Dear Girl Genius - I Quit
Seriously, I'm giving up now. The downhill slide that I noted with the never ending medical arc has just gotten worse with the Battle of Mechanicsburg. It's been going on for roughly two years now real time, all of a day (maybe) in Comic Time. I could deal with that, if I could be assured that there was... I don't know... some kind of end in sight. But there isn't.
Phil Foglio made his reputation in Dragon with "What's New With Phil & Dixie", happily poking fun at the conventions of RPG's in 1 to 3 page bursts. Then he moved on to full sized comics like Buck Godot and the infamous Xxxenophile and proved he could do long format too. Girl Genius was his and Kaga Foglio's masterpiece though, an epic storyline through a fantastic alternate steampunk gas lamp Europe, simultaneously taking apart and embracing the cliches of MAD SCIENCE! with the same skill Phil did with RPG's.
And at first it was good. Agatha was an engaging heroine, Baron Wulfenbach an intriguing and sympathetic villain, and the initial stories, with the Airship City and the Circus of Dreams, were entertaining.
Then we got to Mechanicsburg and it all went to Hell.
The current story, to put it in the gentlest possible terms, is a damned mess right now. I cannot for the life of me describe it beyond "There's a lot of fighting going on" because it's been going on so flaming long that keeping up with the multiple plot lines and the now enormous character zoo is just too damned exhausting. Who the @#$% cares about a weaponized tunnel boring machine fighting a mechanical squid in front of a cathedral run by an intriguingly clad nun? IT DOESN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE MAIN STORY, which is the conflict between Agatha and the Baron.
Note, I said "conflict" not "battle". The heart of the story, at least in the beginning, was the Baron having to deal with the return of the Heterodynes, which he feared (and rightly so as it turned out) would break the Pax Europa he'd established. This was a fight between Agatha's beliefs and the Baron's, between the right to be a Spark of Conscience and the iron, lobotomized control the Baron wants to impose.
But instead of that we have the Battle of Mechanicsburg, which is a bloody mess and which seems to have gone completely beyond the control of the Foglios to impose any sort of coherency on. Freefall has some horribly long plotlines as well, but at least it can provide a punchline at the end of every three panels.
Girl Genius only provides punches now.
Phil Foglio made his reputation in Dragon with "What's New With Phil & Dixie", happily poking fun at the conventions of RPG's in 1 to 3 page bursts. Then he moved on to full sized comics like Buck Godot and the infamous Xxxenophile and proved he could do long format too. Girl Genius was his and Kaga Foglio's masterpiece though, an epic storyline through a fantastic alternate steampunk gas lamp Europe, simultaneously taking apart and embracing the cliches of MAD SCIENCE! with the same skill Phil did with RPG's.
And at first it was good. Agatha was an engaging heroine, Baron Wulfenbach an intriguing and sympathetic villain, and the initial stories, with the Airship City and the Circus of Dreams, were entertaining.
Then we got to Mechanicsburg and it all went to Hell.
The current story, to put it in the gentlest possible terms, is a damned mess right now. I cannot for the life of me describe it beyond "There's a lot of fighting going on" because it's been going on so flaming long that keeping up with the multiple plot lines and the now enormous character zoo is just too damned exhausting. Who the @#$% cares about a weaponized tunnel boring machine fighting a mechanical squid in front of a cathedral run by an intriguingly clad nun? IT DOESN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE MAIN STORY, which is the conflict between Agatha and the Baron.
Note, I said "conflict" not "battle". The heart of the story, at least in the beginning, was the Baron having to deal with the return of the Heterodynes, which he feared (and rightly so as it turned out) would break the Pax Europa he'd established. This was a fight between Agatha's beliefs and the Baron's, between the right to be a Spark of Conscience and the iron, lobotomized control the Baron wants to impose.
But instead of that we have the Battle of Mechanicsburg, which is a bloody mess and which seems to have gone completely beyond the control of the Foglios to impose any sort of coherency on. Freefall has some horribly long plotlines as well, but at least it can provide a punchline at the end of every three panels.
Girl Genius only provides punches now.