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.
Finally! While I finished my Hugo reading earlier than ever, I was watching stuff right up to the deadline, having made it difficult for myself by deciding to not just watch the actual finalists, but also Mad Max: Fury Road, the rest of Agatha All Along, and the last two seasons of Lower Decks (I was very behind). During the last week in particular, I watched so much stuff... but I did make it, finishing my last movie (Wicked, Part I) just past midnight on Wednesday, when ballots were due at midnight. Thankfully in Pacific Time!
Anyway, here are my notes on the visual categories: (I don't remember what I nominated for certain, but I think I nominated "73 Yards" and "Dot and Bubble," both of which made the ballot).
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
6. Fallout 1x8: "The Beginning", written by Gursimran Sandhu, directed by Wayne Yip
I was excited when I saw this episode was called "The Beginning," because if there's anything that makes Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) stink, it's watching season finales to shows you don't watch, and surely this would not be the case of an episode called "The Beginning." But the writers of Fallout are being obnoxiously clever, and "The End" was the first episode while "The Beginning" was the last. Hence, I pretty much cared about nothing that was happening here. (That said, it doesn't seem to be my thing as a show; I doubt I'd have ranked it higher even if I had seen it all.)
5. Star Trek: Lower Decks 5x09: "Fissure Quest", written by Lauren McGuire, directed by Brandon Williams
I have very much enjoyed Lower Decks for most of its run... so it was a little disappointing to get to this episode and realize that it was seemingly more nominated on the basis of fan service than quality per se. This is the first part of the two-part season (and series) finale, bringing an end to a story arc about mysterious fissures popping up across the multiverse. Alternate versions of many classic characters appear, including T'Pol (Enterprise), Garak and Bashir (Deep Space Nine), Lily Sloane (First Contact), and a whole cadre of Harry Kims (Voyager). Probably the best part, though, is when Boimler contains about the overdone pointlessness of making every story be about the multiverse. Anyway, it's basically fine.
4. Star Trek: Lower Decks 5x10: "The New Next Generation", written by Mike McMahan, directed by Megan Lloyd
The season finale to Lower Decks was well done, if a bit of a trope at this point: the Cerritos is somehow called upon to save the Federation, and proves itself despite being a California-class. It has some good moments and some excellent jokes, but I found it less successful than some previous iterations of the concept. I get that these particular episodes were probably nominated because they had good fan service, but there are a number of 2024 episodes I would have ranked higher than these two: "A Farewell to Farms," "Fully Dilated," and "Upper Decks" were all stronger.
3. Doctor Who 1x04: "73 Yards", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
I don't think the return of Russell T Davies to Doctor Who has been an unabashed success, but this episode really shows what he does at his best. Oh, you don't have your lead actor available for every episode? Well, let's do a creepy folk horror thing about the companion living the rest of her life never seeing him again but eternally being stalked by a figure always exactly 73 yards away from her. Utterly captivating, thanks in no small part to Millie Gibson as Ruby, but really it's one of those episodes where everything comes together. Plus... the first episode of Doctor Who to ever be inspired by A Swiftly Tilting Planet? I think not up to quite as much as Agatha All Along, but clearly in a class above the two Lower Decks episodes.
2. Agatha All Along, episode #7: "Death's Hand In Mine", written by Gia King and Cameron Squires, directed by Jac Schaeffer
Though I have been enjoying Agatha All Along (as of this writing, I haven't gotten to the finale yet), I would say it does kind of suffer from the same thing as many serialized streaming shows, in that probably it has about seven episodes worth of content but is nine episodes long. That said, I did really enjoy this one, which follows one of the side characters, Lilia, a seer who jumps through her own life out of order, not just putting together a mystery, but also coming to better understand herself and the nature of friendship. I thought it was very well done.
1. Doctor Who 1x05: "Dot and Bubble", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
This episode is partially social media satire, the kind of contemporary pop culture stuff Russell T Davies can do in his sleep... but he does so well. But the episode has an extra substrate to it that only becomes apparent at the very end, which is really well done, and leads to what might be the very best scene Ncuti Gatwa recorded as the Doctor.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, directed by George Miller, script by George Miller and Nico Lathouris
I did not care for the previous movie in this series, and I cared for this one even less. I think the first probably accomplished what it set out to perfectly, but I didn't actually care to see it accomplished. The second is brought down by some weird choices: the focus on the gruesome baddies seemed more gratuitous in this one, and why on Earth is her name "Furiosa" when she's a little girl??
