Continuing to talk about the Best Graphic Story Hugo nominees list

[womzilla]

I alluded earlier to the fact that I was not very satisfied with the nominations list for the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, and stated directly that I was appalled that there was such an obvious counting error in the nominations. Here's a bit more discussion why.

Six works made the final list as published (in alphabetical order):

• The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle


• Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones


• Fables: War and Pieces


• Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic


• Serenity: Better Days


• Y: The Last Man, Volume 10: Whys and Wherefores

So, two web comics--one created as a web comic by a relative newcomer (Schlock Mercenary) and one a hybrid web comic/print comic created by a thirty-year veteran cartoonist (Girl Genius); two Vertigo titles, one fantasy (Fables) and one sf (Y: The Last Man); and two tie-ins to other media (Dresden Files, tied in to the novel series, and Serenity, tied in to the television/movie series).

I would have been much more impressed by the list of nominees if they had been correctly counted:

• Captain Britain and MI-13


• The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle


• Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones


• Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic


• Y: The Last Man, Volume 10: Whys and Wherefores

That drops one Vertigo title and one media tie-in in favor of a superb superhero title. While I like Fables a great deal, I liked Captain Britain and MI-13 more. I also think it's just a good thing to have a superb superhero title on the list--superheroes are such a large part of the English-language comics field, and there's a lot there which is worthy of serious consideration by f&sf readers. It's ironic to the point of active weirdness that there were no superhero titles in the Best Graphic Story nominee list and two in the Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form nominee list--The Dark Knight and Iron Man. (Actually, three, if you count Hellboy as a superhero, which I mostly do.) CB-MI13 is not only a superhero book, it's very unapologetically a superhero book, and its virtues are the virtues of the best company shared-universe superhero titles--showcasing an ensemble cast deeply embedded in the wider story, respecting continuity, and engaging with and improving on company-wide crossovers.

Most importantly, I actively support pushing Serenity off the list of nominees. Having one-third of the nominees in a category as other-media tie-ins really made the category look pathetic. I don't mind having one tie-in--tie-ins and adaptations have been a major part of American comics, even of good American comics, since their inception. Remember, Carl Barks spent most of his life doing media tie-ins. But two titles out of six made it look like comics are the weak hand-me-downs of the "real" media, and that was just wrong.

(I also just plain didn't like Serenity: Better Days very much. If we are going to nominate media tie-in comics, they should be good ones.)

Comments

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

I noticed the weirdness around the CB&MI13 nominations yesterday. I've seen discussion elsewhere (http://ajr.livejournal.com/203112.html) about whether comics would be eligible as a whole, or as a completed storyline - I would interpret the rule about works appearing in a series are eligible as individual works, but the series as a whole is not eligible to mean that CB&MI13 as a whole is not eligible because it's a series of stories, and you have to pick one storyline even if it is serialized into different parts, but arguably you could say that CB&MI13 is one now-complete 15 part story, and the whole thing is eligible in 2010.

I agree that it would have been an excellent addition to the ballot, but then I nominated All-Star Superman, Invincible Iron Man, and Hellboy so I think the ballot was lacking in superhero comics :)

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Which Iron Man comics did you like? I want to like Iron Man, but the trades I read (by the Knaufs) ranged from okay to lousy.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

This was the first volume of Invincible Iron Man (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invincible-Iron-Man-Nightmares-Premiere/dp/0785134603/), which is pretty good. I think it was intended to be a starting point for the film fans, and it works pretty well for someone totally new to the character, and it's an interesting self-contained story which doesn't get too deeply embroiled in Marvel continuity. I'm not thrilled by the artwork, in which everyone is strangely shiny (http://pics.livejournal.com/despotliz/pic/000r330s), but it was good enough to be worth a nomination slot. I haven't read the subsequent arc, which I understand to be more connected with the Dark Reign Marvel event.

I got some great recommendations from Ask Metafilter (http://ask.metafilter.com/110800/Iron-Man-Comics).

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I can see that there's a colorable argument to be made that votes for CB-MI13 as a whole for 2008 should not be counted as votes for CB-MI13: Secret Invasion (though I think the actually story title was "The Guns of Avalon"). However, given that "Secret Invasion" was half the issues of the 2008 run, I think that some leeway should have been given for what was, at worst, a set of improperly written nominations.

I would say there's some of the same problem as in Dramatic Presentation about whether to nominate individual episodes of a tv show or entire seasons as story arcs. And the point that ajr made regarding nominating and re-nominating works (as individual collections, as collected volumes, and as completed series) is a potential problem down the line. Good faith from the Hugo administrators, which is always a necessary assumption, should be able to take care of almost all such conflicts, AS LONG AS the administrators are reasonably able to access knowledge about the field.

Now I need to check out Invincible Iron Man. Dang you!