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?

Doctor Who: Destination Prague by Steven Savile (ed.)

Back in the LiveJournal days, I had a friend there who was invited to pitch for this book; he reached out to me and my friend Michael for Doctor Who advice because he hadn't really seen the show. (In retrospect, he was kind of obnoxious; he got in the book, and I saw him making comments in promotion of his story like, "I always liked x Doctor because of y," when I know for a fact he'd never seen a story featuring x Doctor until we recommended one to him!) Because of this, I seem to recall (it has been almost two decades, so I may be wrong) that editor Steven Savile wanted to do an anthology covering the history of a city, and was torn between doing London and Prague. Prague has a rich history, but it seems kind of random to be honest (I explained the premise of this book to my wife while reading it and she laughed), and how many Doctor Who authors know a lot about the history of Prague? London would be more familiar territory... but of course, probably too familiar. What's the USP of a book made up of Doctor Who stories set in London?

Doctor Who: Short Trips #20: Destination Prague
edited by Steven Savile

Published: 2007
Acquired: May 2009
Read: July 2025

Obviously, Savile decided to go with Prague in the end. I thought the book opened a bit oddly, with a story about an inhabitant-less Prague being taken out of time, hardly the kind of thing that makes the reader experience Prague and thus see the upside to setting a bunch of stories there. The next story takes place in Prague's future, and so does the next, and so does the next. I found this a bit of an odd choice, too—I felt like if the selling point of this book was Prague's rich history, then maybe we ought to lead off with a story set in that rich history.

Halfway through, though, I realized we still hadn't had a historical, and so that must be intentional in the sense that I was wrong about the book's premise. It wasn't chronicling past and future history, but only future history. I feel like this is an okay idea, though in that case, I think it probably would make more sense to go with a city readers are more familiar with, like London. But I also think that if you are going to tell just future history, it would be better to do it in chronological order. If the book had a mix of historical and future-set stories, then jumping around would definitely be the right choice for the sake of variety. But if the decision is to only tell the future story of the city, then jumping around makes that future story hard to discern. It would be neat to get a series of snapshots of Prague's future, chronicling its various ascents and descents moving ever further into the future... but what we get instead is dispersed and fragmented and hard to glom onto.

On top of that, I think the choice of just telling future-Prague stories doesn't play to the authors' strengths. I suspect a bunch of authors largely unfamiliar with a city could do some research to find interesting historical incidents to build stories around, and I think a bunch of authors familiar with a city might have found something to say about its future. But telling stories about the future of a city you don't know much about is a tricky business, and mostly what we get are pretty generic sci-fi stories and/or repetitive transpositions of classic Prague things into the future, like (if I counted correctly) three different Golem stories and three different Kafka's "Metamorphosis" riffs.

Like the last Short Trips volume I read, The Quality of Leadership, this one has a second, implicit USP: the editor is not part of the usual cohort of mid-2000s Doctor Who tie-in writers, and thus they have a different Rolodex of authors to call on, most of whom had never written a Doctor Who story (or maybe just one) and many of whom never would again. Some of them are people who have had (or would go on to have) pretty decent writing careers outside of Doctor Who in fact: names I knew from other contexts included Mike W. Barr (a number of DC comics from the 1980s, including Batman: Year Two and Star Trek: The Mirror Universe Saga), Keith R.A. DeCandido (innumerable Star Trek stories, including editing the S.C.E. series), Kevin Killiany (S.C.E.: Orphans), Mary Robinette Kowal (the Lady Astronaut series), Paul Kupperberg (JSA: Ragnarok), Todd McCaffrey (Pern, though I've never actually read any of his contributions), and Sean Williams (The New Jedi Order: Force Heretic).

Bringing in outside writers to an existing tie-in franchise can be hit-or-miss in my experience. Sometimes those outsiders have an expanded way of seeing it, and they come at it from atypical, interesting angles. But conversely, sometimes they have a more limited understanding of it, because their understanding is mostly shaped by what's on screen; because they haven't been living and breathing tie-ins for a decade, they don't see the dynamism that the premise really allows for. Doctor Who can do really interesting stuff in the medium of prose short fiction... but I don't think you'd know it by reading this book, where it seemed to me that most writers were trying to tell fairly "typical" Doctor Who adventures with aliens invading or time-travel shenanigans or rogue Time Lords, stuff that might work very well on screen with a canvas of ninety minutes, but comes across as superficial on the printed page. In particular, the book suffers from the sheer quantity of stories; some Short Trips anthologies have as few as seven or eight, if I recall correctly, but this one crams in over twenty, meaning many of them are by necessity quite short. You just can't do the "typical" Doctor Who story in fifteen-ish pages in a satisfactory way.

Thus, I found this one a bit of a struggle. Indeed, I think it's indicative that of the three stories I did think were very good, two of them were by authors who have written multiple other Doctor Who stories. The first story that really clicked for me was Mary Robinette Kowal's "Suspension and Disbelief"; it's weird and short (the Doctor has to help a woman whose husband is going to be executed for chopping down a tree so she can make a puppet; the resolution involves a giant puppet) but inventive and well told.

The second was James Swallow's "Lady of the Snows," which was a beautiful story about an artist falling in love with an amnesiac Charley Pollard, using her as his muse, with some great imagery and interesting thematic resonance between what the artist is doing to Charley, and what has happened to Prague in the far future. (To be fair to Swallow, who has gone on to write a lot of Doctor Who stories, I think this was just his fourth one or so.)

