psocoptera

Young Hag and the Witches' Quest, Isabel Greenberg, 2024 YA graphic fantasy, or possibly I mean middlegrade. Arthurian, but mostly centered on an original character and taking place after Arthur's death, with flashbacks being told as stories within the story that mostly focus on the female characters. I enjoy seeing people find new directions to take the Matter of Britain and I thought this was a good one. Also it was funny and made me laugh out loud a couple of times, and Greenberg has a really interesting art style, kind of intentionally childlike and sometimes scribbly, but really expressive. (And nice use of a limited color palate, and some neat scenery stuff with standing stones and a river, and a cute and funny baby.) I had Hugo-nominated this on the chance that I would end up wanting to have done that, and, yay, I did, good call past me.

Also I ended up reading this book partly on Hoopla and partly on paper (with reading glasses! they work!) which meant I could do a direct comparison of which felt like a smoother/easier reading experience. Digital comics interfaces have come a long way - Hoopla will show you the page, then each panel so you can read it, then the page again, and only got confused about panel order on a couple of two-page spreads - but I tried timing myself reading 20 pages each way and it was still faster for me to read on paper. (With reading glasses, because the lettering here is small.) It's useful to know that the Hoopla interface is a workable way for me to read comics, though!

Went over to C&G's house for the now-traditional (in that we've done it twice) discussion of potential Hugo nominees and opportunity for me to browse/skim/read in their graphic novel collection. I was reminded that Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe is series-eligible (and I want to nominate it even though I haven't read the most recent installment yet; I've enjoyed a bunch of them and I'm sure I'll get there eventually) and that Sacha Lamb's The Forbidden Book counts as a YA.

Some comics:

When I Arrived at the Castle, Emily Carroll. I like Carroll's work but this was just too surreal and oblique, over the line for me into my not being able to make heads or tails of it at all. :(

Plain Jane and the Mermaid, Vera Brosgol. I'm a long-time Brosgol fan (going back to Return to Sender) and this was cute and fun and delightful and I'm adding it to my nominations.

Young Hag and the Witches' Quest, Isabel Greenberg. This has gone onto the to-read list but I wanted to mention the exciting new experience I had of picking up a comic and finding the text was too small for me to read comfortably. :( Hoopla tells me my library's collective daily borrow limit will reset at midnight and I'm hoping I can read it in my browser and just embiggen it as much as I want. Plan B involves my reading glasses, which I have hitherto only used for sewing.

The Deep Dark, Molly Ostertag. I read the first ~30 pages of this and I am *so hooked*.

Sacred Bodies, Ver, 2024 graphic work. This is a 55-page full-color comic about a human person and a giant bird-person person who get married for ritual reasons and then have to figure out what that means for them. It is really good and interestingly speculative around topics of what is taboo/exploration of taboo. Kinky or maybe kink-adjacent; content notes for nudity and violence. Purchasable online here, or if you are a Hugo nominator I personally know who thinks they might be interested in it as a 2024 graphic work, especially if you are a Hugo nominator from whom I frequently borrow books, I'd be happy to share my PDF for that purpose.

The Witches of World War II, written by Paul Cornell, art by Valeria Burzo. This was neat - an alternate history in which Rudolf Hess's (real-life) flight to Glasgow was the result of manipulation by a team of (real-life) British occultists. I enjoy this kind of alternate history, and I like a good con story, and I liked the interplay and tension between belief and con-artistry, both between different people and internally. I also liked that I could tell and keep track of who everyone was, which is sometimes tricky with artists doing a more-realistic style, and great fun was being had with one character's devil-horns hairstyle.

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons, Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott. I was not enthusiastic about this - oh look, I thought, it's this year's obligatory big two entry, at least there's only one this year. I was so wrong! This was terrific! Epic story, gorgeous art, does interesting things with canon. Perhaps I should have considered from the start that Kelly Sue DeConnick is a more interesting writer than Tom King.

Bea Wolf, Zach Weinersmith, art by Boulet. Cute concept, but seems very much like the kind of project that was more fun to do than it is to read. At least, I found it tedious, skimming through silently in one sitting - I can imagine it might work better as a readaloud, read to kids chapter by chapter. (I tried reading Q the first page and we agreed it seemed to work that way. If he was younger or we were all stuck on a road trip or something, maybe. But not really something I'm looking to do at this time.) Some fun panels art-wise.

I talked about Shubeik Lubeik here.

Saga Vol 11 - I was such a big Saga fan in the early years (that breastfeeding cover! I was sold!) but I did not miss Saga when it went away for a few years and I was not eager to see it when it came back (in fact last year's Graphic ballot was so generally uninteresting that I had forgotten whether Saga 10 was on it or not) and I think at this point I can liberate myself from feeling obligated by further Saga.

Similarly, Three Body Problem seems to be everywhere - two different television series, and this comic adaptation (and also apparently a movie, an animated series, and a series animated in Minecraft?) - and I just don't feel like I need to read or watch any of it.

My ballot behind the cut: ( Read more... )

So, my friend heroically read, like, three dozen graphic novels this year looking for stuff she might want to nominate for the Hugos (so, SFF, adult rather than YA/middlegrade, non-superhero), and then I sat down today with the stack of her five favorites to see how much graphic novel I could read before either a) my eyes fell out of my head or b) I had to go pick up my kid. It was b, and it was three of the five. All of which I would now like to rec!

