Hugos 2025: Ballots for Dramatic Presentation and Graphic Story

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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

1. Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way, script by Ryan North, art by Chris Fenoglio

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.

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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?

Adam Kotsko, Late Star Trek (2025)

Adam Kotsko is a philosopher of, I guess, at least some repute, but I know him best for two things. One, he wrote a really sharp piece about the college literacy crisis, one that I actually assign in my 101 classes and students tend to respond to really well. Second, he is a prolific poster on Reddit, usually on the "Daystrom Insitute" subreddit, which is devoted to highly detailed analysis of Star Trek. (You might think this would be my jam, but after about a year of subscribing I left the sub because 1) they are too much focused on producing convoluted in-universe theories, and 2) they don't allow jokes!)

Thus he is the kind of person some call an "aca-fan." As an academic and a fan myself, I have read a lot of aca-fan work and seen a lot of aca-fan presentations at conferences... and to be honest, I mostly hate it. In my experience, there are largely two kinds of bad aca-fan work. The first are ones who are good fans but bad academics. Lots of enthusiasm for, say, Doctor Who, but little academic rigor; their fannish instincts overwhelm the analysis. Too many fandom comments or jokes, a lack of real engagement with the text in question. I once saw a presentation at a conference and when I asked a question applying one thing the presenter had said to a different aspect of the text, the answer was basically, "Well, it's just a tv show. It's for fun!" I mean, if that's your attitude, why are you here to begin with. (Literally while I was writing this post a friend texted me to complain she was at a talk that was "just heart eyes as a talk.")

But there's another type of bad aca-fan in my opinion, the one who is not actually a very good fan. They've watched some Doctor Who, but they seem unaware that there's a whole rich universe of fan discourse, they are unfamiliar with the production history or whatever; they just bring their academic framework of choice to the text but don't really engage with its nuances because they don't know it. To me, this one is almost worst, because why are you even doing this if you don't really know the thing you're analyzing? (A good example of both of these problems is the book Doctor Who in Time and Space, which I read and reviewed about a decade ago.)

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era
by Adam Kotsko

Published: 2025
Read: July 2025

I am pleased to say that Kotsko has produced a book that is characteristic of neither approach. Late Star Trek is a monograph about Star Trek that takes inventively as its unit of analysis the period from 2001 to the present: Enterprise, the novels produced while there were no shows on the air, the reboot film trilogy, and the streaming shows from Paramount+. Kotsko's argument is that this is the era where the people making Star Trek "made Star Trek that is about its status as Star Trek, rather than simply doing what people like about Star Trek" (27). The shows (and books and comics) became self-conscious in a way that sometimes paid off... but often did not.

Kotsko's approach is a careful one overall; he is attentive to both the details of the texts themselves and the nuances of their production. He knows his stuff as a fan (for the most part), but he also is never blinded by his fanboyism. I thought his analysis was overall quite strong—which might be to say, he usually says things that I agreed with! I was struck by his observation that basically every post-2001 incarnation of Star Trek has been about terrorism to some degree, a choice that made sense in 2001 but maybe not so much that we should still be making it twenty years later. I felt like there is probably more for some future writer to dig into here—is it an expression of our contemporary lack of belief in utopian futures? or an expression of the old Jameson canard about the end of the world vs. the end of capitalism? or frustration with the continuation of the surveillance state long past its supposed rationale?

His consideration of Enterprise is a good one, pointing out the ways in which the show was kind of misconceived, but kind of worked sometimes, and ultimately had to be reinvented two times across its four-year run. Many people think that the fourth season redeemed the show, and though he kinds of leans in this direction, he also points out its failings, such as the fact that it basically stopped pretending to even care about its characters, just turning them into observers for moments of fan service.

I did find the weakest part was his analysis of the so-called "novelverse," the interconnected web of novels that ran from 2001 to the debut of Picard in 2020 continuing the twenty-fourth-century shows beyond their screen end point. This is probably because he clearly is a fan of what they did, whereas I (as I have chronicled exhaustively in a series of posts on this blog) have largely been skeptical, if not exhausted, by many of the choices the so-called "Destiny-era novels" have made; I would argue they commit many of the same mistakes he later identifies in Picard, just differently.  In particular, it seems to me that the novels are just as suffused by the un-Star Trekky cynicism he criticizes Picard for (I write this in the middle of reading Available Light, where far too many characters seem to think carrying out coups against democratically elected leaders is just one of those things), but he doesn't discuss that.

