Here it is, my rankings for the recently-but-awkwardly-renamed category of Best Graphic Story or Comic.
Things I Nominated
I don't read very many current comics in their year of release; since I read most of my comics through collected editions, I'm always about a year behind, which makes it tricky to nominate things. In 2020, the comics I kept up with were Brian Michael Bendis and Ryan Sook's Legion of Super-Heroes, Saladin Ahmed and Minkyu Jung's The Magnificent Ms. Marvel, Brian Ruckley and Anna Malkova's Transformers, the anthology series Transformers: Galaxies, and the first Transformers / My Little Pony crossover, Friendship in Disguise! Only one of those could I claim unabashed enjoyment of, so I did nominate Friendship in Disguise!
It didn't make the ballot. I would be surprised to see it even make the longlist, as I don't think Transformers comics ever have, even when at their peak with More than Meets the Eye.
This series is one-half D&D, one-half Jumanji, and now, weirdly, one-half the Brontës' Tales of Angria!? Anyway it's possible something quite clever is happening here, but I never cared.
This is the second volume of a space opera trilogy; the library had the first volume (Walking the Path) on Hoopla, so I went ahead and read both together. I liked the basic ideas here, though it does feel heavily Saga-influenced with all the zipping around and quickly sketched worldbuilding. It's about a space Amazon delivery crew, a nun who finds out her religious order is corrupt, and what brings them together. Christian Ward's art is beautiful, but I found the writing and the art made it a struggle to track the space Amazon characters as individuals, much to the detriment of the story. There are some big things that don't seem developed enough, while on the other hand, some small things drag out for a long time. I really wanted to like this, as I like both creators, and madcap-underdog-space-adventures is basically my favorite genre, but I never got into it.
This is a comics adaptation of Parable of the Sower, the first of Octavia Butler's two "Earthseed" novels; I own the novel but have not yet got around to reading it. Coming to the adaptation without having actually read the book, I found it somewhat stilted. There is a lot of narration (pulled, I assume, from the novel's prose), and I didn't feel the art carried the story as much as it might have. The art looks good, and is tonally appropriate, but there are a lot of characters that I couldn't always keep straight. It seemed interesting, but never really grabbed me.
On the other hand, volume five of Monstress was fine. Not great, but fine, and one of the better installments of the series. I do like the ongoing story of Kippa, even if much of the rest of the set-up leaves me cold, so I am ranking it higher than Parable.
This collects the first six issues of a new series from eternal Hugo favorite Kieron Gillen. The premise is good fun: sure you can bring King Arthur back to life... but wouldn't that make him a zombie? There's also the potential to say some interesting stuff about British national identity, and occasionally the book does. Mostly, though, it's a fast-paced action story with lots of twists and turns, and fun characters, supported by strong art from Dan Mora. Enjoyable, and I would read more of this, but I felt there was room for more thematic depth.
I'm not sure I've ever read a Seanan McGuire Hugo finalist that I've unreservedly liked, but this collection of comics about Ghost-Spider (the hero formerly known as Spider-Gwen) came the closest. This was pretty delightful superhero stuff: Gwen Stacy is trying to be in a band and fight crime in her own universe of Earth-65 while also trying to attend college and make a friendship with an older version of Peter Parker on Earth-616. It's pretty typical "young superhero" tropes with just enough novelty to make it enjoyable; in the Marvel multiverse, Deans of Admission just shrug off when new students are transfers from other timelines! I've been a fan of Takeshi Miyazawa ever since Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, and he is as dependable here as always, a perfect match for what McGuire is doing on writing. Overall a cute package that made me want to go back and read all the Spider-Gwen comics.
Ranking is tricky because this is definitely less ambitious than Monstress or Parable of the Sower. It is, on the other hand, does a better job of being what it wants to be, and what it wants to be is more to my taste. My main reservation is that the story basically just stops; this collects the first five issues of a ten-issue series. I guess we will have to wait to see the nominating data to understand why, but I am a bit baffled as to why the nominators didn't just nominate the whole ten-issue series as a single work; as it ran from Oct. 2019 to Oct. 2020, it would have been eligible as a single unit, and I probably would have liked it unreservedly (assuming McGuire sticks the landing).
Overall Thoughts
I kind of feel like I should deploy No Award? But that seems churlish; I can see why someone else would like all of the items on this list, even when I didn't particularly enjoy them myself. Some years there have been some great sf&f comics up for the Hugo Award, that I was glad to have read, but that mostly was not the case this year.
Obviously Monstress will win. Maybe things will finally be shaken up in the 2023 awards, when Saga will finally be eligible again.
No comments:
Post a Comment