Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening

Some amazingly gorgeous artwork here, but what the hell was going on?

That question applies from the most literal (frequently throughout, I could tell that an action scene was being depicted, but not what was happening, where people were in relation to each other, who was hitting whom with what, or what the results were)

. . . to the individual (who are these people? what is their relationship with each other? who is that in that mask? who is that in that other mask? is this person literally transforming into a monster or is this a metaphorical depiction of their insanity? Both maybe? Is Tuya her sister? lover? friend? How are all these witches and nuns interrelated? Are there witch-nuns? Wait, now there's a shadow council or something, literally descending from the sky like a mechanical deity in a Greek play?”)

. . . to the meta (do they intend to start us in medias res and fill in information as we go, and they're just really bad at it? Did I literally miss some kind of prequel? Oh, great, here's an clunky infodump accompanied by drawings of cats - that doesn't make it any less yawn-inducing.)

It basically seems like they wanted to reveal an incredibly complex universe and an intricately related web of characters spanning generations, and tried to do it in one comic book instead of the trilogy of novels that might have covered the needed information.