5. Dune, Part Two, directed by Denis Villeneuve, script by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts
I feel like whenever I have watched previous versions of Dune, by the time you get to the second half of the story, I have very much lost steam, and so the second half I am usually pretty bored during. Splitting the second part into its own movie means you can conceive it as its own story, and thus I think this is the most I have ever cared about the second half of Dune. Still, I didn't care a lot; I feel like Paul's arc here is interesting in the abstract, but I was never really pulled into it. Some neat visuals, and I'm broadly sympathetic to it in a way that very much wasn't true of Furiosa.
4. Wicked, Part I, directed by John M. Chu, script by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox
I am an Oz fan who has successfully spent over twenty years of my life avoiding Wicked, but that streak finally came to an end. I thought this was basically fine so far but also feel like I can't really judge it; there are a lot of balls in the air and how good Part I is will really depend on the the extent to which Part II can pay them off. There were some good songs, and I liked the dopey Winkie prince character a lot; also I hope Boq gets it together in Part II. As an Oz fan, I found some of the choices made distracting; why does the map of the four quadrants use the the five colors from the books... but make the Munchkin Country tan and the Winkie Country blue? (Also as much as it's in dialogue with the MGM Oz film, obviously, it struck me that you also can't make a film in 2024 about a magic school that doesn't in some way owe something to Harry Potter, and this very much does.) So, I am ranking it above the two things I didn't really care for, but under the films that were complete in and of themselves.
3. The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders
My wife read all three Wild Robot books aloud to my kids, the first two twice in fact; I haven't read them, but absorbed a lot of it from overhearing. When the movie came out last fall, they went and saw it but I didn't make it with them. So I enjoyed finally getting to experience a version of story for myself. I found this charming and entertaining, with some decent visuals and some excellent performances, especially Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, and Bill Nighy.
2. I Saw the TV Glow, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun
This is a horror film about two high school kids who grow up watching a cheesy 1990s tv show that isn't great art but speaks to them. (It's very much based on Buffy, to the extent of using the same font in the opening credits and including a cameo from Amber Benson.) As a child of the era, I thought it did a good job of capturing the 1990s vibe in general, and that specific feeling of stumbling across something late at night that belongs to you and no one else—something kind of lost from our culture of algorithmic discovery. Really sad, really well done; the lead cast were great. I don't know that this would work for everyone, but it very much worked for me. A great movie with important stuff to say.
1. Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, script by Gints Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža
If you want to watch two movies this year about groups of animals coming together in the face of rising sea levels, watch The Wild Robot too, but if you only want to watch one, then Flow is the one. This movie has no dialogue, and does a beautiful job of capturing the visuals and behaviors of animals. Lots of really striking sequences, lots of heart. I would have never heard of this without the Hugos (though I see it did win an Oscar), and it easily takes the top place on my ballot.
Best Graphic Story or Comic
[UNRANKED] Monstress: The Possessed, script by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
I very much enjoyed the first volume of Monstress when I read it back in 2017 (the fact that I ranked it fifth is more a testament to the quality of that year's other nominees)... but by volume two, I found it impenetrable and ranked it last! I have kept up with the series, even continuing to buy it, in hope that I might someday enjoy it again, but I have failed to do so. Every one of the first seven volumes has been a Hugo finalist, and I almost always rank them last. Finally, last year, volume eight was not, and I used that as an opportunity to finally jump off the series. No volume nine for me! This means I am just leaving it off my ballot, though I think that's functionally the same as listing it in last place.
6. We Called Them Giants, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans
This short graphic novel tells the story of strange, mostly unexplained, events on Earth from the perspective of a teenage girl in foster care: first the majority of humans disappear, causing humanity to degenerate into gangs, then mysterious giants appear. It didn't do much for me; it felt more like a high-level summary of the events in question. I never got interested in the events or characters.
