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 ( Read more... )
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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 ( Read more... )
1) The most pertinent is probably that, from what I can see, GG didn't actually get a published collection last year! Amazon gives Vol. 12 a release date of 2013, which Wikipedia tells me is the most recent collection. Granted, the rules might be kind of fuzzy for always-running webcomics...
2) Remember that the Hugo Shortlist doesn't represent all the books that were nominated, but just the top 5 finalists in each category. (And we had LoserPuppies snagging one of those slots, to boot.)
3) Yet in all seriousness, I'd be kind of surprised if GG were to make the finalists again. And it's not because I don't think it's great. I've dug the Foglios for over 20 years.
But the thing is, there are so many good comics coming out today. So many comics and graphic novels that are just impressing the heck out of readers and critics alike, which are telling new stories and breaking new ground. And as enjoyable as GG is, it's kind of ... not doing that. It's kind of like what I feel about superhero comics: If this is the kind of thing you like, this will scratch that itch pretty well. And for certain things, "lightly entertaining" really is good enough.
In fact, while I didn't go into it in great detail above, that's exactly why Ryvre & I were kind of aghast that it won during the category's first three years of existence. Because if you look at any of the "Top 10 Comics of the Year" on various comics sites, or other comics awards, for 2009-2011 ... well, I have to doubt Girl Genius even placed at all. To people who know the comics offerings as well as we do, GG's Hugo wins were clearly less about its merits stacked up against the other comics that came out that year, and more about the Hugo voters not being comics readers (at that point in time anyway) and just voting for the names that already had greater recognition in prose-reading SF fandom.
Essentially, I think the broader SF readership has become more comics-aware and comics-literate at the exact time that impressive new works from unique, artistic voices are debuting with stunning regularity. So I'm sure the comic is still being nominated by some, in the years it's eligible. Just, er, not by enough.
And again, I say that as someone who likes it.
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The funny thing is that, for me, "comics" means two different things to me. My view of the type of comics i see in comic stores (and formerly, anyplace that sold magazines) is stuck in the '80s, and has a nigh-complete skew towards superheros. My exposure in the '90s included an expansion in the tone and art, but the bulk of the content didn't change much. I'm aware that far more exists, but I don't really get it in any appreciable way. I don't really imagine this overlapping with the Hugos.
My other view of "comics" are various other things I read online these days. I imagine these as having some overlap with the Hugos. It's probably just a matter of associating what I read/saw, and how I was exposed to it, at different times of of life. There's 1980 - 1990, and 2010 - now.
Thanks for widening my perspective a bit.
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