Steve[n] Mollmann's blog: it only knows that it needs, but like so many of us, it does not know what
14 August 2026
Hugo Awards 2026: Ballots for Dramatic Presentation and Graphic Story
Finally, here come my rankings for the "visual" Hugo categories, namely, the two Dramatic Presentation categories, and then Best Graphic Story or Comic. (Is it still called that? I feel like they changed the name.) Unlike most people I know, I am very good at keeping up with reading and very bad at keeping up with tv. So while I finished my Hugo reading three or four days before the deadline, and even had some time for non-Hugo reading throughout, I had to watch two movies and four episodes of tv during my last week, and I finished my last film at midnight the day before votes were due at noon.
(Get yourself a wife who, when you sleep until 11am, wakes you up and checks that you remembered to submit your Hugo ballot on time!)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
[UNRANKED] The Wheel of Time 3x04: "The Road to the Spear", written by Rafe Lee Judkins, directed by Thomas Napper
Back in 2022, I watched a previous episode of this show when it was a finalist, and I accidentally watched the wrong one first, so I have been bored by this show twice already. I certainly wasn't about to subject myself to it a third time.
5. Murderbot 1x10: "The Perimeter", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Paul Weitz
Say what you will about The Murderbot Diaries, and I have, but the thing the books undoubtedly have going for them is the cynical narration, from a character who largely wants nothing to do with other people and their feelings. Strip that out, and you mostly get a bunch of schmaltz.
4. Murderbot 1x09: "All Systems Red", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Roseanne Liang
If an episode of a serialized show is a Hugo finalist, I typically don't watch the other episodes. You either wow me on your own, or you do not. I had a slight advantage coming into "All Systems Red," though, because I have read the first Murderbot book on which the first season is based. I thought this was decent but a bit broad; I was not very convinced by the actors playing all the humans. Some good jokes, but the occasionally sitcomesque tone was jarring.
3. Plur1bus 1x01: "We Is Us", written and directed by Vince Gilligan
This was a very well done first episode of a show with an interesting premise that I will probably never watch any more of. Works on its own in the sense that you can understand it just fine; doesn't work on its own in that it's all setting up interesting ideas, so what will be done with these interesting ideas is still to come. I thought the actress playing the main character was very good and there was some striking imagery. I wish a friend hadn't told me the premise at some point, because I think it would have been interesting to work it out while watching it. Much more involving than Murderbot.
2. Severance 2x10: "Cold Harbor", written by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Stiller
This feels less like a nomination for this specific episode of Severance and more a nomination for the second season as a whole... and indeed, two years ago, the first season as a whole was a finalist. I don't know why that didn't happen again this year. I enjoyed the second season a lot, if not quite as much as the first—I love the premise and the leads, and there's lots of great character work and good twists, but my feeling is that some of the decisions made by the antagonists would fall apart under scrutiny. (Why can they hire whole marching bands but not, like, pay one guy to watch where Mark S. goes?) Still, I enjoyed the season finale a lot, which delves into some of the ethical implications of severance in a really interesting way... but the season ends on a cliffhanger, just like the last one did, so the pleasures of resolution are continually deferred, and that's a thing I just hate about contemporary television. Thus, even though I feel like this was probably better than Doctor Who in most senses, I am penalizing it.
(Interesting to note that three of the five tv shows are Apple ones. Are they the only interesting streaming service left at this point?)
1. Doctor Who 2x05: "The Story & the Engine", written by Inua Ellams, directed by Makalla McPherson
To me, the best episode of the second season of the largely mediocre Disney Plus Doctor Who revival was "Lux," where the Doctor and Belinda battle an evil cartoon. But this one, set almost entirely within a Nigerian barber's shop, about the power of stories, was probably second best. Not perfect, but bubbling over with ideas, and something you couldn't have done with any other Doctor. Not Doctor Who at its greatest, but largely more interesting to me than the stuff I've ranked below it.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
6. Frankenstein, directed and written by Guillermo del Toro
Look, maybe this is unfair, but I have more opinions about Frankenstein than probably most anyone you know, and this adaptation has largely uninteresting takes on a novel that I find intensely interesting. I was not a fan of reducing it all to Freudian family melodrama, especially its very unearned ending. I liked the earlier parts of the film better; the introduction of (essentially) Victorian Elon Musk was an interesting idea (though it doesn't really go anywhere in the end), and the bit where jaunty exciting music played while Victor was cutting up corpses was probably the best part of the entire film. If it had all been that clever and that striking, I would have ranked it much higher. Too many fight scenes; the gruesome violence of those got old fast.
(I could be wrong, but I think this is the first Frankenstein movie I have ever seen! Seems weird that that could be true after forty years, but I am pretty sure it is.)
5. KPop Demon Hunters; directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans; written by Danya Jimenez, Hannah McMechan, Maggie Kang, and Chris Appelhans
This movie has been watched in my household many times since it came out last summer, and the music has been played many times more. I am very familiar with all the music videos. But I had actually never seen the movie all the way through until I was forced to when it was announced as a Hugo finalist. It was cute enough. Not deep, but I did really like "What It Sounds Like," which I think is beautiful stuff. If it had only all been that good!