5. The Hunger and the Dusk, Vol. 1, script by G. Willow Wilson, art by Chris Wildgoose
This is a fantasy adventure comic from the pen of G. Willow Wilson (of Ms. Marvel fame); it starts with orcs and humans at odds, but then it turns out that both factions are under assault from a fearsome race from across the ocean and must learn to put aside their differences. The two main threads follow an orc healer with a human adventuring party, and two orcs from different clans entering into an arranged marriage. The art by Chris Wildgoose is good, and the writing is fine. Like, you've read better comics from Wilson but certainly many people produce worse comics and they even become Hugo finalists. I think I would have liked it more if the six issues collected here had built to some kind of climax, but it felt to me like it just stopped, and not in a way that left me eager to read on; there's no big resolution or even a cliffhanger to chew on.
4. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two by Emil Ferris
The first half of this story came out way back in 2017; it was a finalist for the 2018 Hugo Awards. Book two was originally supposed to come out in 2018, but didn't materialize until 2024, after an acrimonious lawsuit between Ferris and her publisher. I used to look and see every now and again if it had been released, but eventually I gave up, so I was thankful for the Hugos reminding me to actually get it! The story is about a young girl named Karen growing up in the 1960s, struggling with her growing realization that she's a lesbian versus her Catholic upbringing—not to mention the fact that her mother just died, her father abandoned her family, and her brother is probably a gangster. The story is told in the form of drawings from Karen's looseleaf diary, and it looks beautiful. Karen draws herself as a monster because that's how she sees herself, and the story explores what different kids of monstrousness actually mean: violence versus sexuality vs prejudice. Great read, though I found the end a little frustrating. I don't see any indication of a book three coming, though there certainly is space for one. This book is definitely doing something much more interesting and much better than We Called Them Giants or The Hunger and the Dusk...
3. No Award
...but it's not actually science fiction or fantasy, even if it is about someone who reads those genres! Karen isn't a monster, she just draws herself as one. It seems to me that the Hugo ought not to go to a work that's not actually sf&f, so I have to place No Award above it... even if I would rather see My Favorite Thing win than a bunch of the other finalists.
2. The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag
This is a YA graphic novel about a high-school age Hispanic lesbian in rural California who reconnects with a childhood friend who moved away years ago. Only she doesn't want to reconnect, because she doesn't want that friend to discover her secret—a dark one in the basement that her family has hid for generations. This is one of those fantasy stories that does a good job working on two levels, there's a literal monster, but of course it's also a metaphor. Ostertag's characters are well-drawn, and she especially does a great job with the main character's yearning for connection but also pushing of other people away. This is the kind of thing I really like about reading for the Hugos; I never would have come across this I'm sure, but ended up really enjoying the experience a lot.
This was my first Best Graphic Story finalist, and it surprised me by feeling like the one to beat: it's a choose-your-own-adventure comic that uses Star Trek technology to cleverly explain the form of the entire genre. Never before has a Star Trek tie-in been a Hugo finalist, but very rarely do Star Trek tie-ins do anything interesting with their chosen medium and genre, which is exactly what I want an award finalist to do.
Overall Thoughts
Like last year, I thought Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) was good; only one real dud. Yes, I would have picked other episodes of Lower Decks, but it's a solid show and I'm happy to see it on the ballot.Long Form was also pretty good; sure, I didn't like Furiosa or Dune very much, but also they clearly have their adherents, and I wouldn't be embarrassed if they won (as I was when The Old Guard won). Three whole non-franchise films!
Best Graphic Story was kind of meh this year but I guess you can't win them all.
What will win? I am typically very bad at calling these categories. I'm guessing Star Trek won't win in Dramatic Presentation; it hasn't done so since 1995, despite making the ballot fairly consistently. If "Those Old Scientists" or "Subspace Rhapsody" can't win, I don't see what can! But I actually do feel like it might have a shot with Warp Your Own Way. (Who'm I kidding, though... it'll probably be Monstress again.) I don't think there's an obvious favorite in the Dramatic Presentation categories. Dune, Part One won, but I don't think the sequel will have the same oomph. I Saw the TV Glow is too queer to win, Wicked too girly, and the others too kiddy. So who knows! Maybe one of the Doctor Whos for Short Form?
Once & Future is a recently concluded thirty-issue comic series from Boom!, written by Kieron Gillen and illustrated by Dan Mora (with Tamra Bonvillain on colors). It concerns an attempt by a sort of undead King Arthur and Merlin to reinscribe themselves on Britain; the main character is a modernist academic who discovers that the grandmother who raised him is Britain's chief monster hunter—and that he's inherited her story.
