Those 2015 Hugo Awards...
[A couple of posts I recently made on Facebook. Cobbled together and reformatted because oh hey LiveJournal lets you do that sort of thing.)
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"In any case, this slate of nominees has already launched a Twitter firestorm, and lots of people are planning to vote "No Award" in every category except "Best Novel." It's definitely a weird turn of events that, the year after Kameron Hurley's double win, we see list of nominees that includes someone published by "Patriarchy Press." " - Charlie Jane Anders on io9
I'm tempted to throw up my hands and say this is why we can't have nice things. Because sooner or later some group of asshats will stomp on through and ruin it for everyone else.
So, this year's Hugo Awards is already set to be a debacle, one way or another. (I can't begin to imagine how surreal the Awards ceremony at WorldCon will be, if in fact it turns out that the winner of multiple categories is "No Award", one after another after another.) The real question is whether this is something they can actually recover from, given that the nomination process allows terrible people to game the system like this so completely.
Sigh.
And yet, one of the odder parts about this year's Hugo Awards nominees that (in light of all the controversy) is going generally unremarked upon, is that the "Best Graphic Story" category is (A) strong as hell, and (B) surprisingly reflects the critical and popular reading tastes of actual comic shop goers! Ryvre and I first voted in the Hugo Awards in 2012, and were shocked that two of the five nominees, including the eventual winner, were titles that we - as people who work in the industry - HAD NEVER HEARD OF. (But who, even if they had never had a book distributed by Diamond Comics, were perhaps regular attendees at WorldCon and thus more known to the nominators than the various bestsellers bought by actual comics readers...?)
This year, on the other hand? Out of five nominees, three of them are Image books (ie, creator-owned, creator-financed), and the Marvel one makes me incredibly happy:
* Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt, (Marvel Comics)
* Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery, written by Kurtis J. Weibe, art by Roc Upchurch (Image Comics)
* Saga Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics))
* Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick, written by Matt Fraction, art by Chip Zdarsky (Image Comics)
* [plus one *Puppies nominated book that WHAT A SURPRISE no one's ever heard of]
Back in 2012, the "Best Graphic Story" category was up for ratification: Would this category continue? Or was it not actually all that viable? And based on what we saw that year (plus the fact that the Foglios had won three years in a row, for the first three years of its existence), we could totally have seen it having gone away.
How strange that in 2015, this category actually seems the most valid, and the least-XXXXed up, of the entire ballot.
.
.
.
"In any case, this slate of nominees has already launched a Twitter firestorm, and lots of people are planning to vote "No Award" in every category except "Best Novel." It's definitely a weird turn of events that, the year after Kameron Hurley's double win, we see list of nominees that includes someone published by "Patriarchy Press." " - Charlie Jane Anders on io9
I'm tempted to throw up my hands and say this is why we can't have nice things. Because sooner or later some group of asshats will stomp on through and ruin it for everyone else.
So, this year's Hugo Awards is already set to be a debacle, one way or another. (I can't begin to imagine how surreal the Awards ceremony at WorldCon will be, if in fact it turns out that the winner of multiple categories is "No Award", one after another after another.) The real question is whether this is something they can actually recover from, given that the nomination process allows terrible people to game the system like this so completely.
Sigh.
And yet, one of the odder parts about this year's Hugo Awards nominees that (in light of all the controversy) is going generally unremarked upon, is that the "Best Graphic Story" category is (A) strong as hell, and (B) surprisingly reflects the critical and popular reading tastes of actual comic shop goers! Ryvre and I first voted in the Hugo Awards in 2012, and were shocked that two of the five nominees, including the eventual winner, were titles that we - as people who work in the industry - HAD NEVER HEARD OF. (But who, even if they had never had a book distributed by Diamond Comics, were perhaps regular attendees at WorldCon and thus more known to the nominators than the various bestsellers bought by actual comics readers...?)
This year, on the other hand? Out of five nominees, three of them are Image books (ie, creator-owned, creator-financed), and the Marvel one makes me incredibly happy:
* Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt, (Marvel Comics)
* Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery, written by Kurtis J. Weibe, art by Roc Upchurch (Image Comics)
* Saga Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics))
* Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick, written by Matt Fraction, art by Chip Zdarsky (Image Comics)
* [plus one *Puppies nominated book that WHAT A SURPRISE no one's ever heard of]
Back in 2012, the "Best Graphic Story" category was up for ratification: Would this category continue? Or was it not actually all that viable? And based on what we saw that year (plus the fact that the Foglios had won three years in a row, for the first three years of its existence), we could totally have seen it having gone away.
How strange that in 2015, this category actually seems the most valid, and the least-XXXXed up, of the entire ballot.