I like thinking of awards as signposts, and I value the guidance they provide. I particularly value the Lambda Literary Award Best LGBTQI+ Comics category, because it’s a great opportunity to read and celebrate works by queer creators from a broad and diverse range of genres.
This is another example — it seems to be a bit of a theme this year! — of a graphic novel that pushes at the form to encourage readers to engage with the work. As such, it may not be for everyone, but it’s definitely for me.
https://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/sand-f-857-aubrey-sitterson/SandF_857_AubreySitterson.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSRevolutions, defining freedom, and empires, oh my! Shaun Duke and Stephen Geigen-Miller sit down with comics writer Aubrey Sitterson for a conversation about Free Planet! Together, they talk about Sitterson’s collaboration with artist Jed Dougherty, his approach to visual storytelling, the narrative style of Free Planet, comics formalism, and much more! Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoy the episode!
If it wasn’t clear by now, in addition to being very good comics, this is very good science fiction. There are many ways to approach science fiction in the comics form, but this might be the most genuinely speculative, the most deeply considered and textured, the most well-thought-out future history of any comic I’ve read since my old friend Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder – and Finder was one of my favorite comics of all time. There are no SFFnal elements that feel extraneous, tacked-on, or like they’re there just for Rule of Cool.
This first issue of DIE: Loaded is well-paced, setting up events deftly, and it’s full of hooks (and, no doubt, foreshadowing that will pay off down the line). Some of it you certainly have to have read the previous series to fully appreciate, but not all I would guess, and as a die-hard DIE-hard, I certainly wasn’t bothered by the callbacks.
The keen sense of visual design contrasts the childlike aspects of the character art. That’s not due to a lack of skill; this is clearly deliberate. There really is a striking degree of intentionality, here. The level of detail and the superabundance of decoration in the art and the page layouts makes that very clear.