It's been collected in five trade paperbacks; over the past few years, volumes one, three, and four have been finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, so those are the ones I've read. This year's Hugo voter's packet came with PDFs covering the complete series: book one of the "deluxe edition" (collecting volumes one through three), volume four (the one that was actually a finalist this year), and volume five (which was eligible for the 2023 award, but was not actually a finalist). So I decided that once I finished Hugo voting, I would go back through and read the series in its entirety, in order.
Like a lot of Kieron Gillen comics, it's pretty good but it reads as though it could have been better, like it could have done more with its premise and its characters than it ended up doing. Once & Future has two big strengths; one is the way it uses its very concept to interrogate the idea of British identity. In the first volume, King Arthur is brought back by Anglo-Saxon supremacists... but what they've forgotten is that Arthur wasn't Anglo-Saxon, he was a Briton who fought off Saxons! So he turns on them and begins expunging what he sees as invaders from Britain. Bits like this recur throughout the series, deft moments of pointing out the way the stories we glom onto culturally often don't actually say what we imagine they do. A lot of the time the story is about the conflicts between different versions of the Arthur mythos, the early medieval version clashing with the later one; there's some fun stuff with Beowulf in volume two. The particular highlight in this regard is Boris Johnson's hilarious cameo.
Collection published: 2022 Contents published: 2021-21 Previously read: August 2023 Reread: November 2023
The other highlight is the character of Bridgette McGuire, the retired monster hunter, a grandmother who gives no shits about your feelings and will do anything to anyone—including her beloved grandson—to keep Britain safe. As Gillen points out in the series afterword, she's the kind of character who can be a vehicle for adventures forever, but that doesn't stop her from developing and changing in ways both small and big over the course of the series. I always enjoyed her shenanigans and dialogue.
However, the series doesn't do enough with its interesting premise. There's a lot of big action sequences, and certainly Dan Mora does a great job illustrating them, but it felt to me like Kieron Gillen spent more time asking "how could this mythological idea be used to make a comic book action set piece?" than he spent asking "what does the Arthurian mythos tell us about modern Britain?" I loved those moments, like I said above... but honestly, there just weren't enough of them across the series's thirty issues. At time the overlapping mythologies get confusing, and not in a good way; I don't think the series adequately delineates the difference between the multiple Arthurs, for example, and some of it gets wacky. Why would Tennyson's Arthur be steampunk!? The last volume feels like Gillen thought the series was going to run another thirty issues but was suddenly given only six to wrap it all up... I was surprised to learn from the afterword that he actually had twenty-four more issues than he originally thought he was getting!
I also felt that Duncan and Rose, the ostensible leads, deserved more of a character throughline than they ended up getting. They often end up feeling along for the ride, and I wanted a stronger sense of their development and choices in the face of all the weird things they go through.
Other than some of the jumpy issues near the end, it is (as Gillen-penned comics usually are) a pretty smooth read. There's a number of clever ideas in here. Mora's art gets a bit too grotesque at times but is usually excellent; Tamra Bonvillain is a revelation on colors. But I can't help feeling there's another version of this story that consistently treats its mythology as something to be interrogated rather than as a basis for clever set pieces.
Plus to name your final volume "The Wasteland" but then claim the poem was written by "T. S. Elliot" is a pretty unforgivable mistake!
Next, we have my nominations and
votes in the "visual" categories: comics, tv, and film. (I have linked the titles
if I have written a review elsewhere, or if the work is freely
available on the Internet.)
Things I Nominated
As I said in my last post, I lost my nominating ballot (if I ever had it), but I am pretty sure I nominated an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season one, "Spock Amok," for the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
6. Star Wars: Andor 1x12: "Rix Road", written by Tony Gilroy, directed by Benjamin Caron
Andor is a Disney Plus show that's a prequel to Rogue One, a film I found overrated—and I have to admit, I don't really remember the character of Andor at all. (Plus, as a Star Trek fan, I find his name confusing.)
Normally with shows I don't watch that are Hugo finalists, I just watch
the relevant episodes, not any other ones. Sometimes this works (I
think both For All Mankind episodes I've seen work great on their
own), sometimes it does not (my friend Christiana is always criticizing
the scattershot way I viewed The Good Place). This year I acceded to Christiana's advice, which was to not watch all twelve episodes of Andor, but to at least watch the first and sixth before moving onto the two that were Hugo finalists.