4. Sinners, directed and written by Ryan Coogler
I thought this was a well done vampire story with good period details. Surprisingly funny, which I had not expected from the somewhat earnest discourse around it. ("Maybe she ain't white" made me rewind to make sure I heard it right!) Some great moments overall, just not totally my kind of thing, so not as interesting to me as Andor but certainly more interesting than Demon Hunters. Anyway, anything from this point up strikes me as a totally worthy winner.
3. Andor Season Two, created by Tony Gilroy
In 2023, two episodes of Andor season one were finalists in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), which didn't really work, as Andor is one of those shows where the whole season is one big story. Thankfully, this year, the entire season was a finalist in Long Form. I know everyone loves Andor, but having seen a whole season of it now, I find it a very frustrating show. I think it's very well shot, it has lots of great, interesting characters (bar, weirdly, Andor himself), and every now and again there's a beautiful moment that just hits it out of the park: Mon Mothma dancing at her daughter's funeral, Mon Mothma's speech, the Ghorman massacre, Kleya Marki's infiltration of the hospital. But this series is structured as four three-episode stories, and it was hard for me to shake the feeling that every single one of these could have been cut down to two episodes and the show wouldn't have lost a thing. Its cardinal sin is that too often it's just boring! So I am ranking it above KPop Demon Hunters (clearly it is doing interesting things) but below Superman (which was never boring).
2. Superman, directed and written by James Gunn
I wanted to see this last summer (it came out on my birthday, even!), but didn't mange to get around to it. Now, having finally seen it, I would say it's good but not great. Clearly conceived as an anti–Man of Steel (every time the film shows massive devastation, it carefully demonstrates both that the area has been evacuated and that Superman scoops up innocent bystanders), it leans into a lot of stuff I like about the character, and obviously was made by someone who—like me—thinks of the Donner movies and the comics of the 1980s and '90s as the "default" version of the DC universe. Given I recently reread all the JLI comics, I of course appreciated the Guy Gardner stuff, though I wish Metamorpho's personality was more like that iteration; as someone from Cincinnati, I of course appreciated the Hall of Justice. But I feel like it never quite grabbed me; I found the emotional conflict supposedly at the heart of the film kind of distant and unclear. But anyway, obviously more to my taste than Andor, but not as interesting to me as Mickey 17.
1. Mickey 17, directed and written by Bong Joon Ho
This movie is about a guy who can't die—or rather, can die as many times as his masters need him to do so—sent into space as expendable support on a colonization mission. The boss of the mission is a sort of combined Donald Trump/Elon Musk figure; the movie as a whole uses these ideas of immortality to think about who we consider expendable in lots of different concepts, but especially imperialism and capitalism. Lots of weird tonal shifts, which I always like, and good, if dark, jokes.
This is a webcomic that has been running since 2006; its third act concluded in 2025. (It's apparently not concluded yet, but the author's blog indicates Act 4 won't begin for a couple years.) Under the way the Hugo Awards handle serial narratives, that means the entire comic is eligible for the Hugo Awards as a unit. However, only the 2025 strips, which run sixty pages, are included in the Hugo voter packet. On the other hand, reading the comic since the beginning would mean reading over two thousand strips... and the art started out quite terrible! So I decided to read the comic from the beginning of Act 3, which started in 2020, and is a more manageable 469 pages, though I did skim some of the very early strips for context.
Anyway, that means it's not totally the comic's fault I was often lost, but there are a lot of characters with a lot of history to keep track of here. That I didn't mind too much... what I did mind is that the actual stakes of the act where amorphous and unclear. I don't know if that would have been better if I'd read the whole thing or what; there's apparently a big time gap between acts 2 and 3, and from context, I think a lot of what confused me was new to Act 3. The basic thing here is that 1) ghosts are real, 2) seeing them has something to do with a brain chip (but I wasn't sure what; I think the chip lets you see ghosts but I also think there were unchipped characters who could see ghosts?), 3) the government is going to give everyone brain chips in order to connect minds to create collective empathy (the two leads are the president and first lady), 4) but this means everyone will also know about ghosts, causing a national freakout, so 5) they must figure out how to get the one without the other, and 6) contend with the Catholic Church, which has its own opinions on what people know about the afterlife. What I didn't get is why the president and first lady were so keen to give everyone brain chips. If they couldn't figure out a way to give people collective empathy without giving everyone ghost knowledge, then why not... just hold off? All the characters acted like there was a deadline of when the "Middle Bridge Project" was due to launch, but surely the launch date was chosen by the characters? It was also very unclear to me what the Catholic Church was actually trying to do. Like, they wanted to be in on it in some way... but what were they actually trying to do and how was it bad? I never really knew.
So with the stakes so unclear, I was pretty much doomed to not enjoy this.
Back in the 2000s, I was a voracious consumer of webcomics, and this struck me as "quirky" in a way very much typical of the era. It would have fit very well among the kind of stuff I read back then! It reads like a weird throwback in the 2020s, however.
