1 Draft for “Monsters, Mutants, and Mongrels: The Mixed-Race Hero in Monstress.” Mixed Race Superheroes. Eds. Eric Berlatsky and Sika Dagbovie-Mullins. Rutgers University Press, 2020. Monsters, Mutants, and Mongrels: The Mixed-Race Hero in Monstress 1 Chris Koenig-Woodyard Introduction In the comic series Monstress (2015-), writer Marjorie Liu and illustrator Sana Takeda realize Jennifer K. Stuller’s call to aesthetic arms in Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors that “there is no one way to be heroic”: What we need are heroes and heroisms: Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, Aboriginal, Middle Eastern, gay, straight, male, female, transgender, fat, skinny, somewhere-in-the-middle, athletic, disabled, with the ability to fly, run faster than a speeding bullet, write, parent, kick-ass, grow, and make the world we live in a better place. (162) Monstress portrays the reluctant heroism of its female protagonist, Maika Halfwolf, as she fends off supernatural and political factions that persecute and tyrannize her and her kind, the mixed race “Arcanics.” It is a challenging narrative to summarise succinctly because Liu and Takeda’s combinatory and maximalist style amalgamates numerous genres and aesthetic modes (alongside references to historical, political, and cultural elements and events, and allusions to literature and comics). The text’s governing generic modes of alternative history, epic, fantasy, and the anti-bildungsroman aptly suit Liu and Takeda’s depiction of Maika’s multi-raciality as an Arcanic. They construct a generically hybridic comic that portrays a post-World War II superheroine, embracing Lillian S. Robinson’s assertion in Wonder Woman: Feminisms and Superheroes that “the female superhero originates in an act of criticism” by challenging “the masculinist world of superhero adventures” (7). For Liu, who identifies as “mixed race” (as Asian American, with a Taiwanese father and white mother of French, Irish, and Scottish descent) such a critique is personal and grows out of her work writing for Marvel: For years I was the only woman on the X-Men panel at San Diego Comic Con or the only woman at the X-Men retreat. And for years I was the only woman of color, the only person of color, at these gatherings. I did fine, but that’s not the point. Why didn’t that ever strike anyone as odd or problematic? Well, here’s the deal: being a woman or person of color in a space dominated by white men is like wearing a Klingon cloaking shield: as long as you don’t need to open fire, no one is going to notice whether you’re there or not. No one at these Marvel retreats noticed the absence 1 Ideas in this essay were first presented at the 2017 Canadian Society for the Study of Comics, where I organised two panels on “Monster Studies.” My thanks to the panelists and conference-goers for lively conversations about all things monstrous. I am grateful to Eric Berlatsky, Sika Dagbovie-Mullins, Daniela Janes, and Wendy Knepper for feedback on drafts of this essay.