This
was good advice, in that I had some helpful context, but also bad
advice in that I thought the sixth episode, "The Eye," was much better
than the two that were actually finalists; had "The Eye" been a finalist, I probably would have ranked it first. "Rix Road"—like most of the Andor episodes I saw—does a great job of building to a dramatic climax, as the inhabitants of an Empire-occupied planet take to the titular road to hold an illegal funeral procession for Andor's mother. But unlike "The Eye" and "One Way Out," I felt like the energy of this dramatic confrontation fizzled rather than exploded; the speech by Andor's mother is good, but then it just kind of ends. So I would put it roughly on a par with "Babylon's Ashes"; I gave a slight edge to The Expanse based on my long-term loyalty to that show.
5. The Expanse 6x6: "Babylon's Ashes", written by Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck and Naren Shankar, directed by Breck Eisner
As I say every year, I stopped watching The Expanse back during season 3, but it's not the show's fault, it's my own. However, I have enough context to follow what's happening because I read all the books, and the show is fairly faithful. That said, I suspect the emotions of the pay-offs of a season finale (series finale?) would come across much more strongly had I watched the preceding episodes. So, yeah, this was fine and had its moments, but if I ever catch up on The Expanse, I think I will like it more. (Bits of it were very sudden, though; it seems pretty crazy that they did the first book in fifteen episodes, but the sixth one in six!)
4. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, ep. 9: "Whose Show Is This?", written by Jessica Gao, directed by Kat Coiro
As always, it is perhaps silly for my only episode of a show to be the season finale, but that's how I (usually) roll. This was okay, I guess, but it more fizzled out than climaxed. Which maybe was on purpose, given the meta gags, but I didn't think those worked terribly well (though I did like how she broke out of her show); my favorite jokes were the ones about Charlie Cox's Daredevil, who put in a completely unexpected appearance. But I was moderately entertained, so fourth place it is.
3. Star Wars: Andor 1x10: "One Way Out", written by Beau Willimon, directed by Toby Haynes"One Way Out" is a solid prison break story, but perhaps one that would have benefited more from seeing the prison set up in previous episodes. Christiana told me that Andor has a lot of wheel-spinning episodes, but if you jump around like I did it has an admirable tendency to be completely different each time out. Episodes one, six, and ten have almost nothing in common in terms of character or setting except for Andor himself.
2. For All Mankind 3x10: "Stranger in a Strange Land", written by Matt Wolpert & Ben Nedivi, directed by Craig Zisk
Even though I have only seen one previous episode of For All Mankind (the season two finale, a Hugo finalist last year), I found the pay-offs in this much more effective. In this episode (of a show about an alternate history of the space race), while terrorists attack NASA on Earth, a group of astronauts on Mars must figure out how to get a pregnant woman to a waiting orbiter where she can safely give birth even though they're almost out of fuel. Groups of smart people working together to come up with bizarre plans is basically my favorite genre of television, and this is a strong example of it. If I can ever stomach paying regularly for Apple TV+, I will have to go back and watch the rest of this show.
1. Stranger Things 4, ch. 4: "Dear Billy", written by Paul Dichter, directed by Shawn Levy
As I've been saying, I normally watch only whatever episode of a show is specifically nominated... but I had seen seasons one and two of Stranger Things, before I fell behind on my tv watching, so I resolved this would be my impetus to catch up. I saved Stranger Things for last in my schedule just in case I couldn't make it through everything, but I was indeed able to view twelve episodes in the month of September, getting me up to "Dear Billy." I can see why this episode was a finalist; Sadie Sink is excellent as Max throughout, and in particular the famous ending with its use of Kate Bush is harrowing and triumphant, a great depiction of depression and the ways we can sometimes escape from it. I really struggled to place this against For All Mankind, but ultimately decided to go with the show I actually watch otherwise. (Now that I've fulfilled my Hugo obligations, I can stop watching again, right?)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
6. Avatar: The Way of Water; directed by James Cameron; script by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver
I successfully went fourteen years of my life never having seen Avatar; alas, I was not so lucky with the sequel, which I suffered through in all its inexplicably-three-hour entirety. It seems to me that the entire movie suffers from—among other things—a nonsensical and morally abhorrent premise. That is to say, the main guy, Jake, is a human living as a Na'vi on the planet Pandora, leading its people in a war of resistance against occupying human forces. But early on in the film, he goes on the run because his family is threatened. The problems are: 1) he flees to a place where he has no ability to blend in, among a different race of Na'vi; 2) this is an awful thing for him to do, he's depicted as the only hope they have; 3) the movie then just totally ignores the plight of the Na'vi he abandoned, either because they are okay (which makes no sense) or they are all being slaughtered offscreen (which makes him even worse).