A Guest in the House, Emily Carroll. I thought this one was already on my to-read list but apparently I had failed to actually put it there despite knowing I wanted to read it? People may know Carroll from some online horror comics works like His Face All Red. Guest in the House is a Gothic set in Ontario in the 80s (or 90s? I can't remember which) - young wife comes to her new husband's lake house and discovers mystery re his first wife. Carroll is a master of giving just enough to feel like you've been told a story and leaving enough to end on a note of "oh holy shit", and this book is very much that.

Carmilla: The First Vampire, Amy Chu and Soo Lee. This one was definitely set in the 90s! I know nothing about the original Carmilla but in this one, a young Chinese-American social worker is looking into the deaths of some young women and becomes aware of both the original Carmilla book and a person of that name who may be involved. Some twists I did not expect and some solid character work - probably my least favorite of these three, but it's well done, and the end opens up some sequel/spin-off possibilities that I would definitely read if Chu and Lee decided to write more of them.

Shubeik Lubeik, Deena Mohamed. I have to admit that I skimmed some of this and read parts out of order because I was running out of time, but I absolutely loved it. A world where wishes are real, with some top-notch worldbuilding around that, and a sort-of-semi-anthology structure around a man in possession of three wishes and the people who end up using them. Funny, biting, sometimes deeply moving even despite my skimming. I have an abandoned opening-and-notes for a world-with-wishes story, so it was so exciting to see someone else doing something related (and much different and better than I was going to. I mean, mine was just USian and this is in Cairo and has a lot about how Islam might view wishes, just to start with). Does anyone else remember that Will McIntosh novel with the spheres, Burning Midnight? Highly recommended to fans of that (well, the first half of that, you know what I mean if you've read it), and fans of Sandman. Oh, and fans of great black-and-white art - there is some splash color but it's mostly black and white, and Mohamed does some interesting stuff with low-key stylistic variation that I would have needed more time to really think about but helped organize the narrative. I hope they give it the Eisner, but I can't vote for that, so I'll at least try to give it the Hugo...

Fence: Disarmed, Sarah Rees Brennan, another tie-in novel for the Fence comic series. I think I've fallen a bit behind on the comics - there's a volume 5 I haven't read (and then a volume 6 coming out in Jan 2024) - but I didn't feel like I was particularly missing anything. I thought this was fun - I liked it more than the previous one, maybe because I was now more used to SRB's writing of them, or maybe because it was a better plot concept, or maybe because everyone has been allowed to grow up a little bit. Some good moments for everybody but most especially Seiji and Nicholas, <3.

(Note: this is not a comic, but I'm tagging for comics to make it easier to find again.)

Why Don't You Love Me?, Paul B. Rainey, 2023 graphic. A lot of the reviews are like "read it without spoilers!" but I found it utterly unreadable without spoilers, so, you know, your call. Everything else behind the spoiler cut.

( Read more... )

Other Ever Afters: New Queer Fairy Tales, Melanie Gillman, 2022 graphic story collection. I'm a fan and patreon of Gillman and had already read... four of the seven of these, I think? And had seen a couple of pages but not the entirety of two of the others? But I really liked the way they all worked together, and getting to see how the ones I think I only saw part of ended. (Or that could just be my bad memory and I had seen the whole things before, who knows.) I find Gillman's art very appealing, and I've always been interested in fairy tales and what makes something work as a fairy tale - some fun trope subversion here.

Where Black Stars Rise, Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger. Reading the first half of a King in Yellow riff before napping with fever dreams could have been a dubious choice but in fact my fever dreams did not incorporate any of it, so, yay that. I was not super into this, the art reminded me of one of the Sandman artists who was not my favorite and I didn't really feel like I got the point being made. Like, interesting characters/scenario but it just didn't quite land for me.

M is for Monster, Talia Dutton. I liked this a lot, the kind of art where it was always very clear what was happening, and everyone had very appealing faces, and the throughline was simple and straightforward but sometimes that's not a bad thing! It engaged my emotions! I like that in a story!

In celebration of Banned Books Week, Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe, 2019. I bought this a few months ago - I mostly try not to buy books and get everything from the library, but I think it had just been challenged or banned somewhere and it was a support/spite purchase. I thought it was really well done - a lot of really intimate, personal moments, put together into a comprehensible more-or-less chronological narrative, with a sort of steady, comfortable tone. (Raina Telgemeier walked so Kobabe could run?) I teared up a couple of times - when Kobabe meets eir niece, and on the "gender landscape" page, which I had seen online but was even better in context in the book. (You can see it here for instance.) If anyone is curious I would rate the age-appropriateness as "teen and up" - there's some bodily fluids and a couple of sexual acts, and I think Kobabe emself recommends it for high school and up, but I would personally be fine with my 13yo reading it. (My only qualm is that Kobabe talks about a couple of very painful and traumatic gyn exams, which, like, I totally support em writing about eir own experiences! but could make readers as yet unexperienced with gyn exams more scared than they perhaps need to be! Hopefully readers will also encounter less-scary portrayals elsewhere!)

(On another note entirely, I don't know whether it's Dreamwidth or Firefox that is red-dotted-underlining all the words I type that it doesn't recognize... I'm guessing Firefox because it has underlined Dreamwidth, and you would think that Dreamwidth would know the word Dreamwidth - but either way, someone should teach it some damn spivak pronouns. Stop telling me eir and emself are misspelled! They absolutely are not!)