Takeda, whose painterly illustrations bring the story's tentacled gods and intelligent human/animal hybrids to life, Monstress has won five Eisner Awards and kept a high place on best-of lists (including EW's). This year, the series published its 41st issue and seventh collected volume.

The end is in sight (and Liu says she knows exactly what the last page will be) but there's still a ways to go. Even so, Liu and Takeda (who have been working together since even before Monstress, on comics like Marvel's X-23) decided to expand their fruitful collaboration even further, and work on other projects during their downtime from Monstress.

Thus, The Night Eaters was born. As EW revealed earlier this year, the latest Liu/Takeda team-up is a planned trilogy of graphic novels about Chinese-American twins who realize there's a lot more to their parents than they thought. The first installment, subtitled She Eats the Night, was released earlier this month, and has quickly become the most acclaimed new horror comic of spooky season.

"How wonderful it is to see Marjorie's outstanding gift again and share it with all readers," Takeda tells EW. "I'm deeply grateful to everyone who is involved in this lovely project."

So with The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night now in stores alongside the latest volume of Monstress, EW caught up with Liu to discuss her incredible work on both comics — and also ask her about what monsters are. Because in these stories, monsters are terrifying (especially the way Takeda draws them), but they are also friends and family members who can be worthy of love.

"We're trying to integrate and come to terms with these wounds that are inside of us. And these wounds can feel like little monsters," Liu says. "The trauma can feel monstrous because it haunts us. We are haunted by these things, we are haunted by ghosts, and we are haunted by ghosts that aren't even ours. We're haunted by the things that our parents pass down to us, by the things that their parents passed down to them."

Check out an edited version of our conversation with Liu below.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: At what point did you and Sana decide to embark on another multi-part project story even while you're still working on Monstress?

MARJORIE LIU: Oh boy. I would say back around 2019, we broached the subject. In case it's not clear, we like the work, and we're not afraid of work. We're creatively restless. So around 2019, Sana said, "Let's still do Monstress, but let's maybe think about doing something else too at the same time." And I was like, "Okay." And so, I was thinking about it, but I have to tell you that this book was completely unplanned.

It was at the height of the pandemic in 2020. I was at home, it was lockdown. I was watching a lot of horror movies, I was gardening, I was just trying to stay busy and do my thing. One day, I had this vision in my head of what it would be like if my aunts and my grandmothers encountered a ghost, if they ended up in a haunted house. And it was really hilarious to me because the ghost would have no chance. That ghost would be done if the women in my family charged in. It just would be no contest. And so, that really made me laugh and I needed to laugh.

So I just sat down and started writing. I didn't really have a plan. This happens to me occasionally over the course of my career where I'll just sit down and start working. Usually, there are middle-of-the-book doldrums where I end up tapping out. My computer is a graveyard of unfinished novel scripts. But this time, that didn't happen. The inspiration stayed strong, and the characters came to me. The story came to me, that initial question of what would happen if the women in my family encountered a ghost. I just kept going, and suddenly there was this book, there was this family that I absolutely fell in love with: Ipo, Keon, Milly, and Billy. I had the world, and it was there. And so, I took a little bit, I revised it, and then I tapped on Sana's window and I said, "Hey, remember that conversation that you had couple years ago? You still game?"

How did you get from that kernel of an idea of moms and aunts fighting ghosts to this intergenerational story? Speaking of horror movies, I just saw this new one Barbarian.

Everyone says it's really good.

It is really good! I don't want to tell you anything else, because it's good to go in knowing nothing, except just to say that like most horror movies, it's about young people in their 20s or 30s. Sometimes it seems like horror almost needs young, inexperienced people or whatever to work because people who are older or know a little bit more about the world would maybe be hardier and stronger. Was that the appeal of a multi-generational horror story that flips around in time?

So first of all, if I had to sum up Night Eaters in a nutshell, it would be a Chinese immigrant mom decides that she has to teach her adult children a lesson inside of a haunted house.

As I started working, that's what it began to narrow down to for me. That's how I started to think of it because thinking about the women in my family was like this army of women. It was too big. So I had to narrow it down. But the other thing about writing about families is that families are natural sites of horror.