I think probably Kotsko just has a different register of enjoyment than me when it comes to storyworlds—I think he's more into the building of continuity as an end in itself. Not to the extent of some fans, but you can definitely see it in the three "novelverse" authors he singles out for praise: Kirsten Beyer, Christopher L. Bennett, and David Mack. Beyer I can't really comment on (I only read the first of her "Voyager relaunch" novels and decided it wasn't for me, and it does seem like Kotsko considers it the weakest), but Bennett and Mack are probably my least favorite of the regular writers of the Destiny-era books, both having in my opinion a poor command of characterization. Still, though, I appreciate his detailed attention to the novels, and that it comes from a place of consideration and love; it was this part of the book that made me wonder what kind of "aca-fan" work I might pitch if I were to build a glass house for others to throw stones at.

He makes good points about the so-called "Kelvin timeline" films, especially their weirdly repetitive structure and self-referentiality (each one is about Starfleet needing to get back to doing Starfleet things... instead, you know, just making a movie about doing Starfleet things), and he rightly explains why Star Trek Beyond is the best one. I really liked his analysis of how the Kelvin comics (which I haven't gotten to yet except for Countdown, Nero, and Spock: Reflections) tried to make the flawed conception of the reboot films work as a basis for ongoing stories. I am doubtful there are more invested academic analyses of Star Trek comics out there than this!

I liked the whole book, as you can tell, but I found Kotsko's takes on Discovery and Picard particularly potent. Like me, he sees the first season of Discovery as its strongest despite its missteps; he sees the third season onward as competent but ultimately boring. Similarly, he thinks the original premise of Picard was its most interesting even though the way the first season ended was disastrous, and though everyone likes to dump on season two of Picard, I was gratified for his detailed takedown of the flaws of season three. As he says, each season of Picard is basically a new show that seemingly demonstrates contempt for the previous seasons of the show.

There are some small flaws, such as details gotten wrong: he calls Pocket editor Marco Palmieri "Mark," says there were three cancelled Kelvin timeline novels but there were actually four. The most egregious factual error is that the timeline in appendix 2 is completely useless because it gives all the twenty-fourth-century shows twenty-third-century dates and thus intermixes them with the original series. 

Probably the thing that bothered me most is that Kotsko's experience of Star Trek fandom is primarily based on Reddit, and reflects some of its idiosyncrasies seemingly without recognizing that they are idiosyncrasies, such as his use of the terms "alpha canon" and "beta canon," terms that really aren't used elsewhere, and which are misleading, since "beta canon" is definitionally actually not canonical! Obviously I'm biased, but the TrekBBS is mentioned/cited only a couple times (including a thread I myself participated in), but I think it has a more production-focused user base that would have counterbalanced the more lore-focused user base of Reddit. (And given him more insight into some areas he is interested in, such the reception of Enterprise season three. That said, I appreciate that a detailed discussion of Enterprise's famous season three episode "The Interregnum" is included in a scholarly work!)

Overall, this is an incisive piece of criticism; Kotsko is an academic and a fan, and in the best sense of both words. It gave me some good stuff to chew on, I zipped through it in just a day and a half, and I'm curious to check out some of the work he cites as well.

Hugos 2025: Star Trek: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way

Published: 2024
Acquired: December 2024
Read: April 2025

Written by Ryan North
Art by Chris Fenoglio

Colors by Charlie Kirchoff
Letters by Jeff Eckleberry

I received this book as a Christmas gift from my wife and kids, but was given a bump to actually read it when it was selected as a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story—the first Hugo finalist I'll be writing up on this blog. It's a choose-your-own-adventure-style comic book set in the world of Star Trek: Lower Decks, where you play as Ensign Beckett Mariner. (This makes it the first Star Trek tie-in to be a Hugo finalist; I really must update my Star Trek at the Hugos post.) Writer Ryan North is the perfect man for this project, as both a longtime comics writer who knows how to work within constraining forms and wrote a choose-your-own-adventure version of Hamlet.

