Author and comics creator Marjorie Liu is interviewed by Nerds of Color and The Beat about her latest comic, Monstress. “There are a couple ways to describe Monstress. The first way is as a dark steampunk epic fantasy about a girl who has a psychic connection to a monster. On another level, there were a lot of ideas I was wrestling with leading up to Monstress. I grew up listening to my grandparents talk about WWII. My grandfather was in the Chinese airforce; my grandmother was 14 years old, on the ground. She had to run from home and join this wave of child refugees that basically crossed China on foot to escape the invasion. And I grew up listening to their stories. In hindsight, I realized that really affected me. For a long time, I’ve always been thinking about what does it take to survive a cataclysmic war? What does it take to put yourself back together again after surviving something that horrific?” (The Gutter’s own Chris wrote about Marjorie Liu’s books here).