A Drop of Corruption is the sequel to last year's winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, The Tainted Cup, a novel that I enjoyed enough that I would have picked up the sequel even if it had not been a Hugo finalist. It's the second in a series of fantasy mysteries about speculative detective Ana and Din, who investigate crimes on the behalf of an imperial "Iudex." Massive creatures called leviathans affect their world; the empire defends people against them, but also extracts from them biological compounds that can be grafted onto humans to enhance them in various ways. Din, for example, has perfect recall, which he uses to aid Ana in her investigations.
The pleasure of these books is twofold. First, Ana and Din themselves are strong, fun characters. Ana is clearly derived from Sherlock Holmes, but distinct enough to be tremendous fun regardless; Din isn't really a Watson substitute, though, rather a young man with his own strong sense of justice and personal demons. I enjoyed this book's one-off third investigator, Malo, a lot as well, and I hope a place is indeed found for her in future books. The other pleasure is the richly evocative world, one of empires and grotesque experiments, of people who have been modified to be as bizarre as the world they inhabit. I really enjoy seeing all this, and as in more naturalistic settings, the detective's ability to move across the classes of society means we get to see a lot of different aspects of thi world, both inside and outside the empire.
Bennett seems to be up to some interesting stuff with the complexities of empire here, whose mental and cultural effects are paralleled to the biological modifications its subjects undergo; when Din thinks, "We built this... We have built this unnatural thing, and it has built us in turn" (342), supposedly he is thinking of the Shroud,* the empire's living research facility for grafts. But later, when he sees the Shroud in all its glory, he calls it "a construction vast enough to split any wave and seek any shore" (454). Surely that's what empire itself is—and thus surely also his earlier line is really about how empire shapes people, shapes our thinking and our abilities. It's a good example of how sf can take something metaphorical and make it literal; over in Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant novels, we see how empire reshapes the thinking of the main character to make her into its tool, here the empire's savants have had their thinking quite literally altered.
It's weird, then, that Bennett seems to think this book is up to something totally different! As I usually do, I read the author's note at the end sometime during the book (this is not always a good idea; it definitely spoiled something when I did it with What Stalks the Deep); there, Bennett discusses how the novel was meant as a critique of autocracy: "perhaps our fascination with kings and autocracies is more innate. As Sir Terry Pratchett once put it, it's as if even the most intelligent person has this little blank spot in their heads where someone's written: 'Kings. What a good idea'" (457). By a total coincidence, I happen to be co-writing an essay right now about the City Watch strand of Prachett's Discworld, which, like this book, uses the police procedural to interrogate ideas about fantasy kingship. There are two issues I see here. One, is that, to be honest, I don't think A Drop of Corruption is a good criticism of autocracy. While Pratchett makes what he's doing very obvious, especially in the first three City Watch novels, which are all about the Watch stopping people from putting a traditional fantasy king on the throne of Ankh-Morpork... I don't think anyone would ever read A Drop of Corruption and conclude it's an attack on autocracy. Though it has a king in it, the appeal of kings isn't really explored in any way, shape, or form as it is by Pratchett; yes, the plot turns on (in part) the succession of kingship, but this could just as easily have been the succession to a dynastic family or the inheritance of a large corporation. If he hadn't said the book was an attack on autocracy, then it would have been fine, but I feel like once he's told you it is, you'll come away disappointed.
The other issue as, as Chris Winkle has also pointed out, is that the people set up in opposition to kingship work for an empire with an unelected, immortal emperor! Now, to be fair, this is also a problem with the City Watch novels, whose systemic problems are usually resolved by an unelected autocrat... just one who happens to be nice. It's interesting that both Bennett and Pratchett use a police procedural format to critique the power of kings. Many scholars have criticized how the police procedural as a format normalizes the state's use of violence, but I do wonder if they overstate the case a bit, or at least haven't fully considered how putting violence in the hands of the police is better than putting it in the hands of a king! At least in our world, the police are in theory a democratic institution, in that ultimately their mandate derives from the people, and is designed to prevent corruption with the society it develops, something Ana highlights a couple times in A Drop of Corruption. She tells Din, "Yet this job is perhaps the most important [...], for without it, well... the Empire would come to look much like Yarrow [the novel's autocracy], where the powerful and the cruel prevail without check" (350). Later, she reminds Din that the empire has granted some of its people "[b]lessings of the flesh, the mind, the spirit. Any of these blessings might lead one to imagine that they are of regal element. And that is why we must have a watchman among us, to ensure that these folk never forget the truth. [...] That though a person's mind may be shaped differently, their hearts and souls are all too human" (452). The idea that society needs a watchman and the police are it is straight out of the City Watch books... it's just weird that in both of these books, the watchmen are not actually answerable to the people in any meaningful sense as they would be in a democratic institution. The people are thus entirely dependent on that fact that Ana, like Vimes, is a good person who would not misuse her power. Which is, you know, the myth of kingship! Like Pratchett, Bennett is maybe not capable of totally moving beyond fantasy's love of kings.