The last one was also the very last in the book, Stel Pavlou's "Omegamorphosis." (And to be fair to Pavlou, though he has written other Doctor Who stories, it's literally just two of them. But all three are bangers!) This is the book's third and final Kafka riff... but it's the only one of them that actually feels Kafkaesque, surreal and disconcerting. 

So, I think there are better Short Trips volumes out there, and I unfortunately suspect this one was fundamentally misconceived from the beginning.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Short Trips: How The Doctor Changed My Life

Lady Blackhawk in Guy Gardner: Warrior

In the 2000s, the original Lady Blackhawk, Zinda Blake, was a recurring character in Birds of Prey,* which I've already read. What I hadn't read, though, was the storyline where she was transported through time from her native era to the present day, and so I wanted to read that as part of my project to read Blackhawk comics. 

Thus, I read every issue of Guy Gardner: Warrior in which she appeared, checking the Grand Comics Database and League of Comic Geeks to determine which issues those were. (You can see the full list of them at the bottom of this post.) During this time, the Green Lantern Corps was all dead or something (I know I read about this when I read Emerald Fallout as part of Darkstars, but I don't remember the details), and Guy had discovered that he was actually half-alien, getting powers from his Vuldarian DNA rather than a power ring. (Did he still have these powers when the GLC reformed during Geoff Johns's run? Were they retconned away? Or just forgotten?)

from Guy Gardner: Warrior #24

I didn't except her to play a big role... but I did expect her to play more of a role than this! Zinda first appears in issue #24, the Zero Hour tie-in; in this one, Guy keeps jumping through time in pursuit of Extant, along with Supergirl, Batgirl, and Steel. In one time period, they encounter Lady Blackhawk; she comes along on their next couple hops through time, and that's it.

She doesn't appear again for five issues, until #29. In this one, Guy is opening Warriors, his superhero-themed bar (or bar for just superheroes? it wasn't very clear to me), and Zinda pops up. She says that after the events of issue #24, she found herself standing outside the bar and just came in. And that's it, that's all the explanation there is! She and Wildcat (who also seems to work at Warriors; in terms of his chronology, this would be after his Showcase '94 story, before Batman/Wildcat) recognize each other, but there was no previous story where the two interacted as far as I know, because during the time Lady Blackhawk was a main character in Blackhawk (c. 1959-68, see items #4-6 in the list below), Wildcat and the rest of the JSA were in comics limbo (or on Earth-Two).

from Guy Gardner: Warrior #43

From then on, Zinda is essentially just in crowd scenes of the employees at Warriors. She doesn't really do anything characterful or interesting; the bolshy, swaggering woman of Gail Simone's Birds of Prey does not yet exist. On two separate occasions, she flies other characters somewhere in a helicopter, and that's it; on the left you can see basically the only significant line of dialogue she gets between issues #36 and 43.

Continuity-wise, her appearance is a bit of a throwback, because there was no Zinda Blake in the post-Crisis Blackhawks... though I guess as the Rick Burchett Blackhawk ongoing only made it up to 1950 (aside from the 1963-68 span briefly covered in Blackhawk Special #1, see item #11), we could imagine that Zinda did participate in the post-Crisis Blackhawks from 1956 to 1968 as what would have been the second Lady Blackhawk, following Natalie Reed. Or maybe Zero Hour changed the history of the Blackhawks back to something more closely resembling its pre-Crisis version. I guess I will see what various Blackhawk stories do going forward. (I do know that Blackhawk's post-Crisis name of "Janos Prohaska" sticks.)

You might wonder if removing Lady Blackhawk from time would have repercussions for those older stories, but I believe Zinda's last appearance was in issue #243, from November 1968 (see item #6), so as long as Zinda was plucked out of time between 1968 and the present day, there wouldn't be any issues.

So, overall, Guy Gardner: Warrior was not worth reading for Lady Blackhawk; I didn't experience anything I hadn't experienced by reading summaries on Cosmic Teams. But sometimes I read tangential comics as part of my reading projects and end up enjoying them on their own merits. Was that the case with Guy Gardner: Warrior?

Lots of things in this comic make no sense, but foremost among them is how many women want to sleep with Guy.
from Guy Gardner: Warrior #38

Not at all. In fact, this is probably one of the worst superhero comics I've ever read. Beau Smith continually introduces new ideas without having followed up on previous ones (there's an issue that ends with Guy's mother moving in as the cliffhanger; she literally never appears in the series again). The villains and the art are the 1990s "extreme" Image aesthetic at its worst, even in the hands of artists that would go good work elsewhere, like Phil Jimenez and Howard Porter. Most issues are boring at best, actively stupid at worst. I'm all for a good gender-swap story, but the one here is awful. Lots of gender violence throughout the series, including the gratuitous fridging of Arisia in the penultimate issue (I guess this must have been undone later, though).

The only benefit to reading this comic is that it gave me an excuse to read a bunch of entries in Guy Gardner Colon Warrior, one of the Internet's greatest blogs, which unfortunately reached its natural end point when they ran out of issues to take the piss out of. Amazing stuff. 