It's very cleverly done, much more cleverly than it needs to be, to be honest. I'm going to spoil the whole thing here, so if that bothers you, don't read the rest of this post.

The book begins with you waking up; you can elect to bother Tendi and Rutherford in Engineering, Boimler who's off-duty, or your mom on the bridge. Depending on what you do, different bad things happen: a Borg attack, a tribble infestation, and so on. I ended up in the various paths around the Borg attack initially, and quickly came to realize they all ended with everyone dying... except that if you had only known the Cerritos's prefix code, you could have (for some reason) saved the ship. Eventually I went down one path where there were a pair of voices talking after you died about obtaining the prefix code, and about how you only ever went for a very limited range of choices.

Eventually, I exhausted all the paths, but skimming through it, I could see there was a lot of the book I hadn't gained access to yet. I started just flipping through, and eventually I found a page where instead of being able to pick between coffee and raktajino for breakfast (which is how the book begins), you were also able to pick tea. With a little bit of detective work, I was able to figure out how you ought to be able to get there" the mysterious voices say at one point that they can't introduce new choices but it is possible to add existing choices. If you add together the coffee page number with the raktajino page number, you get to the tea page—and that unlocks a whole new network of choices.

What you start to figure out is this is all a holodeck simulation, explaining why different bad things happen if you make different choices. There's Star Trek explanations for the whole structure and format of the book, justifying the form in terms of the content. It's very cleverly done! You as the reader also begin to participate in book, talking to Mariner about what she's doing and why. You have to help Mariner figure out a way out of this situation, which begins to turn even more grim than you might have imagined. There's another bit where you have to do math to make a jump from one part of the book to another, this one cleverly done, where on one bad ending, Mariner gives you half of a math problem, and you have to play out another bad ending to get the other half of the math problem, so that you can put both those things together and finally get to a path that allows you to play out a good ending.

So yeah, it's put together incredibly well (see my diagram of it on the right), using Star Trek tropes to explain a lot of choose-your-own-adventure tropes, and pushing the form into interesting, unusual directions. The ending is even kind of moving, as you save the Cerritos, but the crew of the ship don't really understand what actually happened. This was my first Best Graphic Story finalist, and I wouldn't have guessed it going in, but upon finishing it, it immediately felt like the one to beat!

I do have one very pedantic complaint: for a book where page numbers are essential, they are printed annoyingly small! It's harder than it needs to be to flip through this book, and you need to flip through it a lot.

Hugos 2022: Ballots for Graphic Story and Dramatic Presentation

And here is my last Hugo ballot post! We have my nominations and votes in the "visual" categories: comics, tv, and film. I should note that I was done with the comics back in June... and didn't finish the film/tv stuff until two days before the deadline. I find it easier to organize my reading than my watching, I guess. (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

I don't read many comics right as they come out, so my ability to nominate things for Best Graphic Story is always pretty limited. This year I nominated the same thing I did last year... a My Little Pony / Transformers crossover comic! Seemed unlikely to me that The Magic of Cybertron would make the ballot, but I did my bit...

I nominated two tv episodes in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), both episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks season 2 that I enjoyed immensely: "wej Duj" (Klingonese for "Three Ships"), where the lower-decks crew of the USS Cerritos are paralleled by lower-decks escapades on Klingon and Vulcan ships, and "First First Contact", the delightfully triumphant season finale. To my surprise and delight, "wej Duj" actually made the final ballot! It's the first Star Trek installment to make it since an episode of Discovery in 2018.

I also nominated some random Big Finish stuff I enjoyed, though I have no expectations that any of it will ever make the ballot. Two Torchwood audio dramas (The Five People You Kill in Middlesbrough and Madam I'm) in Short Form, and one Doctor Who audio drama (Shadow of the Daleks) in Long Form.

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Best Graphic Story or Comic

6. Monstress: The Vow, script by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda 

Below, I said I was only really interested in the backmatter in Die. Well, at least Die has interesting backmatter...