Yet, I am unpersuaded that "Bennett obviously loves Khanum and its emperor." This is only the second book, after all. Just because the character in this installment do not see the contradiction between criticizing the kingship of another country and serving an empire doesn't mean Bennett does not. After all, they have built this unnatural thing, and it has built them in turn. How can they see beyond it? The book is filled with people whose alterations allow them to see some things very well but cause them to totally miss other ones. Is Bennett actually not capable of totally moving beyond fantasy's love of kings? Or is he playing a long game.
I do think Pratchett was playing a long game; I kind of wonder if the City Watch book's patrician was being set up as a transitional figure, if at some point he would step down and allow the people to rule themselves, having carried out the necessary violence to effect the transition. (A trope seen, as Peter Paik identifies, in texts like Watchmen.†) Unfortunately, as Eugenia Pietralunga Biavati points out (in her forthcoming essay on the City Watch books for the special issue of Studies in the Fantastic I am co-editing about speculative detectives), even though the books feature a "continued interrogation of heroic fantasy violence... [the] undercurrent of dramatic tension [about fantasy violence] ... was never resolved because Pratchett died after writing the eighth City Watch novel." I would add the even the last two City Watch novels move away from this concept, I suspect because as his Alzheimer's got worse, Pratchett avoided some of the more complicated things he'd done in earlier City Watch novels. If Bennett, like Pratchett, is playing a long game with our love of autocrats, hopefully he is able to pay it off in future installments.
* It's presumably one of those weird synchronicities of culture that dog awards that is responsible for the fact that two of this year's Hugo finalists are about oppressive human institutions exploiting weird biological phenomena they have named "Shroud."
† My reading of Paik predates this blog, so I can't link you to a direct explanation of this idea, but I do have a post discussing his idea of the "shrug" in my review of the Legion of Super-Heroes threeboot.
Almost a decade after its first revival (see item #3 on the list below), Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency was revived again, for a second three-issue miniseries, this time from IDW. (The revival was accompanied by a new collection of volume 1's first five issues, see item #1 below; I have also seen some evidence that ISBNs were assigned for more collections, but none of those were ever published.)
I found these three issues more of a mixed bag than the previous revival from Caliber. I think there were two reasons: one avoidable, and one perhaps unavoidable.
First, the avoidable one. I didn't find any of the stories among these three as well put together as the ones in the previous two runs of The Maze Agency. Maze Agency stories were always complicated, sure—I imagine there's very rarely a fair-play whodunit that isn't—but these usually verged into overcomplicated. The reader might very often lose track of things... but probably the one thing that should never happen in a whodunit is that the reader loses track of the suspects. But in all of these stories, especially the first and the third, I found that was exactly was what happened. Two many characters, and when the murderer was revealed, I wasn't quite sure I remembered who they were.
Probably part of the problem there is not the writing, but the art: the IDW stories are all penciled by Ariel Padilla, and I didn't think he had the command of making unique faces necessary to pulling off the complex character work of a murder mystery. Sure, not everyone can be Adam Hughes, but almost all of his many replacements in the original run still managed to do it. The glossy mid-2000s coloring techniques probably don't help either. In particular, issues #2 and 3 have lots of characters—beauty pageant participants and two distinct Japanese families, respectively—and if you can't tell them all apart, you'll very quickly be lost. I wish a stronger artist had been found to bring back The Maze Agency.
from The Maze Agency vol. 3 #2
The other reason, though, was probably unavoidable. The pleasure of the original Maze Agency wasn't just the whodunits, it was being with Jen and Gabe as their relationship evolved and developed. The series moved forward in real time; its two years of comics covered two years of their lives.