Zinda "Lady Blackhawk" Blake appeared in issues #24, 29, 36, and 38-43 of Guy Gardner: Warrior (Sept. 1994–June 1996) and issue #1 of Guy Gardner: Warrior Annual (1995). The stories were written by Beau Smith (#24, 29, 36, 38-43; Annual #1) with Flint Henry (Annual #1); pencilled by Mitch Byrd (#24), Phil Jimenez (#24, 29), Howard Porter (#24), Mike Parobeck (#24, 41), Flint Henry (Annual #1), Marc Campos (#36, 38-39, 41-42), Tom Grindberg (#38), Aaron Lopresti (#40), and Brad Gorby (#43); laid out by Jackson Guice (#24); inked/finished by John Stokes (#29), Dan Davis (#24, 29, 36, 38-43), Flint Henry (Annual #1), Rod Ramos (Annual #1), Bob Dvorak (Annual #1), Phil Jimenez (Annual #1), and Nick Napolitano (#39); colored by Stuart Chaifetz (#24), Gene D'Angelo (#29), Scott Baumann (Annual #1), and Lee Loughridge (#36, 38-43); lettered by Albert De Guzman; and edited by Eddie Berganza.

This is the twelfth in a series of posts about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers JLA: Year One. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
7. Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 / The Brave and the Bold #167 (1976-80)
8. Blackhawk (1982) 
9. Blackhawk vol. 1 #251-73 / DC Comics Presents #69 (1982-84) 
• Pre-Crisis Continuity 
10. Blackhawk: Blood & Iron (1987-89)
11. Blackhawk vol. 3 (1989-92) 

* She first joined the team in Between Dark & Dawn (2004), and was featured in several subsequent volumes including Blood and Circuits (2006-07), Club Kids (2007-08), Metropolis or Dust (2008), End Run (2010-11), and The Death of Oracle (2011).

Avatar: The Last Airbender Comics Chronology

My wife and kids are working their way through Avatar: The Last Airbender, and they've just got to the end of Book Two. When the Earth King and his bear turned up, my six-year-old remembered them... from the Avatar comics they had read on one of their reading sprees several months ago! I pointed out that the collected The Lost Adventures actually has three comics in it that bridge the gap between Books Two and Three, and suggested they read it before moving on. They did this, and then upon watching the first episode of Book Three, asked what comic went between that episode and the next.

Well! Never was this dad happier to be asked a question. With some help from the Avatar wiki, I worked out the timeline of Book Three's episodes, incorporating the comics from The Lost Adventures. When I told my wife I hadn't been able to find a good timeline online, she said... why don't you make one? So here we go. 

Thanks to the continuity notes on the Avatar wiki, and several threads on Reddit. Note that I don't care about things I have not and will not read, like the novels. I've used the episode numbers given on the Avatar wiki, which are different than the ones given on Netflix. Some of the after the show books overlap with each other (like technically Smoke and Shadow and North and South do), but I've listed them as single unit for readability.

KEY:

• #x##: episode
• TLA: The Lost Adventures comic
• TAT: Team Avatar Tales comic 
• Title: standalone graphic novel 

Book One: Water

• 1x01: "The Boy in the Iceberg"
• 1x02: "The Avatar Returns"
• 1x03: "The Southern Air Temple"
• 1x04: "The Warriors of Kyoshi"
• 1x05: "The King of Omashu"
• 1x06: "Imprisoned"
• 1x07/08: "Winter Solstice"
• 1x09: "The Waterbending Scroll"
• TLA: "Bee Calm" 
• 1x10: "Jet"
• 1x11: "The Great Divide"
• 1x12: "The Storm"
• 1x13: "The Blue Spirit"
• 1x14: "The Fortuneteller"
• 1x15: "Bato of the Water Tribe"
• TLA: "Water War" 
• 1x16: "The Deserter"
• 1x17: "The Northern Air Temple"
• TLA: "Don't Blow It!" 
• TLA: "Relics" 
• TLA: "Fruit-Stand Freestyle" 
• 1x18: "The Waterbending Master"
• 1x19/20: "The Siege of the North" 

Book Two: Earth

• 2x01: "The Avatar State"
• TAT: "Origami" 
• 2x02: "The Cave of Two Lovers"
• 2x03: "Return to Omashu"
• 2x04: "The Swamp"
• 2x05: "Avatar Day"
• 2x06: "The Blind Bandit"
• 2x07: "Zuko Alone"
• "Lost and Found" [uncollected comic] 
• 2x08: "The Chase" 
• 2x09: "Bitter Work"
• Katara and the Pirate's Silver
• TLA: "Sleepbending"
• TLA: "Lessons"
• TLA: "Sokka the Avatar"
• TLA: "Dirty Is Only Skin Deep"
• 2x10: "The Library"
• 2x11: "The Desert"
• TLA: "Divided We Fall"
• TLA: "Reach for the Toph" 
• 2x12: "The Serpent's Pass"
• 2x13: "The Drill"
• 2x14: "City of Walls and Secrets"
• 2x15: "Tales of Ba Sing Se"
• 2x16: "Appa's Lost Days" 
• 2x17: "Laka Laogai"
• 2x18: "The Earth King"
• 2x19: "The Guru"
• 2x20: "The Crossroads of Destiny"
• TLA: "It's Only Natural"
• TLA: "Going Home Again"
• TLA: "The Bridge" 