In that sense, it's very easy to tell a horror story within the confines of the family. And I think it just felt natural to narrow it down, bring it in, and make the focus this mother. This mother who is this immigrant, and for reasons that she thought were good, she raised her children in a particular way and she wanted them to have an easier life. She didn't want them to go through what she had gone through, and then they reach adulthood. They're in their 20s and she looks at them and she's just like, "All right, you know what? That might have been a mistake. I regret this choice." The problem is it's a little late.

I'm such a huge Monstress fan. With The Night Eaters, I was really entertained both by the ways that is very different from Monstress, and then also some thematic overlap, particularly when it comes to this family stuff. How would you describe the way these stories take monsters and demons and make them familiar, familial, worthy of love? Something that I find really compelling in both The Night Eaters and Monstress is this idea that your mom might be a demon and that's okay.

How do I put this? Life is nothing but one long exorcism, basically. And by that, I mean, we come into this world as ourselves, and then everything gets heaped on us. There's intergenerational trauma, there's personal trauma, there's anxiety, there's fear, there's all of that. I don't mean literal demonic exorcisms, but I just mean that as we go through life, we're always trying to expel these things. We're always trying to heal, if we can. If we're even aware of it.

We're trying to integrate and come to terms with these wounds that are inside of us. And these wounds can feel like little monsters. The trauma can feel monstrous because it haunts us. We are haunted by these things, we are haunted by ghosts, and we are haunted by ghosts that aren't even ours. We're haunted by the things that our parents pass down to us by the things that their parents passed down to them. And so when I'm writing, when I'm thinking about Monstress, when I'm thinking about The Night Eaters, I'm thinking about these ghosts. I'm thinking about these legacies that sometimes getting imposed upon us in ways that we never asked for, but that we have to wrestle with and try not to pass down to the next generation. Sometimes we're successful, sometimes we're not. Because it's very difficult to see these things.

Part of the healing, what's helped me anyway, is having compassion for oneself and having compassion for those ghosts, having compassion for those wounds and saying, "All right, you know what? This is what I've got to deal with, and there's no reason to hate myself for it. There's no reason to be angry at myself. This is just what it is." And so, when I'm working on Monstress, I'm thinking about ghosts and thinking about monsters, but I'm also thinking about... Well, what is the path to healing? How does one reintegrate? How does one heal? How does one become your full self?

That certainly feels like a big part of Maika's story in Monstress, coming to understand these different parts of herself. But in addition to the internal aspect, is there also an external aspect to your use of monsters as an engagement with social relations and the ways that certain types of people are sometimes demonized by others?

Absolutely. Colonialism and racism is a deep part of Monstress. How immigrants deal with their children in a new world is another aspect of The Night Eaters, because my dad's an immigrant, half my family are immigrants. I'm touching on things that I observed and experienced when I was growing up. And the supernatural is just a way to deal with it, and estrange myself from it in a way that allows me as the writer to make contact with some of these ideas. I'm still the writer that needs fantasy to tell. In the same way that some readers need fantasy to read and experience something like a difficult story. They need that estrangement. I, as a writer, still need that estrangement. Maybe one day I won't, maybe one day I'll be able to tell a story that doesn't require the fantastic, but I'm not there yet.

I mean, The Night Eaters feels close.

I'm getting there, I'm getting there. The other thing that I wanted to touch on, which is similar to Monstress, is that here too we have another really pivotal and important mother-daughter relationship.

I think particularly with women, I feel like we're always talking about daddy issues, but we never talk about mommy issues. We never really talk about how pivotal the relationship is between mother and daughter, and how a woman's relationship with her mother influences everything from her self-esteem to how she raises her children, to how she makes friends, to how she dates. That relationship is so pivotal and important. And I find myself coming back to it, particularly in The Night Eaters.

When you and Sana were working up the character designs for The Night Eaters, what did you want to convey about them in their visual presentation?

