Hugo Reading, uh, 4, I guess.
Well, I did do a bit of Hugo Reading before Dad and Jake came, and some while they were here, and some more after they left. So I have a few more categories to talk about.
The Graphic Novel category is what I'll talk about tonight. (Need to go to bed soon.)
5) My least favorite was Meathouse Man. Ick. In this world/future, "corpse handlers" use part of their minds to animate dead bodies to do work too dangerous or unpleasant for living people to be willing to do. Including, um, sex work. The story follows a man (for some reason all the corpse handlers we hear about are men) corpse handler who hopes to find true love with a living woman (the only women in the story are potential mates, by the way--everyone else is male) but is repeatedly let down by women who don't love him back or who grow out of loving him. At the end he gets a job running the corpse-gladiators, and has his own personal, um, sex-worker corpse to pretend to love him when he's off duty.
WHUT I DON'T EVEN. What a bleak view of women. And men. Well, there certainly is no accounting for taste.
4) The Girl Who Loved Dr Who.
What a relief. Much more to my taste than the preceding story. The art was okay, the story was okay--it wasn't my favorite but miles better than the previous one. Dr. Who winds up in our world when the TV show Dr. Who is going to be filming nearby. He teams up with one of his young fans to find out how he got there and how to get home.
3) Girl Genius (I forget which book, sorry)
I love this series and periodically go glut myself at the website. I also sponsored the Kickstarter and thus have e-copies of all the books. I loved this book too. (I'm uncomplicated and loyal that way.) That said, there were a couple of entries that I thought were even better.
2) Saga Vol 2
I read Volume 1, which I believe won a Hugo last year, so as to understand the story to this point, before reading Volume 2. (I did the same with Warbound, you'll recall, because I thought I couldn't really experience the work as intended without reading the whole series--and reading the whole series was a possible thing.) Kudos to my friend Donald who had ordered the volumes for himself but kindly had them shipped to my house so I could read them first. If you're reading this, Donald, you should have received them Priority Mail yesterday.
Wow. I really liked this story. I think it was the babysitter character that did it for me. Or no, maybe the main male character's father. There were...gross moments... but not nearly as bad as _Meathouse Man_.
1) Time
I had never seen this before--apparently it was published at the rate of one picture an hour or something like that, so I suppose people must have been going back again and again and again, and often flipping back through several pictures. Now you can see it on the web--it's three thousand some odd pictures long, but there's a playback thingie that plays them at the rate of 10 pictures per second with pauses for the ones with dialog (so you can read them.)
I really liked this story. I liked the spirit of exploration that the characters showed, and the way they worked together as equals, and the way they didn't just assume that everything was hostile, and the way they dealt with some things that actually *were* hostile. I'm not sure I understand the story but I really liked it and I thought it was a very interesting concept to present it the way the artist originally did.
So that's where I am on that. Also, after some thought (and some discussion with some of my kind commenters) I have moved Wakkulla Springs to the top of the Novella category instead of number 3. That may yet change again, but that's where I am now.
The Graphic Novel category is what I'll talk about tonight. (Need to go to bed soon.)
5) My least favorite was Meathouse Man. Ick. In this world/future, "corpse handlers" use part of their minds to animate dead bodies to do work too dangerous or unpleasant for living people to be willing to do. Including, um, sex work. The story follows a man (for some reason all the corpse handlers we hear about are men) corpse handler who hopes to find true love with a living woman (the only women in the story are potential mates, by the way--everyone else is male) but is repeatedly let down by women who don't love him back or who grow out of loving him. At the end he gets a job running the corpse-gladiators, and has his own personal, um, sex-worker corpse to pretend to love him when he's off duty.
WHUT I DON'T EVEN. What a bleak view of women. And men. Well, there certainly is no accounting for taste.
4) The Girl Who Loved Dr Who.
What a relief. Much more to my taste than the preceding story. The art was okay, the story was okay--it wasn't my favorite but miles better than the previous one. Dr. Who winds up in our world when the TV show Dr. Who is going to be filming nearby. He teams up with one of his young fans to find out how he got there and how to get home.
3) Girl Genius (I forget which book, sorry)
I love this series and periodically go glut myself at the website. I also sponsored the Kickstarter and thus have e-copies of all the books. I loved this book too. (I'm uncomplicated and loyal that way.) That said, there were a couple of entries that I thought were even better.
2) Saga Vol 2
I read Volume 1, which I believe won a Hugo last year, so as to understand the story to this point, before reading Volume 2. (I did the same with Warbound, you'll recall, because I thought I couldn't really experience the work as intended without reading the whole series--and reading the whole series was a possible thing.) Kudos to my friend Donald who had ordered the volumes for himself but kindly had them shipped to my house so I could read them first. If you're reading this, Donald, you should have received them Priority Mail yesterday.
Wow. I really liked this story. I think it was the babysitter character that did it for me. Or no, maybe the main male character's father. There were...gross moments... but not nearly as bad as _Meathouse Man_.
1) Time
I had never seen this before--apparently it was published at the rate of one picture an hour or something like that, so I suppose people must have been going back again and again and again, and often flipping back through several pictures. Now you can see it on the web--it's three thousand some odd pictures long, but there's a playback thingie that plays them at the rate of 10 pictures per second with pauses for the ones with dialog (so you can read them.)
I really liked this story. I liked the spirit of exploration that the characters showed, and the way they worked together as equals, and the way they didn't just assume that everything was hostile, and the way they dealt with some things that actually *were* hostile. I'm not sure I understand the story but I really liked it and I thought it was a very interesting concept to present it the way the artist originally did.
So that's where I am on that. Also, after some thought (and some discussion with some of my kind commenters) I have moved Wakkulla Springs to the top of the Novella category instead of number 3. That may yet change again, but that's where I am now.