Book Three: Fire

• 3x01: "The Awakening"
• 3x02: "The Headband"
• TLA: "Private Fire"
• 3x03: "The Painted Lady"
• TLA: "Night Animals"
• TLA: "Boys' Day Out"
• 3x04: "Sokka's Master"
• TAT: "The Substitute" 
• 3x05: "The Beach"
• TLA: "Ember Island Arcade"
• 3x06: "The Avatar and the Fire Lord" 
• 3x07: "The Runaway"
• TLA: "Monster Slayer"
• 3x08: "The Puppetmaster"
• TLA: "Combustion Man on a Train"
• 3x09: "Nightmares and Daydreams"
• 3x10/11: "The Day of Black Sun"
• 3x12: "The Western Air Temple"
• 3x13: "The Firebending Masters"
• TLA: "Swordbending"
• TLA: "No Benders Allowed"
• Suki, Alone 
• 3x14: "The Boiling Rock," Part 1
• TLA: "Love Is a Battlefield"
• 3x15: "The Boiling Rock," Part 2 
• 3x16: "The Southern Raiders"
• TLA: "Dragon Days"
• 3x17: "The Ember Island Players"
• TLA: "Game Time"
• 3x18/19: "Sozin's Comet," Parts 1-2
• TLA: "Bumi vs. Toph, Round One"
• 3x20/21: "Sozin's Comet," Parts 3-4

After the Show

• "Matcha Makers" [uncollected comic] 
• The Promise
• TAT: "Rebound" 
• The Search
• TAT: "Shells" 
• TAT: "Sokka's Poem" 
• The Rift
• TAT: "Toph and the Boulder" 
• TAT: "Sisters" 
• TAT: "The Scarecrow" 
• Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy 
• Smoke and Shadow
• Azula in the Spirit Temple 
• North and South
• The Bounty Hunter and the Tea Brewer 
• Ashes of the Academy 
• Imbalance 

Every post-show timeline I looked at seems to have different, sometimes wildly different, placements, so your mileage may vary. If you have a compelling argument, I'd like to hear it!

The Pelican History of England #8: The Victorian Period (1815–1914)

Surely I am at least somewhat biased in favor of this book, because the nineteenth period is my own special period of study, which means that (as opposed to many of the earliest volumes) I have a wider context in which to fit this book. But even aside from that, I think England in the Nineteenth Century is one of the best installments of the Pelican History of England, if not the best.

One of the goals of this series was to provide a "social history" of England, to focus not just on "dates and kings and battles" as A. R. Myers put it in volume 4, but how society itself was changing and evolving. This is an admirable goal, but I have found that many of the series's writers struggled with pulling this off in practice, leading to books where you would get snapshots of different aspects of society, but no coherent story. In my review of volume 4, I made this comment about volume 1 that I think sums it up well: "I felt like I got told a lot about what Roman houses in Britain looked like but not, say, why the Romans turned up to build houses to begin with." Volume 4 itself was another that struggled with this approach.

Some other authors moved away from this, preferring to work forward chronologically through a period, and I've found these the better volumes, because they were usually able to tell a story about the era in question—but even though each writer has their own prism of what they're interested in, it still would feel like you were moving forward through kings and politics, even if not "kings and battles," as if they had perhaps only succeeded because they had abandoned the whole raison d'être for the series. (I particularly liked volumes 5 and 6.)

The Pelican History of England: 8. England in the Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)
by David Thomson

Originally published: 1950
Acquired: August 2008
Previously read: January 2013
Reread: July 2025

But Thomson manages to make a social history and to tell a story in a way that achieves the platonic ideal of this series, and I don't think it's just the fact that I'm a Victorianist myself that makes me say this. Thomson focuses on how during this time the English were coming into a greater understanding of their own society, and thus attempting to do something about. He is writing to reclaim the Victorian period to the way the modernists came to view it in the early twentieth century (see Woolf's Between the Acts, which would have come out less than a decade prior, for a good example of this): "The whole meaning of Victorian England is lost if it is thought of as a country of stuffy complacency and black top-hatted moral priggery.... [They were] a people engaged in a tremendously exciting adventure – the daring experiment of fitting industrial man into a democratic society. Their failures, faults, and ludicrous shortcomings are all too apparent: but the days when Mr Lytton Strachey could afford to laugh at the foibles of the 'Eminent Victorians' have passed,* and we must ask ourselves the question whether we can laugh at our great-grandfathers' attempts to solve problems to which we have so far failed to find an answer" (33-4). Yes, it was an age of empire and of unequally distributed wealth, "[b]ut even when least fully aware of whence their power came Victorian Englishmen usually used it well, for they used it in the cause of freedom" (10). Some of their attempts seem comic to us now, yet "[i]t is wiser but more difficult to try to understand mid-Victorianism than to ridicule it" (102).

Drawing on another historian, M. D. George, Thomson puts it this way when discussing the conditions of the working classes in London: "hardships begin to be talked about only when they are no longer taken for granted: and it is the increased attention paid to them that is perhaps the main feature of the period.... Sweated labour and cellar dwellings were not invented by the men who made the industrial revolution: they were discovered by them, discussed by them, and in the end partially remedied by them" (18-19).