 

5. Die: Bleed, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans

The first volume of this series was a finalist in 2020, the second in 2021. This is the fourth and final; I didn't enjoy those previous volumes enough to feel motivated to read the third before this, so I just skipped it. (It's about people trapped in a TTRPG, and each volume focuses on a different writer who influenced RPGs. The first did Tolkien, the second the Brontës, and this one Lovecraft; it turns out the one I skipped did Wells, so maybe I ought to go back.) I found this hard to follow—too many characters, and even though it came out as twenty issues across three years, it's clearly meant to be read in one go. It seems to be trying to say something interesting about queerness and RPGs, but I couldn't follow the story enough to tell you what. The most interesting part was definitely the backmatter, where Kieron Gillen interviews people about the evolution of RPGs.

4. Lore Olympus, Volume One by Rachel Smythe

This is a webcomic, now released in print, that retells the story of Hades and Persephone with modern trappings. The comics language here uses a lot of manga conventions, and manga tropes dominate the romance story, too. Overall I enjoyed it well enough. Some good jokes, nice art, but sometimes I struggled to keep the characters straight, and the emotions are a little overwrought. This is clearly the beginning of a long story (this volumes collects episodes 1-25 of a serial that has run 200 thus far), and I am not sure it is really aimed at me, though the end promises a darker turn that I would be curious to see the repercussions of.

3. Once & Future: The Parliament of Magpies, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Dan Mora

This is volume three of a series about the Arthurian mythos rising up again in modern Britain; I read volume one when it was a finalist last year. (I didn't intentionally skip volume two; I didn't realize I'd skipped an installment until there were a bunch of references to Beowulf in this one.) It's pretty fun stuff, with strong characters, good art, and occasional moments of genius... but like all the original Kieron Gillen comics I've read, I have this sort of vibe that he's almost but not quite as good as Brian K. Vaughan. Unfair but there you go.

2. Far Sector, script by N. K. Jemisin, art by Jamal Campbell

In some ways I enjoyed this more than Once & Future: as a somewhat erudite superhero comic, it's just more my jam than the non-stop-high-concept kind of thing Kieron Gillen tends to write. On the other hand, this is a good superhero comic but not a great one, and Once & Future is definitely up to more. On the whole, I would say my enjoyment of the two is pretty comparable, so I gave the edge to Far Sector on two bases: I do like superhero comics a lot, and it's also a complete story as opposed to a fragment.

1. Strange Adventures, script by Tom King, art by Mitch Gerads & Evan "Doc" Shaner

As soon as I finished this, it was clearly the best of the four Graphic Story finalists I had read thus far. Beautiful art, thematic complexity. There are snatches of greatness in, say, Once & Future, but this is the kind of thing this category ought to be rewarding.

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

6. Encanto; directed by Jared Bush & Byron Howard; script by Charise Castro Smith & Jared Bush

This is (if you need to be told) an animated musical about a Colombian family who lives in a magical house, where each resident of the house has a magical power... except one. I really enjoyed this; it's a solid film with some great songs and interesting thematic beats. I really liked "Surface Pressure," about one sister's need to never stop doing what the family needs, and "Waiting on a Miracle," about the protagonist's desire to do something to help the family. It's a good depiction of the complexity of family dynamics, about how people want to contribute to a system that has disappointed them. I think it deserves awards, but I'm not convinced it deserves this award. Sure, it's got magic, but is it really in dialogue with the genre of science fiction and fantasy? Or is it more a contribution to the genre of children's animation? (if that makes sense) This is to say, don't let its low ranking leave you thinking I didn't like it. I just don't think it's in the core sensibility of what I seek to reward with a Hugo.

5. Dune, Part One; directed by Denis Villeneuve; written by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth

I have never been a Dune partisan. I largely bounced off the book as a teenager (though I probably would find it more digestible now), I have seen the Lynch film a couple times, and I remember enjoying the Sci-Fi Channel original miniseries. This adaptation is probably the best one you could imagine, with room to breathe due to the increased running time but also the budget not afforded the Sci-Fi Channel mini. It's impeccably cast, and like all Villeneuve films I've seen, it looks great. But I felt... somehow unmoved by it all. Magisterial, but I didn't feel invited into either the world or the characters' emotional lives. It's like you're at a remove the whole time.

4. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings; directed by Destin Daniel Cretton; script by Dave Callaham, Destin Daniel Cretton, and Andrew Lanham

Last year, my wife and caught up on Marvel films (at the time, Spider-Man: Far from Home was the most recent), and I felt like that was it: following Avengers: Endgame, there was nothing more I wanted out of them, and I was ready to move on. I haven't seen one since, though I guess I ought to go see Thor 4 in theatres given I saw the other three in theatres. All this is to say that I was actually quite charmed by this, which follows the Marvel origin story formula, but is a reasonably strong execution of it. It has a real sense of style and flair, a good soundtrack, some great set pieces, the best villain I can remember in a Marvel film for a long long time, and a totally gratuitous but excellent comic relief character.* On the other hand, I thought star Simu Liu was charismatic and likeable, but his emotional arc didn't really seem to be present, writing-wise. I really struggled with ranking this. Is it a better movie than Dune? I don't know. Certainly it is less ambitious, and do the Hugos need to award (what is by my count) the eighth Marvel origin movie? Anyway, as it often is, my tiebreaker was the question, "What am I more likely to rewatch?" And the answer to that question is definitely Shang-Chi.

3. WandaVision, created by Jac Schaeffer, directed by Matt Shakman

Thankfully, this was the only complete-season finalist this year. I found this pretty fun at first: the sitcom pastiches are excellently done, and the language of television is abused to disconcerting effect. Moments where the camera angle suddenly shifts out of the sitcom standard, or the credits roll and things keep on going, or the crossing over of the better Quicksilver, are wonderful. Elizabeth Olson and Paul Bettany get to show off more here than in every Avengers film put together. Plus the episodes that are basically just sitcoms are very well done ones! I found this less interesting the further away it got from that basic set-up, however. There are a lot of characters who ultimately don't serve very important functions, narratively or thematically, and by the final episode, the show has abandoned its interesting meta play in favor of a somewhat-above-average Marvel punch-up. The sitcom stuff was ultimately a puzzle to be solved, not an idea to be explored. The idea that someone who lost her real family life and found solace in sitcom families might try to make her own sitcom family seems ripe with possibilities for saying something about family, but the finale doesn't go there, and it has none of the playfulness that characterized the rest of the series. Still, we have a number of episodes of really enjoyable stuff prior to that point, and I was definitely more involved than in Dune, and I would happily see this win.

2. 승리호, directed by Jo Sung-hee, script by Jo Sung-hee & Mocan

Space Sweepers is a Korean space film, about space scavengers who end up in over their heads when they discover a robot with a hydrogen bomb inside it aboard a derelict spaceships... a robot in the form of a human child. Okay, look, it's not a great movie. The villain (played by Richard Armitage!) has no real motivation, and a couple of the characters' backstories feel tacked on, and I found bits of it confusing and/or clumsy. But, you know, group-of-underdogs-in-a-spaceship unite to do great things has basically been my favorite genre of sf film since Star Wars, and this is a charming example of it with a lot of heart. A special shout-out to the character of Bubs, who at first seems to be a quippy murderous robot, but is soon revealed to have extra dimensions. Is it really the second-best thing on this list? Probably not; I think on any objective measure of "good film" it goes below Dune. But would I be excited for it to win a Hugo? More than anything else on this list.

1. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Filmed Adaptation of the Chivalric Romance by Anonymous, written and directed by David Lowery

I didn't know much about this going in beyond that it was based on an Arthurian medieval text (one with which I am unfamiliar) and that it was controversially received. Well, I really enjoyed it: it reminds me of the kind of 1980s pre-Lord of the Rings fantasy film I might have randomly plucked off the shelf at Blockbuster as a kid, and been weirded out but entranced by, before the fantasy genre of film became codified as massive epics. Well, that crossed with a Tarkovsky movie! Beautiful, jarring, potent. Exactly the kind of thing I like the Hugos to expose me to (doubt I would have bothered otherwise), and the kind of thing I like to reward.

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) 

6. The Wheel of Time 1x06: "The Flame of Tar Valon", written by Justine Juel Gillmer, directed by Salli Richardson-Whitfeld

This seems like a perfectly acceptable piece of epic fantasy, if you're into that kind of thing. The mean thing to say is that I liked it better when it was called The Lord of the Rings.