It's all a bit The Word for World Is Forest, isn't it? Yet even though that's one of my least favorite Le Guins, James Cameron could have done a much better job if he had ripped it off more: the thing Le Guin shows in her novels of conflict between colonizer and colonized is that the colonized have to avoid buying into the values of the colonizer. If the Na'vi really offer an alternative to the values of Earth, then why is the only way they can be defended with the values of Earth? That is to say, with overlong fight sequences that could have come straight out of a Marvel movie? At the end of the movie, Jake and his family haven't really accomplished anything at all! So anyway, this was an astounding technical achievement, I guess, but so what? I did like Jemaine Clement's character. If I have to suffer through another, he had better be in it.
5. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, directed by Ryan Coogler, script by Ryan Coogler and Jay Robert Cole
This second Black Panther film was basically fine. Some good moments and action and humor, good character work dealing with the death of Chadwick Boseman/T'Challa. Namor from the comics was reworked quite a lot here, but in a way I found really interesting and successful. I had totally forgotten Lupita Nyong'o's character from the first film, though, so some parts of the movie were a bit confusing, and as a friend pointed out, why is this sequel to a groundbreaking Afrofuturist text about two victims of imperialism fighting each other as opposed to, you know, the colonizer? The final battle was, thankfully, surprisingly short for a Marvel movie. But I look forward to seeing where they go with Shuri as Black Panther; I've been a fan of Letitia Wright since Cucumber and Banana. So, not a great film, but certainly doing more interesting things than The Way of Water, and doing them better.
4. Nope, written and directed by Jordan Peele
The nice-but-actually-mean thing to say about this movie is that at least it's better than Us, but it's no Get Out. This is about a horse farm that trains horses for films suddenly coming under attack by a strange force. It has some good comedy, and there's a nice sense of group-of-disparate-people-pull-off-a-crazy-plan, and the explanations are reasonably satisfying, but it's one of those cases where I read the Wikipedia article and ended up feeling that the movie the director said he was making was more interesting than the one I watched, if you see what I mean. But, you know, better this than another Marvel movie.
3. Severance Season One, created by Dan Erickson
I had never even heard of this before it became a Hugo finalist, but dutifully signed up for Apple TV+ for two months to work my way through it. It's about a corporation where people are "severed": your work self and your home self become different people, each with no memory of the other. For the "outie," it's a great deal: you get paid, but never remember going to work. But for the "innie," it's a slog, because you spend your whole life at work and know nothing better. It's a bit phildickian, in a good way; it captures that feeling I really liked in Ubik or Martian Time-Slip, of "new technologies, same old bullshit," the alienation from the world that is the postmodern condition. There are some great performances (Parks and Rec's Adam Scott, of course, but all four leads are strong), some excellent jokes, and some decent twists. That said, there are probably a bit too many twists; I would have been more interested in exploring some of the psychological and sociological consequences of the "severance" technology, but the series moves into the kind of conspiracy thriller territory that is a bit too standard in streaming shows. I might have ranked it higher except that the first season doesn't really tell a complete story, so it's not totally satisfying, and hard to judge as a whole.
2. Turning Red, directed by Domee Shi, script by Julia Cho and Domee Shi
I watched a lot of Pixar films as a child, but few in adulthood; in the past five years thanks to the double-whammy of parenthood and Hugo voting, that has changed. Of the several I have seen in the past few years (which include Inside Out, Onward, and Soul), this is a clear favorite, abandoning the usual Pixar formula (two disparate personalities work together to cross a strange landscape) in favor of a beautiful story of adolescence and the experience of immigration and assimilation. The main character is a Chinese-Canadian who turns into a red panda when embarrassed, and this is a potent fantasy metaphor for her relationship with her mother and with the culture of her classmates. Lots of good jokes, great character beats, and a beautiful climax that gave me goosebumps.