The beginning of the book is a bit jarring coming off of J. H. Plumb's volume 7, because Plumb ended his book on kind of a cliffhanger: "To thinking men the horizon was dark and foreboding.... [I]n 1815, at the end of long endurance, there was fear, and envy, and greed, but little hope" (214). But Thomson doesn't see 1815 this way at all! He says that in 1815, England "was on the brink of an era of prosperity and greatness unrivalled in her whole history," though he does also admit "she was entering upon a period of remarkable social distress and unrest" (32). One of the selling points of the series was that each writer had the freedom to advance their own interpretation, so this isn't necessarily bad, but it does read weird, like when an issues of a comic book ends on a cliffhanger, but the next issue has a new creative team, so they just ignore it and do what they're interested in. Thomson doesn't position 1815 as a dark time like Plumb did, but as a time where people began to see the darkness and therefore began to do something about it.

Thus the book manages to tell a story, but instead of being the story of kings or prime ministers or battles, it's the story of how England attempted to improve itself; if there was "[t]he spread of social distress and economic upheaval," what matters to Thomson is that this led to the creation of "what soon came to be called 'the condition of England question'." He talks about the many significant people, but what matters about them is how behind their actions was the "fermenting of a new spirit of discontent" (43). The book is filled with examples of how things were changing for the better, leading to results that might seem bad in isolation but were improvements on how things had been. For instance, Thomson discusses the reduction of crimes for which the death penalty could be imposed; before 1832 you could be hanged for pickpocketing or stealing a sheep or "impersonating out-pensioners of Chelsea Hospital" (17). The new alternative was transportation (i.e., exile to Australia), and while this may seem like a bit of a barbaric punishment to us in isolation, it really was a serious improvement; after 1838, murder (or attempted murder) was the only crime anyone was hanged for. Okay, yes, hanging is barbaric, but limiting hangings to murders is definitely an improvement!

One of his big emphases throughout is the way the modern "social service state" developed; Thomson had previously written a book called Equality (1949) where he discussed this in detail, and I am interested enough to probably track it down someday. The belief that the government could be the remedy for social ills through systematic intervention was a new one in the period. Here, he says that the period created "well-rooted and flexible institutions of government and of social life.... [T]hese institutions of national life could be preserved, adjusted, modified, and used for new ends" (230). For example, he talks about how Robert Owen ("[c]ompletely a crank, something of a prig, but very much a saint"!) promoted education because it was the solution to the new idea that "our characters are made for us by environment and heredity alike, and therefore we are not responsible for what we are.... Men can all recognize truth when it is placed before them, and by moulding men's minds to the truth, society and even human nature can be revolutionized. Here was a simple and powerful basis for any program of comprehensive reform" (46).

A related emphasis is the Victorians' attempt to create a scientific understanding of society and thus a scientific basis for reform—this is my area of interest when it comes to the Victorians, so of course I'm into it. Thomson discusses Herbert Spencer, of course, but also figures less well known to a modern reader, like H. T. Buckle, who "attempt[ed] to handle human society by the methods of the physical sciences" and Walter Bagehot, who wanted more conscious discussion of a society that had evolved without conscious direction, and applied principles of natural selection (105). I found his discussion of how Darwin's Origin created an intellectual break particularly fascinating; I want to quote at length his quotation of Edward Pease, one of the founders of the Fabian Society, writing in 1916:

It is nowadays not easy to recollect how wide was the intellectual gulf which separated the young generation of that period from their parents. The Origin of Species, published in 1859, inaugurated an intellectual revolution.... The older folk as a rule refused to accept or to consider the new doctrine. I recollect a botanical Fellow of the Royal Society who, in 1875, told me that he had no opinions on Darwin's hypothesis.... Our parents, who read neither Spencer nor Huxley, lived in an intellectual world which bore no relation to our own; and cut adrift as we were from the intellectual moorings of our upbringings, recognising, as we did, that the older men were useless as guides in religion, in science, in philosophy because they knew not evolution, we also felt instinctively that we could accept nothing on trust from those who still believed that the early chapters of Genesis accurately described the origin of the universe, and that we had to discover somewhere for ourselves what were the true principles of the then recently invented science of sociology. (qtd. on 151)

But as he says, a man like Charles Dickens is born out of the same intellectual conditions that give us people like Spencer, even if he might seem very different at first glance: "His significance is not that he propounded any programme of social reforms or political improvements, but simply that he painted, for all to appreciate and enjoy, a vivid picture of working class folk whose poverty could be seen not as a penalty from heaven or the punishment of sin, but as the product of bad social conditions and the consequence of man's inhumanity" (114).

Thomson discusses imperialism, thankfully, fitting in too into his overarching story. I liked his take on Rudyard Kipling: "He made popular the ideal of a common imperial patriotism, transcending every diversity of birth and circumstance, ennobled by an ideal of selfless service. He has much too often been quoted as an exponent of aggressive imperialism. He is rather the voice of unrepentant but chastened imperialism, seeking perhaps to unconsciously equip British power with moral purpose and a human content" (204). I don't think you have to buy this interpretation of Kipling in specific or Victorian imperialism in general, but it shows where they were coming from—or at least where they believed they were coming from. On the other hand, I was a bit skeptical of his claim there was little malice in the British attitude to Germany before the Great War (218), given the strong anti-German sentiment in some of the era's future-war fiction I have read.

This is a smaller part of the book, but he also discusses the way the monarchy changed in this era to become what we (I would argue) still recognize it as today, as a physical symbol of Britain's greatness (172), calling it "a new type of royal authority, resting not on constitutional prerogatives or political activity, but on the psychological needs of nationalism and imperialism" (174).