Volume 3 of The Maze Agency was published fifteen years after the last issue of volume 1... yet the characters have clearly not aged fifteen years. Nor, however, are we picking up shortly after where we left off; these are not early 1990s period pieces, either. In true "comic book time" fashion, the fashions and the technology indicate this is the mid-2000s, but Jen and Gabe are where we left them. Or, even worse, regressed a little: one of the stories indicates Gabe has his own apartment, but he actually moved in with Jen during the original run. There probably was not a good solution to this dilemma, but I find it disappointing nonetheless. (I think, though, I would have done what Sue Grafton did in the Kinsey Millhone books partway though, and transformed them into period pieces. For one thing, the fashions of the late 1980s and early 1990s are much better than the generic mid-2000s stuff Jen is wearing here. She even lost her forelock!)
from The Maze Agency vol. 3 #3
What I think of as the "modern" revival of The Maze Agency actually isn't all that modern—depressingly, it's closer to the series's original run than it is to the present! However, there was one last Maze Agency revival just a couple years ago, from Scout Comics... which lasted just one issue! I was able to find a press release about the Scout revival but no interviews or anything; certainly, the fanfare with which it was announced seems to indicate it wasn't planned as a one-shot, but no further issues were solicited or anything.
Anyway, it's fine. The twists of the mystery are interesting enough, and there are some good bits of humor in it. Unfortunately, it's let down by the art: all of Silvano Beltramo's women basically have the same face, and he's also the colorist, and occasionally gives Jen reddish-blond hair (matching one of the suspects) instead of blond, so I often had to reread dialogue to figure out which woman was Jen! I do appreciate they got Alan Davis back to do one of the covers; I think it was originally a 1:5 incentive cover, but it wasn't any more expensive than the regular cover online.
from The Maze Agency vol. 4 #1
The Scout Comics one-shot seems to be it for The Maze Agency; I believe it was Mike Barr's last-ever published comics work, and he's now having health problems, alas. If you liked the core series, these later revivals don't quite recapture its glory days, but are still worth tracking down.
Volume 3 of The Maze Agency originally
appeared in three issues, from Nov. 2005 to Jan. 2006. The stories
were written by Mike W. Barr, penciled by Ariel Padilla, inked by Ernest Jocson (#1-2) and Michael Jason Paz (#3), lettered by Tom B. Long, colored by Rainier Beredo (#1, 3) and Romulo Fajardo Jr. (#2), and edited by Dan Taylor.
"Shriek: The Sequel!" originally appeared in issue #1 of The Maze Agency vol. 4 (Dec. 2023). The story was written by Mike W. Barr, illustrated and colored by Silvano Beltramo, lettered by Tyler Smith, and edited by Andrea Lorenzo Molinari.
This is the penultimate in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers the short stories. Previous installments are listed below:
Writers: Scott Beatty & Chuck Dixon Penciller: Marcos Martin Inker: Alvaro Lopez Colorist: Javier Rodriguez Letterer: Willie Schubert
Maybe I've been spending too much time on Reddit's "Omnibus Collectors" sub, but recently I've been tracking down nice deluxe editions of classic DC storylines. On a very flimsy pretext, I purchased JLA: Year One; I also added a couple others to my wishlist, and I received this as a birthday present, the deluxe edition of Batgirl: Year One, which I borrowed from the library over a decade ago.
The original "Year One" was of course Batman: Year One, justly a classic, which established a "post-Crisis" origin for Batman. DC returned to this concept many different times and ways over the years; for example, in 1995, every DCU title's annual was a "Year One" story. One briefly common approach was the "Year One" miniseries: there were a whole spate of these in the 2000s, giving post-Crisis origins for characters like Robin, Green Arrow, Metamorpho, and the Huntress. I haven't enjoyed every one that I've read, but when they work, they really work: usually DC handed the reigns over to a high-profile creative team and got them to do good work in a timeless tale that stands alone. (And, of course, the post-Crisis pre-Flashpoint iteration of the DC universe is the best one, i.e., it's the one that was in effect when I got into superhero comics.)
There's a nicely done subplot about how Commissioner Gordon knows Barbara is Batgirl... but just can't admit it to himself. from Batgirl: Year One #9
Batgirl: Year One is no exception to this. Chuck Dixon isn't my favorite scripter, but he was everywhere on the Batman books in the 2000s, including Birds of Prey, so he was a good choice for Barbara Gordon's origin; outside of Robin and Nightwing: Year One, I'm less familiar with co-writer Scott Beatty's work, but he has done some very solid, very fun Batman-adjacent standalones, like the team-up with Elongated Man in Gotham Knights. And the quality work of Marcos Martin and Alvaro Lopez on this book is indisputable; they both seem like the kinds of illustrators who ought to have done more comics than they have. Their work here is slick and bold and stylized, full of energy that perfectly communicates the attitude of Barbara Gordon at this point in her life and superheroic career. The colors of Javier Rodriguez are excellent, too, bright and energetic.