5. Arcane: League of Legends 1x09: "The Monster You Created", written by Christian Linke & Alex Yee, directed by Pascal Charrue & Arnaud Delord

This is a 3D-animated cartoon on Netflix set in the world of the League of Legends videogame, and the only thing on the short-form ballot I hadn't even heard of before it became a finalist. I don't have anything against this, but it was the final episode of a nine-episode serialized story that made absolutely no concessions for anyone; there wasn't even a "previously on..." at the beginning. Which I get, no one but me is watching this show this way, but I had no ability to assess it really. It looks nice when it's still, but I found the way people moved a bit off, like it was, well, a videogame. Some very dramatic moments that had me curious about context... but also very gruesome in places, which doesn't appeal. I was going to put this below Wheel of Time but then I realized at least I was never bored watching this (though I didn't find the fights very interesting). 

 

4. Loki 1x04: "The Nexus Event", written by Eric Martin, directed by Kate Herron

I'm sure this was quite exciting to people who had been watching Loki, and indeed, there was some fun stuff in it: I liked Loki getting punched by Sif again and again. But, like, what is a "nexus event"? Maybe someday I will watch all of Loki, but until then, this didn't quite work on its own. My friend Christiana hates it when I evaluate tv this way, but I need some kind of limit. If I am obligated to watch the previous three episodes of Loki, am I not also obligated to watch the previous nineteen episodes of For All Mankind? And that's not happening.

3. The Expanse 5x10: "Nemesis Games", written by Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck and Naren Shankar, directed by Breck Eisner

As I always say, I stopped watching The Expanse during season 3 (not the show's fault), but since I read the books, I was mostly able to follow this out of context. It's another perfectly competent episode whose emotional beats might have landed better had I seen the previous nine episodes of the season, but landed well enough regardless, especially the bits with Naomi. The Expanse has made the ballot five out of the last six times, and this was the best Expanse finalist since "Leviathan Wakes."

2. For All Mankind 2x10: "The Grey", written by Matt Wolpert & Ben Nedivi, directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan

This did work on its own, to my surprise. For All Mankind is an alternative history show where the Space Race continued unabated after the 1960s. This episode is set in the 1980s, and America has a base on the Moon, Apollo-Soyuz is going ahead, there are missile platforms in space, and so on. I am a sucker for shows about competent people working together to solve difficult problems, and this is one of them. (I particularly liked Wrenn Schmidt as Margo Madison, director of Mission Control.) There are lots of good moments in this, a show about how even in dark times we can work together, and it very much made me want to go back and watch the first two seasons. Except, you know, it's on Apple TV+ (surely one of the less necessary streaming services; I signed up for a week-long free trial to watch this).

1. Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x09: "wej Duj", written by Kathryn Lyn, directed by Bob Suarez

Like I said above, I nominated this. This was a great episode of the overall strong second season of Lower Decks, with the story of the lower-decks Cerritos crew paralleled with their counterparts on Klingon and Vulcan ships, all coming together in a satisfying way. The character of T'Lyn, the Vulcan prone to "outbursts," was particularly fun, as was security chief Shaxs doing pottery. It's Lower Decks at its best, and you bet that if a show I actually watch gets a Hugo nomination, I am going to rank it highly.

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Overall Thoughts

This is one of the better Best Graphic Story ballots I've seen; even if I never enjoy Kieron Gillen comics all that much, there's no denying he's one of the medium's most acclaimed writers. There are no finalists this year that stick out as mediocre-but-nominated-for-some-other-reason. Monstress won for its first three volumes but hasn't won since; my guess is based on past voting patterns, N. K. Jemisin will win yet another Hugo.

Similarly, this is a strong long-form Dramatic Presentation ballot, with all six movies being fundamentally enjoyable. (I did not fall asleep during any of them, unlike last year.) I stand by the prediction I made last year before this year's ballot was even out: Dune will win.

I find the state of short form annoying... but what can you do about it when serialized shows dominate the sf&f television market? Now that The Good Place is no longer in contention, I have no idea what Hugo voters actually like.

* After the Mandarin reference, I reminded my wife of the events of Iron Man 3, which we saw some time ago. I figure that was it: we explain how this move relates to the other one for the continuity nerds in the audience, then move on. Little did I expect that five minutes later Ben Kingsley would turn up! If you told me that as originally filmed, his character left them before they went through the portal, I would believe it; I don't think he interacted with a main character again after they crossed over, so you could have totally beefed up his role in reshoots.