1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, written and directed by Daniels
This squarely hits my interests in storytelling: big sf concept that is interesting on its own merits but also a powerful metaphor for real life, takes itself totally seriously but also not seriously at all at the exact same time, characters who are just regular people living regular lives turning out to be the moral linchpins. I thought this was excellent from top to bottom, hilarious and also touching. I don't think anyone talks about the "New Sincerity" anymore, but surely this is it at its best: all the techniques of postmodernism deployed to a heartwarming message. This year's top three were all excellent, but this was an easy winner.
Best Graphic Story or Comic
7. Dune: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, script by Lilah Sturges, art by Drew Johnson
The comic of the movie of the novel? Really?? This seems spectacularly pointless. Sure, do a comic of the original novel and unleash the visual imagination of Frank Herbert in a way that can't be captured by another medium. (And I believe there are some comics directly based on the novel.) But why try to capture the visual imagination of a film of a novel on the page? It seems pointless—and once you read it, you realize it is pointless. This vastly accelerated set of highlights with art that essentially copies film stills gives you little sense of the grandeur of either film or novel.
6. No Award
I find the nomination of Dune fundamentally inexplicable. There is no way this is one of the six best sf&f comics of the year.
5. Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, script by Bartosz Sztybor, art by Alessio Fioriniello and Filipe Andrade
This is a tie-in to the game Cyberpunk 2077, and its nomination is also inexplicable. It's about two people in some kind of cyberpunk dystopia, one of whom wants to climb the criminal ranks, the other of whom just wants to fantasize about living an easy, meaningful life in the country. It's okay, but some of the art is hard to follow and much of what happens is pretty cliché. It has its moments, but there's nothing here to make you care.
I've put Monstress—which I believe has never missed the Hugo ballot since 2017—in sixth several times. That I did not do so this year is more a testament to the low quality of the other nominees in this category than anything else. I didn't think it was very great this year, but I'd definitely prefer to see it win over a Dune or Cyberpunk 2077 tie-in.
3. Once & Future: Monarchies in the U.K., script by Kieron Gillen, art by Dan Mora
This
is volume four of Gillen and Mora's sequence about King Arthur returning in modern Britain... only as a zombie. As is so often true of Kieron Gillen comics, I can't help but feel the premise has more potential than is used. There are a lot of clever spins on Arthurian legend here... but they mostly only justify exciting action sequences, rather than say something interesting about Britain. But it is exciting and I like the characters, so it is certainly better than Cyberpunk 2077 or Monstress.
2. Saga, Volume Ten, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples Saga is back! It's been what, three years I think since volume nine? I usually read it in the form of the huge hardcover omnibus volumes, but I am glad to have this little taster of what is to come. It's been a while, so my memory on many story points is murky, but I still enjoyed this a lot. Good character work, decent twists, and as always amazing art from Fiona Staples. Not so sure about the villain who speaks like a Twitter conservative. It isn't quite as good as the self-contained Woman of Tomorrow... though even if it was, I'm don't think the Hugo Awards are really for rewarding tenth volumes in ongoing series! Give the award to something new and interesting. (Saga won for its first volume, and was a finalist for volumes two, three, six, seven, and nine; if I was king of the universe, it wouldn't be a finalist again until its final volume—assuming, of course, that it sticks the landing.) But given the weakness of the other finalists this year, it acquits itself fairly well regardless.
This was the first of the Best Graphic Story finalists I read, but as soon as I read it, it felt clearly like the one to beat. Beautiful art from Bilquis Evely, but also a really well put together story with a new-but-familiar spin on a classic character. In the end, I was right; nothing in this category came close.
Overall Thoughts
I feel like Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) is unusually strong this year. Even though I don't care for, say, She-Hulk, I can see that it's interesting and why other people would like it. The top three finalists, in particular, are pretty strong. (Though it really is too bad "The Eye" wasn't a finalist.) I think it's probably going to be "Dear Billy," but if not, I think one of the episodes of Andor.
Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) was also interesting (Avatar aside), but in this case, there's a clear winner: I have little doubt that Everything Everywhere All at Once will not win. It won't be close as, say, Arrival, but it will win.
Best Graphic Story continues to slog along as a category. We have four repeat finalists... but alas, the two new series/creators are the worst ones! Move over, Monstress. I am going to go out on a limb and claim this will be Tom King's year to finally win it... but he came in sixth last year, so what do I know?
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