I think probably the whole story of the book is probably summed up by this bit: "Later generations have come to regard as man-made and intolerable many things which the Victorians accepted as without remedy. The Victorians regarded as intolerable many others things which their ancestors had deemed without remedy, and they had slowly to invent appropriate means to deal with these new-found but not novel social evils.... Evils felt to be humanly remediable were tackled as promptly, and, on the whole, as competently, as the means at their disposal allowed" (115). 

It's a strong story of social transformation, and I think the best of these volumes by far. Perhaps a bit too sympathetic to the Victorians at times, but I guess I wouldn't be studying them if I wasn't sympathetic to them myself. It is certainly noteworthy that this is the first Pelican History where the book's publication date is closer to the era in question (it came out 36 years after the book's closing date) than it is to the time I read it (it came out 75 years ago). I am further from him than he was from many of the people he discusses! I think there is something to be said for the "power of distance," but proximity yields its own insights. I look forward to finishing off this project by (re)reading Thomson's second volume, which covers the era he himself lived through.

* Strachey's Eminent Victorians came out in 1918. 

Young Avengers Presents by Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Fraction, Paco Medina, Harvey Tolibao, Alina Urusov, Mark Brooks, Mitch Breitweiser, Alan Davis, et al.

After Civil War, the Young Avengers next appeared in a miniseries called Young Avengers Presents. This is collected in the Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung omnibus, but I picked it up on its own in a used bookstore way back when, so I read that copy instead. Much easier to hold a trade paperback than a giant hardcover!

Young Avengers Presents

Collection published: 2008
Contents originally published: 2008
Acquired: December 2012
Read: July 2025

Writers: Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Fraction

Artists: Paco Medina & Juan Vlasco, Harvey Tolibao, Alina Urusov, Mark Brooks & Jaime Mendoza, Mitch Breitweiser, Alan Davis & Mark Farmer

Colorists: Nathan Fairbairn, Jay David Ramos, Christina Strain, Brian Reber, Paul Mounts

Letterer: Cory Petit

The miniseries consists of six issues, each focused on a single member of the Young Avengers (except for #3, which teams up Wiccan and Speed) in the wake of Civil War. I'm not as plugged into big Marvel events the way I am into DC ones, so I had to work out some stuff here from context that must have happened in titles not focused on the Young Avengers: mostly they are working on the side of the Avengers who have gone underground because they are illegal, except for Cassie "Stature" Lang, who is working for the Initiative, which I think is the legit, government-registered superhero team? Since (or in?) Civil War, Captain America is dead, the Young Avengers met Bucky, and Hawkeye and Captain Marvel came back to life. Mostly this fine, though; I was able to follow along, except it would have been nice to know what made Cassie part from her comrades and pick the Initiative instead. 

Each story has a different creative team, but there are no duds here. The writing in each story is great, and in most cases the art is too. I'll take it story by story; the first is Ed Brubaker, Paco Medina, and Juan Vlasco's tale of Patriot. This is one of the highlights of a strong volume; Eli "Patriot" Bradley is questioning his own name. How can he be a "patriot" for a country that did what it did to his grandfather and so many others, that refuses to see patriotism unless it's jingoism? With Hawkeye's help, he seeks out—in the absence of Captain America—his erstwhile sidekick, Bucky Barnes. Bucky can't give him any answers, which I think makes the story all the stronger: two people trying to find the America they aspire to. Brubaker is generally a strong writer but not one I'd associate with teen heroes, to be honest, so it's pleasing to see him do such a good job here, and the art by Medina and Vlasco matches him well, detailed and realistic, with good command of faces, which is needed in a dialogue-heavy story. A strong opening to the volume.

Is that really an appropriate outfit for a high school teacher? (It definitely is very mid-2000s, though.)
from Young Avengers Presents #1 (script by Ed Brubaker, art by Paco Medina & Juan Vlasco)

The second story, about Hulking, is equally strong. In the original Young Avengers story, Hulkling discovered that his mother wasn't really his mother, but that he was the son of the Kree warrior Captain Marvel and a Skrull princess; his supposed mother was killed. At the time, his parentage was academic because Captain Marvel was dead—but this is comics, and Brian Reed and Harvey Tolibao's story begins with him seeking out his recently resurrected father. I found this really sharp and astute, a boy and a man trying to reach out and forge a connection where none exists. Sure, they are father and son, but they share only DNA, not any kind of emotional bond. It's quite sad, and really well done. I think of the five OG Young Avengers, Hulkling and Wiccan were the two who felt the least fully formed to me, and this does a good job of remedying that when it comes to Hulkling.

Not too surprising he has father issues, I guess.
from Young Avengers Presents #2 (script by Brian Reed, art by Harvey Tolibao)

We then move onto a story of Wiccan and his twin-from-another-mother, Speed; they theorize that they are the lost souls of the children of the Scarlet Witch, and in this story they set out together to find her. Once again, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Alina Urusov really nail it. It's good to see some actual interaction between the twins, there are great jokes, and I appreciated getting some depth on the often glib Speed. Urusov's art is strong, and I really liked the way the two interacted with a former Avengers villain.