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part III: Television, 2017-Present

Continued from my discussion of The Next Generation tv show and films, plus Enterprise, three weeks ago...

After twelve years away, Star Trek finally returned to television (kind of) with the debut of Star Trek: Discovery (2017-present). Discovery featured a new logo with a new typeface:

Peters over at FontShop identifies it as a customized version of "Redrail Superfast." Here's how the logo would look if rendered in the actual Redrail Superfast:

The main change I can identify is the removal of the more finicky serifs: in the base font, almost every letter has these points that go out and then down, but in the Discovery logo, they just go out, if they're there at all. It is somewhat reminiscent of the original Star Trek logo... but I am not a fan. I think it's two things: those Rs look off to me, imbalanced in some way, and only clearly Rs because of the surrounding context. The other is that its finickiness means it doesn't read well from a distance, unlike most other Star Trek logos. I think about this a lot because I shelve my Star Trek trade paperbacks in the dining room and often stare at my bookshelf while trying to get my son to slowly work his way through a meal:

Maybe the coloring is partially the issue, but I don't think the Disco logo stands out as well as the Deep Space Nine or Enterprise logos to either side of it; the novel titles are also in the customized Redrail Superfast, and similarly hard to make out, something the S&S cover designer seems to have admitted when they changed font for the sixth Disco novel.

As I mentioned in part I, the Picard (2020-present) promotional materials used the classic Star Trek font:

The subtitle font could be a number of different sans serifs, but I am pretty sure it is "DIN Condensed."

However, the logo that appeared on literally every piece of Picard tie-in material and advertising was not the logo used in the actual show! The actual show's logo looked like this:

It maintains the DIN Condensed for the subtitle (and in fact, the whole title sequence uses DIN Condensed for credits), but the "STAR TREK" is in Redrail Superfast. This was used in the show's title sequence and, as far as I can tell, literally nowhere else!

I think what happened here is an attempt at branding cohesion that someone changed their minds on at the last minute, because when the cartoon Lower Decks debuted later in 2020, this was its logo:

We have the classic "Star Trek" font for the series title, combined with a unique font for the subtitle. I couldn't find anyone on the Internet stating what the subtitle font is, nor could I figure it out myself; I suspect it's a heavily customized version of something preexisting, if not bespoke. It's definitely going for a comedy vibe, but it's also a little reminiscent of the classic TNG font, I think, with the gaps in the R and the D. (Here's a good post at the TrekBBS where a poster imagines what the logo would look like if it used the actual TNG font.) I should note that for its credits and episode titles, Lower Decks uses the exact font TNG used for those things, "Crillee Italic."

So we have a bit of a pattern emerging in the CBS All Access era, with classic "Star Trek" title and unique subtitle. This would be confirmed when Discovery returned for its third season in late 2020, debuting an all-new logo:

Aha, it all fits together! "Star Trek" for the title; "Eurostile" for the subtitle. Eurostile is one of the fonts used for the livery of Starfleet vessels; it's pretty close to what was used for the Enterprise logo, in fact. Interestingly, though, when the season three premiere debuted on CBSAA, it still used Redrail Superfast for the "Star Trek" part, but later they went back and changed it. So it seems like someone decided they wanted a consistent logo, but late in the game, it was decided that the "Star Trek" font was a better choice for this than Redrail Superfast.

I agree, though there's something indelibly original series about that logo that makes it an odd fit for a universal Star Trek brand. Maybe if it had been used all along, but as I discussed in part I, it has pretty much been contained to the original show and things meant to evoke it. It just seems wrong having it attached to a show about Picard! Surely it should have been something like this:

(forgive my crude mock-up)

The next Star Trek show we know anything concrete about is Prodigy, the Nickelodeon cartoon, which will air in 2021. It keeps the theme going:

There's also the Captain Pike spin-off, Strange New Worlds, but no logo has been released for that yet. Based on the current conformity of the CBSAA era, though, I think we can guess pretty safely what font will be used for the "Star Trek" part of the title, at least!

Continue on to next month's discussion of the fonts of the books...