Well, it's interesting because I usually let Sana do her own thing. I will give personalities. And then I'm like, "Yo, here's the personality, here's the vibe." And then she translates that. And so, Keon is very relaxed and chill. He's so much fun to write. He's just relaxed and chill, but he's got layers. The man has some hidden depth, but he doesn't stress life. And I was like, "Yo, just make him look like a handsome chill dude."

Ipo was just the opposite. She's giving you the thousand-yard stare. Like, no f---s to give. And I was like, "Keep her look very simple." It should look like she wears polyester. She doesn't care about her clothes. And the kids, I was like, "They're hip as s---, they're young and they're fun."

You were saying The Night Eaters really came to you in this surge of creative inspiration. At what point did you figure out that it was a trilogy?

At the very end. The second book is written. And you know what? What's interesting about the second book, the second book was not as easy to write as the first one, alas. You know how it is. You write one thing, it just blows out of you. And you're like, "It's magic." And the next one was not magic, but I got there. It's the question of, what happens when you experience a life-changing event, and you don't want to change? You're like, "You know what? My life was fine." That was the question I had going into the second book, the question that I had to answer. And the third book has its own question.

But as far as structure goes, as far as planning, I'm that person who will ask questions of myself. I pose questions and I have ideas, I have themes. And then I start to think about, "Well, how do I answer them? How do I address these ideas? What's the best way to express the characters and the conflict and the world around these questions, and around these ideas that I'm wrestling with?" I did that in The Night Eaters. I do that in Monstress. I do that in basically all my work.

Do you have an end point in mind for Monstress?

Oh yeah, I've already written it. I've already written the final scene. I just don't know how long it's going to take to get there.

I definitely felt in this most recent arc that we are approaching some climax…

Yeah. It's headed in that direction. I always love talking about structure. Both the pain and the pleasure of writing a comic is that you don't have unlimited space. I have so many ideas in Monstress, there are so many different threads and so many characters that I want to write about in this world. But I keep having to bring it back in. I had to make that conscious decision early on in the series because it would've been too easy for me to just keep branching and branching and branching. But the story is about Maika. Monstress is Maika's story. The Night Eaters is Ipo's story. And so I have to consciously keep bringing it back to them.

Something that pops into my head sometimes is that you were the first woman to win the Best Writer award at the Eisners...in 2018. Sana won a bunch of awards that year too, so it was a great year for Monstress. But every time I remember that, I just think it's so weird. What was that like for you?

What I will say is that I didn't know that I was the first woman until the next day. I was at breakfast and people started texting me. I was like, "Well, that can't be." So then I just poked around a little, and I saw that I was the first woman in the 30-year history, and I cried.

First of all, it was wonderful. It was such an honor to win the Eisner. But it was strange to be the first. It was strangely bittersweet because I felt like I shouldn't have been the first, I felt like there should have been others. It's a delicate thing to say because on one hand, I'm not ungrateful. I'm incredibly grateful for the honor. But also I'm like, "Wow, really? After 30 years?"

I mean, you live the best life you can, and you do the best work you can. And sometimes that takes you to really interesting places, sometimes it doesn't. I've been at this now for almost 20 years. I was 24 years old when I sold my first book, and I'm 44. And I started at the bottom. As a midlist writer, I was writing paranormal romance and I adored being a romance writer. And then I somehow found my way into comics. And then, I've just been trucking along for almost 20 years. And some people do that for twice that long, and never get as lucky as I've gotten. And so, I'm very, very grateful.

Since you were first coming up with The Night Eaters in the pandemic doldrums, what are you most excited about people to see now that it's out in the world?

I'm actually very excited for people to see Sana's art in this book. Because the thing about working with Sana is that it's hard to describe just what a tremendous talent she is. I mean, I think people see it, but to work with her, it's like I give her an idea and then she's like, "Hey, how's this?" And it's like the coolest thing. She's a genius. You look at the expanse of her career starting with Captain Marvel and X-23, then she moves to Monstress, a completely different style. Then she starts working on Night Eaters, another radically different style. I don't know how she does it, but she is someone who can change her style to fit the story, and she does.

She's not content to just keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. She will read a script and she'll say, "You know what? This script needs this. I am not going to redo Monstress. I'm going to do something completely new, because it's a completely different story."

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