Merriam Webster says transmogrify is a word, going all the way back to Aphra Behn... but its origins are a mystery!
from Young Avengers Presents #3 (script by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, art by Alina Urusov)

Next comes Paul Cornell, Mark Brooks, and Jaime Mendoza's story of Vision, who has the consciousness of the former Iron Lad (and future Kang the Conqueror) loaded into him, though it's almost equally a story of Stature, with whom Iron Lad shared a kiss before he returned to his doomed place in the timestream. Cornell of course does a great job by both characters; I have been a little skeptical of including the kind-of adult Vision as one of the Young Avengers, but Cornell sold me on him for the first time here. Particularly strong is the depiction of Cassie, though; it seems more like her story than his to be honest! It is let down a bit by the art, which struggles to depict Cassie's size-changing in general, and a moment where she size changes at the same time the Vision phases in particular.

I can't complain about the "reused identical artwork" trick because I didn't even notice it until I made this scan!
from Young Avengers Presents #4 (script by Paul Cornell, art by Mark Brooks & Jaime Mendoza)

The actual Stature-focused story is also a good one. Kevin Grevioux centers the story around her family: Cassie is struggling with her mother and stepfather much as they are struggling with her, and her emotional state causes her to progressively shrink further and further. I liked the focus on the Young Avengers as friends here; the story isn't just about her, but also Kate, Billy, and especially Eli trying to help her, and it's well done. Cassie is probably my favorite Young Avenger. I did find Mitch Breitweiser's art a bit stiff, not always up to the emotional moments.

Lots of fun stuff with scale in this one: Stature and Patriot are on the microscope slide.
from Young Avengers Presents #5 (script by Kevin Grevioux, art by Mitch Breitweiser)

Finally, we end on a story about Hawkeye finally meeting Hawkeye, that is to say, Kate Bishop finally meeting Clint Barton. It's written by Matt Fraction; I think this is the first time he wrote either character, and he would go on to write an acclaimed run featuring Clint with Kate as a co-star. It's a bit predictable but fun enough; Kate is my second-favorite Young Avenger, and he captures her well. And, of course, you can't go wrong with Alan Davis and Mark Farmer on art.

Hm, but do I buy that Kate actually needs Speed to persuade her to "do some crime"?
from Young Avengers Presents #6 (script by Matt Fraction, art by Alan Davis & Mark Farmer)

Overall, it's a strong volume; I had expected to like maybe half of the stories, not all of them! Handing characters largely the work of one creative team off to others can be a fraught undertaking, but every writer here demonstrated a great grasp of their Young Avengers, and in all but a couple cases they were well-matched by the art. In the absence of ongoing adventures for the Young Avengers, I'm glad Marvel saw fit to release this.

This is the second in a series of posts about the Young Avengers, Loki, and Hawkeye. The next installment covers part 3 of Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung, part 1 (2005-06) 

Reading Sky Pyrates over Oz Aloud to My Kid—Our Last "Official" Oz Novel!

I think The Emerald Wand of Oz and Trouble Under Oz were intended to be the first two of four books authorized by the Baum Family Trust, published by book packager Byron Preiss and publisher HarperCollins. But Byron Preiss died in a car accident, and I think the books didn't sell very well anyway.

But there was clearly also unfinished business. The first two books both had Dorothy missing, and mysterious clouds that would pop up and bedevil Dori and Em. I think it's pretty impressive, then, that years later Sherwood Smith decided to do a third book that would wrap it all up, published through Pumpernickel Pickle, one of those small presses that exists to essentially self-publish Oz novels. Illustrator William Stout did not return; instead, the book was illustrated by Kim McFarland, herself an author and illustrator of the self-published A Refugee in Oz (2010).

Sky Pyrates over Oz by Sherwood Smith
illustrated by Kim McFarland

Published: 2014
Acquired: September 2024
Read aloud: May–June 2025

The first book took place on the ground, the second under it. The third, naturally then, takes us up into the sky. Like Trouble, Sky Pyrates uses a specific Baum novel as a clear jumping-off point, but in this case, not an Oz one: rather, it's Sky Island that inspires this book. Though Dori and Em never go to the Sky Island in this book, they do meet one character from it, and interact with a whole archipelago of islands that float above and around Oz.* It's an evocative setting, and it's Smith's most Ozzy one so far (I didn't find Unicorn Valley in Emerald Wand very interesting and Trouble Under stuck to preexisting locations from the canon). Raggedy-Baggedy, the island of living stuffed people is fun, but my favorite was the land of the winged cats who live in a cloud castle—like Baum always did with animals, Smith does a good job of making them cats in personality and tone. I also enjoyed the titular sky pyrates. Not pirates, but pyrates—swashbuckling adventurers who help those in need in the sky.

The book also delves into an aspect of the Baum canon I don't think anyone else ever has. On Baum's map of Nonestica that first appeared in Tik-Tok of Oz there was the "Kingdom of Dreams," a location he never mentioned in the text of any of his books. Smith makes it into a creepy mysterious place, home of the Nightmare Sorcerer who's behind the strange clouds. But she doesn't spoil all the mystery, establishing that the Nightmare Sorcerer is an interloper in the land himself, thus leaving open what it might be like without him. I think it was well-handled over all.