Maybe I shouldn't be wasting one of my two images from Batgirl: Year One on a totally different character, but I can never say no to Dinah Laurel Lance. from Batgirl: Year One #7
I don't think this is a great work of art. To be honest, I think the plot is unnecessarily confusing, and parts of it are a bit belabored. But what better "Year One" story could there be for Barbara Gordon? This is perfect bubblegum comics.
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.
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
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.
Mike Barr's "fair-play whodunit" comic series The Maze Agency (see my two posts linked below for more detail on its original run) has been revived several times since the end of its original run in 1991. The first of these revivals was a three-issue black-and-white miniseries from indie publisher Caliber Comics in the late 1990s. Picking up the first two of these isn't that hard, but the third issue often goes for silly money on the secondary market—I think because Adam Hughes drew one its two covers, though even the cover he didn't draw can still go for a lot for some reason. (Automated bot pricing?) Thankfully MyComicShop posted a $3 copy of the non-Hughes cover while I was engaged in some futile eBay bidding. (Like, it wasn't there when I started looking for it, hence me going to eBay to begin with, but then I went back a few days later and it was!)
The Caliber run consists of three done-in-one murder mysteries, of course: in #1, Jen and Gabe investigate the death of the actress who played Justice Girl decades ago in a film; in #2, they travel to a Catholic monastery to locate a vital witness for a mob case, and in #3, they are confounded when three different women all turn up claiming to be a model who hasn't been seen in public for decades. They are all solid mysteries of the type Barr perfected in the original Maze Agency run, though I found all the characters and clues in #3 (each potential model also has associated side characters) hard to keep track of. On the other hand, I liked #2 a lot; a large cast of suspects, but they are distinctive, so you can keep track of them all fairly easily, and some nice twists.
from The Maze Agency vol. 2 #2
I'm assuming running the series in black and white was a cost-cutting decision, not an artistic one. Certainly, issues #1 and 3 seem to have been drawn much as anyone would draw a color comic. However, issue #2 feels like it was designed to run in black and white: lots of shadows in the monastery, lots of dark brickwork. Overall, I found it moody and effective. If someone (hypothetically) created a Maze Agency Omnibus, I'd probably want to see issues #1 and 3 colored, but I think coloring #2 would diminish its effect.
Overall, Gene Gonzales is an effective penciller, capturing the likenesses of our leads; he does the first two issues and the first half of the third. Unfortunately, the second half of #3 is done by a different artist with a style that seems both rushed and inappropriately cartoony... and having your characters change physical appearance halfway through an issue is especially detrimental to a murder mystery!
Volume 2 of The Maze Agency originally appeared in three issues, from July 1997 to Apr. 1998.* The stories were written by Mike W. Barr; pencilled by Gene Gonzales (#1-3) and James Bible (#3); inked by David Rowe (#1), Ande Parks (#2), Jason Baumgartner (#2-3), and Larry Shuput (#3); and edited by Joe Pruett (#1-3) and James Pruett (#3).
This is the antepenultimate in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers volumes 3 and 4 from IDW and Scout. Previous installments are listed below:
* The indicia dates on issues #2 and 3 are both just "1998," no month given. Some Internet sources give the months as Jan. and Feb. 1998, respectively, but I think this is just arbitrarily placing the issues in the two earliest slots in 1998. John Jackson Miller's Comichron includes issues #2 and 3 on his sales charts for Feb. and Apr. 1998, and given that issue #1 appears on the sales chart for July 1997, we can infer that Caliber was one of those publishers where the indicia date matches the sales month.
I'm not jumping between different volumes of the Til All Are One compendia anymore, but as always I have my own opinion about how to sequence the stories. (Though I should note I find all of Skybound's decisions here perfectly rational.) My first change is that the compendium places the Action Force crossover Ancient Relics! between "Crater Critters" (UK #123-4) and "The Cure!" (#126-7), which is where part one was released. (Parts two through five didn't appear in The Transformers, but in the UK Action Force comic.) But even though Ancient Relics! doesn't connect to it and so certainly could be taking place simultaneously, "Crater Critters"/"The Cure!" is a single two-part story and it reads weird to have this whole other story in the middle of it, so I bumped it to after "The Cure!"
