Hugo Awards 2026: The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio

The Hugo category "Best Graphic Story" is typically based around comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels, but the category parameters are actually written more expansively than that. I think the only finalist to not be a comic, however, was the xkcd installment "Time," and that's kind of arguable.

The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio

Published: 2025
Acquired: April 2026
Read: July 2026

One of this year's finalists, though, is clearly not a comic: The Invisible Parade is a children's picture book. I was a bit skeptical about this when I saw it, especially when I saw that the book was illustrated by John Picacio and written by Leigh Bardugo. Now don't get me wrong, Picacio is a great illustrator, but he's won a Hugo three times and been a finalist thirteen times beyond that, usually in Best Professional Illustrator, for his covers. Anyone who follows the Best Graphic Story category will know that a lot of its finalists are usually mediocre comics by people who have been finalists in the non-comics Hugo categories, like Seanan McGuire and Nnedi Okorafor. And while Leigh Bardugo has never been a Hugo finalist before, she is a first-time children's book author, much better known for her romantasy novels. Reading children's books aloud to my kids for the last eight years has definitely made me into a children's book snob; I very much agree with Mac Barnett that "more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud," and a big reason for this is the intrusion of people of who are not normally children's books authors. Why The Invisible Parade and not, say, Jessie Sima's latest? (I would rank Not Quite Narwhal above at least a couple of the 2018 finalists.)

I normally don't buy finalists outside of the Best Novel category unless they're by an author I really care about... but Leigh Bardugo is an author my wife really cares about (her favorite romantasy writer) and she asked me to buy this, so I did.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I went into The Invisible Parade with a fair bit of skepticism... but I actually ended up enjoying it quite a bit. The book is about a young girl on the Day of the Dead, who is having trouble getting into the celebrations because she's still upset over the recent death of her grandfather. When she enters the cemetery, she gets separated from her family and encounters the four horsemen. The actual sentence-level writing is so-so, I found it stronger when reading it in my head than when I read it aloud to my kids; I think you can tell Bardugo isn't a natural at fitting into this kind of confined space, but the story itself is pretty good, though I found one aspect of the "moral" kind of weird.

However, the book really shines in the art. Obviously Picacio is a great book cover illustrator... but that doesn't necessarily make him a great graphic story illustrator, but thankfully he is. Good sense of how to pace images, especially good page-turn reveals, which I think are essential to picture book illustrating; sometimes here you turn a page and what you see is just glorious. The text is fine, but it's really the images that tell the story. I don't know if this will be a favorite of my kids (aged five and seven), though they did find it interesting, but I thought it was very well put together from a visual standpoint.