I also think the sisters are bit more active in this one than in the previous books, solving problems on the various islands they visit. As someone who very much enjoyed the group problem-solving aspect of Oz novels, I was appreciative of this.  The sisters are whisked to Oz with their dad, but Smith has his transformed into a (non-talking) dog in short order, meaning that though he contributes, the sisters' choices still drive the narrative. Unfortunately, I did find that as the story came to an end, things kind of got too big for the girls to handle, and Glinda and to lesser extent the sky pyrate captains very much took over while the girls watched. It's a tricky thing to do in an Oz book, I think—make a threat big enough to be exciting, but not involve people like Glinda and Ozma in the resolution. (I also didn't feel like Glinda's defeat of the Nightmare Sorcerer was very climactic; why not do that back at the beginning of the book?)

I found the wrap-up to the whole trilogy decently satisfying, though there were still some threads left open. We know what happened to Dorothy, but I didn't really get why the sisters thought they were related to her. It seems to me there's a clear space for a fourth book, still: the girls themselves flag this up when they point out at the end they didn't have an underwater adventure yet, which would tie into the subplot of Dori meeting a mermaid in both Emerald Wand and Trouble Under. Furthermore, the book ends with the girls' dad knowing they've travelled to Oz, but their mom still in disbelief. Surely that was the direction of the possible fourth book: their mom being dragged along this time and learning that magic is real. Though how would Rik have fit in? The end of the book also promises he and the other Nome boys will join the sky pyrates and possible learn some discipline. On top of all that, this book briefly introduces another American kid book drawn into Oz, a deaf boy named Liu, and Dori and Em speculate it would be fun to go on an adventure with him as well. So there are lots of possible directions for more! I would read them; I feel like these books were on an upward trajectory.

My kid said they liked it. I think they were particularly into the sky cats. 

Kim McFarland's illustrations are... okay. Like with William Stout's in the first two, there's not many of them, and like with those, they're often portraity instead of dynamic. But I wonder if that was a deliberate choice in trying to match the first two books. We do learn from the cover that Dori and Em are Black (this was not clearly indicated in the previous books' pictures, nor stated in the prose), which I think makes them the first Black children in any Oz book I've ever read. I don't think McFarland is as good an illustrator as Stout though, even if I wasn't very into his portraity style. Hers is more... DeviantArt, I guess?

Oh, one other thing. There's a bit (clearly inspired by Ozma of Oz) where the characters have to find a transformed Dorothy in a storeroom. When they are looking for her, they first find a phoenix who bursts into flames and then flies away. Glinda says it's nothing to do with their adventure, but someone else's—either an end or a beginning. I am guessing this is a tie into another Sherwood Smith book, but don't know which one! She did write a book called The Phoenix in Flight, but I think that's sf. She later wrote a quartet of novels called The Phoenix Feather; was she anticipating that?

---

Back in July 2021, I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz aloud to my kid. They were almost 3 at the time... now they're almost 7, and we've read sixty-two of them! We've read every one of the Famous Forty, plus all the "Borderlands" books and any Oz novel by a Royal Historian and/or with some kind of imprimatur from either the Oz Club or the Baum Trust. I was optimistic when we started, but would never have guessed we'd be going four years later at a rate of fifteen per year! Of course, they don't even remember those early books directly anymore, though the first seven or so they've re-experienced a couple times via various adaptions (movies, audiobooks, the Shanower/Young comics), so they know what happened in those ones. But I think there's a big wasteland of memory from Tik-Tok onward; I'm not sure when you reach a point where they clearly do remember the books again. Are they the only kid in the world whose conception of Oz is primarily drawn from Oz Club publications? Imagine remembering Ozmapolitan of Oz better than Tin Woodman!

I'm not sure if they so much like it as think that reading Oz books is just a way of life. Maybe someday they will read them on their own, and get to experience those early books for themselves.

Next up in sequence: ???

* I know the purpose of Smith's books was to tie into Baum's Oz books specifically, but I am a bit disappointed we didn't get at least references to some of the many floating islands that Ruth Plumly Thompson introduced in her Oz novels: the Skyle of Un, Umbrella Island, and Kapurta. I guess the grand unified Oz sky island novel remains to be written. (Actually, I think all of the relevant novels were under copyright in 2014, and two of them still are. It's the kind of thing Oziana could do... except that while they have the right to reference all the Famous Forty novels, they don't have the rights to reference Sherwood Smith's!)

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: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Originally published: 2024
Acquired: May 2025
Read: July 2025

Cover blurbs are interesting, in that they give you a sense of what kind of reader the publisher thinks a book will appeal to. For example, following the publication of Ancillary Justice, it seemed to me that basically every book with any vague space opera trappings was blurbed by Ann Leckie. I was surprised, then, to note that Adrian Tchaikovksky's Service Model was blurbed by John Scalzi, because it's hard for me to imagine that there is significant overlap there. Tchaikovsky writes hard sf with a biological bent, which isn't really the Scalzi tone at all. But as I began reading Service Model, I got it.

This is supposed to be funny.

Unfortunately, I didn't find it funny at all, aside from one joke about remote work. The book is about a valet robot who accidentally(?) kills its owner and then goes on a quest for purpose; the book takes place after the majority of human have died, and only robots remain. The book goes from the robot's original estate, to the central planning office for robots, to a collective farm, to a library, to God. What might have been a perfectly fine novella is a bloated tedious novel; there are by no means enough ideas, depth, or character work to fill almost 400 pages. 

It read quickly, at least.