On the other hand, the compendium places all four parts of the Headmasters miniseries after US #37, which makes sense, as the Earth Autobots send a signal in US #37 that is picked up by the Headmasters in Headmasters #4. But Headmasters was released bi-monthly across late 1987, and I decided I wanted my experience to replicate that—sort of like every now and then you cut to what's going on in space. Headmasters #1 came out between "Crater Critters" and "The Cure!", so I read it after "The Cure!" This does mean my installments of Headmasters will be spread out across several weeks' worth of posts.
Fire on High! / "Vicious Circle!" / "Mechanical Difficulties!" / "Crater Critters" / "The Cure!" / "Ring of Hate!" / Ancient Relics!, from The Transformers US #28-30 (May-July 1987) & The Transformers: Headmasters #1 (July 1987) / The Transformers UK #119-27 & 130-3 (27 June–22 Aug. & 12 Sept.–3 Oct. 1987), The Transformers Annual [1987], and Action Force #24-27 (15 Aug.–5 Sept. 1987); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Two (2025)
written by Simon Furman and Bob Budiansky; pencils by Dan Reed, Geoff Senior, Anderson, Don Perlin, and Frank Springer; inks by Dan Reed, Geoff Senior, Dave Harwood, and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey; letters by Mike Scott, Starkings, Janice Chiang, Diana Albers, and Annie Halfacree; colour by Steve White and Nel Yomtov
from The Transformers UK #120
Fire on High! and "Vicious Circle!" wrap up the ongoing story about Galvatron, Rodimus, Ultra Magnus, Goldbug, and Death's Head. It's totally fine—nothing too clever, but I did enjoy, of course, getting to see a Galvatron/Ultra Magnus throwdown once again drawn by Geoff Senior. It's too bad he didn't get to draw the story's final installment too!
From there, we go into a run of US stories detailing how Grimlock's leadership is shaking out, and focusing a bit on new-ish Autobots like Blaster and Goldbug. The first of these, "Mechanical Difficulties!", inexplicably brings back "the Mechanic," the human villain from just a couple issues ago who made off with some of the Autobots' equipment... when they were all being very dumb. This guy did not need to come back; this story about him is also not very good either. Things improve with "Crater Critters" and "The Cure!", a two-part story where Goldbug and Blaster—having gone rogue due to their dislike of Grimlock's leadership—discover some Decepticons newly arrived on Earth bring with them an infection of metal-eating "scraplets." Some decent character dynamics... plus I always love any Transformers story featuring my favorite Decepticon fuel auditor, Ratbat!
from The Transformers: Headmasters #1
Then I jumped to the first issue of Headmasters. As noted above, I'm reading this (roughly) in publication sequence. But also, the IDW reprints of the Marvel US comic (inexplicably) placed this in the final volume... which I never got, so I've never actually read this story before. I found it interesting and kind of odd. I like the idea of a bunch of Autobots growing weary of war and deciding to leave Cybertron, though it seems a bit mean of them to go to an inhabited planet and potentially bring the war there! Like a lot of Transformers stories of this era, it suffers from needing to introduce lots of toys and thus lots of characters, no one's personality really pops. The present-day versions of a lot of characters introduced in the movie appear here for the first time: Kup, Hot Rod, Blurr. This answers my question from last post of "Kup is always portrayed as one of the longest-serving Autobots... yet
whenever 2007 Kup travels back in time to 1987, none of the 1987
Autobots know who he is. So where did he serve and who with?" But on the other hand, I feel like Uncle Bob is barely trying when it comes to conveying personality: Kup, Hot Rod, and Blurr all have very distinctive even if simple personalities, and you get absolutely no hint of them here! They're just generic Autobot filler.
from Action Force #24
Lastly, we get Ancient Relics! Since G.I.Joe and the Transformers (see items #10 and 11 in the list below) couldn't be run in the UK, this was its equivalent there, with the UK's G.I.Joe adaptation, Action Force. (Though, this reprinting changes all instances of "Action Force" to "G.I.Joe." I am not sure if that was done for this volume or some previous reprint.) The first part ran in the Transformers comic and the other four in Action Force, I'm guessing to convince loyal TF readers to check out the other mag.
