My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
Jun. 16th, 2018 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI just finished Hugo Graphic-nominated My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, read over the course of today, and WOW, it's been a long time since I read a graphic work that blew me away like this. The ART, oh my god the ART, the main conceit, the way the flashback story fits into the present day story... this is an *amazing* work, highly recommended if you're interested in comics as a medium or in powerful, complicated stories in general. Things you should know: what we got in the packet/what's available right now is the first half of a 700 page story; the second half seems to be coming out in August. I read it in scroll so I could make it big enough to read the words easily, but am going back through again in two-page mode to look at the layouts/spreads. Also I think we may be missing a page somewhere near the end. :( Also heavy-duty content notes which I am going to put behind a cut: major child sexual abuse, rape, Holocaust/death camp scenes, violence, child abuse, cancer, children losing a parent to cancer, racial prejudice, homophobia/homophobic violence, involuntary drug use, naked boobs, mention in passing of animal harm but I think no on-page animal harm. About the only thing I can compare this to is Maus, although the art is maybe more Stuck Rubber Baby.
Spoiler: Looking at those comparisons, I feel as of the end of the first half, there's a question here of whether it's actually SFFnal or is just using SFF imagery. For me personally, my answer is that I don't care: it's excellent, it's engaging with SFF tropes, and clearly enough people thought it was Hugo-appropriate to nominate it. But people who raised this question around "If You Were A Dinosaur" or "Hidden Figures" will probably have it again?
ETA to name the author: Emil Ferris, this is her first work and she worked on it for 15 years (!).
Spoiler: Looking at those comparisons, I feel as of the end of the first half, there's a question here of whether it's actually SFFnal or is just using SFF imagery. For me personally, my answer is that I don't care: it's excellent, it's engaging with SFF tropes, and clearly enough people thought it was Hugo-appropriate to nominate it. But people who raised this question around "If You Were A Dinosaur" or "Hidden Figures" will probably have it again?
ETA to name the author: Emil Ferris, this is her first work and she worked on it for 15 years (!).
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Date: 2018-06-28 11:41 am (UTC)I don't think people need to be consistent about how SFFnal they feel stuff has to be. Like, i think "it's fine if it's really good and ties speculative fiction imagery into the story in a way that works for me, but if the imagery feels cursory or i just don't like it, that's going to be one of the things i don't like about it" is a perfectly defensible position.