(The good thing that came out of me reading this is that it spurred me to get the same creators' graphic novel Sidequested out of the library for my seven-year-old, and they loved it so much they read it three times in one week and then asked me to read it too.)
5. The Power Fantasy, Volume One: The Superpowers, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Caspar Wijngaard
Kieron Gillen is one of those writers who gets on the ballot no matter what he writes at this point: since I started voting in the Hugo Awards, he has been a finalist every year since 2020 except for 2024. Gillen is a good writer... but surely not that good. The Power Fantasy is a case in point. I like to flippantly refer to him as "a poor man's Brian K. Vaughan," but Power Fantasy is actually a poor man's Alan Moore or Warren Ellis: in its depiction "what would it really be like for there to be people with superpowers on Earth?", it seems to do little we didn't see already in Miracleman or The Authority. (The super-fetus is very clearly Miracleman-derived!) It even seems to be derivative of Gillen's own work; the squabbling group of superpowered humans with complex histories is right out of The Wicked + The Divine. Of course, one of the most obnoxious things a critic can do is write something off by telling you it's like some other thing they've already read... but I found this offered little original within the medium or genre, and it definitely felt like one of those things that thinks it's being original.
But at least I (mostly) understood what was going on, so I ranked it above A Girl and Her Fed. Hopefully this series doesn't become a perennial finalist in this category like Gillen's Once & Future was.
4. The Space Cat, script by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford
As I said in my full review, I thought this was fun but slight. I don't know that it feels particularly award-worthy... but at least it wasn't derivative, so I ranked it above The Power Fantasy.
As noted in my full review linked above, I found this solid, well-done superhero comics... but nothing transcendent despite some of the hype it has received. Similarly, I thought Space Cat was a solid, well-done example of its genre. So they pretty much rank equally to me; I broke the tie because I'm just more into the genre that Absolute Wonder Woman belongs to than I am the genre that Space Cat belongs to.
2. A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel: Book One of Earthsea by Fred Fordham
In the oddball Hugo category that is "Best Graphic Story," one common type of finalist over the last five years is the graphic novel adaptation of an acclaimed prose work: see 2021's Parable of the Sower (which won) or 2023's Dune (though that's technically the comic of the movie of the book!) or 2024's The Three-Body Problem. I feel like the appearance of these kinds of finalists on the ballot say more about 1) the original prose work, and 2) the limited graphic novel reading of the Hugo electorate than anything else. That said, Fred Fordham's adaptation of the first Earthsea novel is clearly the best of these adaptations to ever appear on the ballot. Fordham's art is beautiful, and overall, this reads as a comic in a way that, say, Parable of the Sower did not, with the images doing the storytelling and very effective use of panelling in the storytelling. The magic still manages to feel magical, even though it's been moved out of Le Guin's beautiful prose into (arguably) the more straightforward visual medium. I did think some episodes became a little too abbreviated to follow, but overall this was very effective. (It's not totally fair to the book, though, but I do think my reading experience was diminished by the PDF provided in the voter packet rendering each two-page spread as a single page, which made the pages kind of small when read on my tablet.)
If you read my review linked above, you will see that I was highly skeptical about 1) a picture book being a finalist in this category, which has up to now entirely been comics (despite picture books technically qualifying), and 2) it being a picture book not created by people who normally do picture books (if you are a parent, you will know there is normally nothing worse). But this turned out not only to be pretty good, but to be the strongest finalist this year! I don't know that I would have thought so in a different year (I would have ranked it third in 2025 or 2024, for example), but this year the category was weak, and I think Invisible Parade clearly had the best storytelling of everything I read from a graphic standpoint: not in the quality of the images qua images, but in the way the images tell the story from page to page.
Overall Thoughts
I think that serialized streaming shows continue to be a point of difficulty for the Hugo Awards. Normally I'm loathe to propose adding categories, but I think Dramatic Presentation should be rejigged into three . I don't know what to call them, but duration-wise, they would be something like:
<60 mins.: for single episodes of tv shows (or other short things; like Dirty Computer from a few years ago); hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that actually do work on their own
60-180 mins.: for films
>180 mins.: for entire seasons of streaming television programs; hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that need their entireties to work, like Andor, Murderbot, and Severance
Right now, it's dumb that I have to judge "Cold Harbor" on its own when it clearly doesn't work on its own, but it's equally dumb that I'm comparing twelve hours of Andor to two hours of Mickey 17.
Overall, I thought both Dramatic Presentation categories just fine. I didn't love most of Short Form, but I appreciate that much of it is widely loved, so the category is presumably doing what it's meant to; as always, I am grateful to Long Form for introducing me to a couple interesting movies I probably never would have gotten around to otherwise (this year: Sinners and Mickey 17).
Best Graphic Story is the usual hodgepodge this year, but to be honest, it's probably been worse. A Girl and Her Fed was pretty bleh, but even that, I can appreciate the scale of the achievement. I suspect this category is still not really finding and rewarding the best of sf&f comics, but I also suspect it never will.
6. A Girl and Her Fed, scripts by K. B. Spangler, art by Ale Presser
4. The Space Cat, script by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford
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