I really don't care about G.I.Joe, but I found this pretty enjoyable. Trying to find the missing Goldbug and Blaster, Blades instead finds Megatron—damaged and deranged after blowing himself up on the space bridge (see #10 below)—in the sewers of London. Blades, Grimlock, and Centurion must try to bring him down with the help of G.I.Joe, who are totally outclassed. It's a pretty simple story, elevated like a lot of Simon Furman's work by using punchy first-person narration from a variety of different characters. And, of course, five whole installments of Geoff Senior art! (But who else could ever be given the assignment of drawing Megatron vs. Grimlock?) One problem: in previous stories, Centurion was a human-built robot remote-controlled by a human being, but here is clearly a reasoning being on his own! Whoops.
This is the twelfth in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #31-32 and UK issues #128-9 & 132-7. Previous installments are listed below:
In chronological order, this is the second volume of the Penguin History of Britain, covering the period from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest. The predecessor to this series, the Pelican History of England, positioned itself as "social histories," eschewing kings and battles and dates in favor of giving the reader a sense of how society itself changed over time. Or, at least, that was the theory; I think many of the writers struggled with the concept in practice, and I certainly did as a reader. Often it felt like you weren't really getting a story, but instead a snapshot, if you see the distinction. For example, though I did like that series's volume 2, it didn't really capture how England evolved from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest, it just told you what it was like overall. Some writers did quite badly with this approach, though others made it work quite well.
I am not sure if the Penguin History of Britain shared this aspect of the premise of the Pelican History of England or not; the "inviolable rules" from the series editor that author Robin Fleming mentions in her introduction are just 1) no footnotes, 2) no historiography, and 3) keep it accessible (xxii). But even if not, it did seem to me that in this volume, Fleming was attempting to write a social history, be it an editorial mandate or not, along the lines of her predecessors: "the founding contention of this book is that the aggregate of the actions, beliefs and tribulations of whole generations of individuals shaped lives and changed societies in very profound ways...; indeed, they did so more fundamentally than the actions of people whose names we happen to know" (xx). Later, she points out that naturally later writers would have fallen into this trap, "because high politics consumed men writing in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, and naturally modern historians have come to share the concerns of our writers of texts" (314).
As I said, the mixed results of the Pelican History suggests that this can be a tricky thing to accomplish. Even though I enjoyed its volume 2, it didn't really tell a story; some of the series's more successful volumes seemed to accomplish the goal of telling a story mostly by abandoning the goal of sticking to society itself. So, I had little evidence you could cover society and tell a good story!
Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400–1070 by Robin Fleming
Well, Fleming gives me some very strong evidence, because I found that Britain after Rome succeeded at exactly what it set out to accomplish. There is indeed little of (what in his introduction to volume 4 of the Pelican Histories, A. R. Myers called) "dates and kings and battles." But that doesn't mean Fleming fails to tell a story; she does an excellent job of giving you a sense of how Britain changed over this period.
Her major thesis seems to be that while we think of the Angles and Saxons as invading and conquering Britain during this time period, there's little evidence of that from the actual period in question, and much more evidence that they settled in Britain and were gradually integrated culturally and societally. Like Dorothy Whitelock in the Pelican History's volume 2, Fleming is interested in the economic power of kings, but unlike Whitelock, she gives you a sense of how that power evolved over time: "Although it is clear that kings were not the founders of England's early towns, it is nonetheless certain that the fates of towns and kings were inextricably linked, because, although kings had not made towns, towns... were beginning to remake England's more formidable kings" (205). She goes on to describe how kings came to realize you could get much more from controlling and taxing town economies than you ever could from warfare (212).
Fleming uses archaeological evidence to push against the political tendencies of earlier writers, but unlike the first volumes of either the Pelican History or the Penguin one,
she is able to use this evidence to tell a story, so it does not feel
like you are just getting a succession of descriptions of places: "It is only when we look at the statistics provided by the bones of the early medieval dead that we come face to face with just how dire life in this period was; how sick, how sad and how short.... Narrative sources... do not allow us to see the leg ulcers that plagued so many; the swarms of disease-carrying flies; the constant discomfort caused by a gut full of parasites; the scrawny, undersized 14-year-old boys. Yet these were fundamental, bodily aspects of people's lives in early medieval Britain" (365). It's very well done stuff, and overall, I found this highly enjoyable reading.
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