This month, and following up on Part 1, last time, I’m going to look at the remaining three Best Graphic Story Hugo finalists.
This second set are the next three books I read, and are listed in alphabetical order — not ranked any other way. So, let’s discuss The Hunger and the Dusk: Volume 1; My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book 2; and We Called Them Giants.
A quick note that, as usual, these reviews contain spoilers.
The Hunger and the Dusk: Volume 1
Written by G. Willow Wilson
Art by Chris Wildgoose
Colors by Msassyk
Color Assist by Diana Sousa
Letters by Simon Bowland
Published by IDW Publishing
Hugo- and World Fantasy Award–winning writer G. Willow Wilson and all-star artist Chris Wildgoose invite readers to experience love on the brink of extinction in their high fantasy tour de force!
In a dying world, only humans and orcs remain—mortal enemies battling for territory and political advantage. But when a group of fearsome ancient humanoids known as the Vangol arrive from across the sea, the two struggling civilizations are forced into a fragile alliance to protect what they have built.
As a gesture of his commitment to the cause—and to the relief of his bride-to-be, Faran Stoneback—the most powerful orc overlord, Troth Icemane, sends his beloved cousin Tara, a high-ranking young healer, to fight alongside brash human commander Callum Battlechild and his company of warriors. With a crisis looming, the success of this unlikely pair’s partnership and the survival of their peoples will depend on their ability to unlearn a lifetime of antagonistic instincts toward one another… and rise above the sting of heartbreak.
My favourite thing about reading the Hugo nominees (and the Lammy nominees, and other awards finalists and shortlists) is that I always discover something I otherwise would have missed. I admit it: The Hunger and the Dusk wasn’t on my radar at all. I might not have discovered it at all, certainly not this soon, if it hadn’t been a Hugo finalist. And that would have been a shame, because it’s a fricking delight.
An unfolding climate crisis — once abundant farmlands can no longer be farmed, grasslands burn, killing and scattering herds — has had Humans and Orcs at one another’s throats for generations. And they’re just the ones that survived this long; the fact that there used to be Dwarves, but now they’re extinct, becomes a major plot point. We can safely infer that this world used to have a bunch of the denizens of the Standard Fantasy Setting, but they got wiped out.
Oh, except for the Vangol, who are kind of like Elves if Elves were highly murderous racial supremacists who wanted to kill and eat everyone who gets in their way. It’s in the face of this long-absent, newly-returned threat that the Orcs and Humans make a last-ditch effort to set aside old hatreds and ally against a common foe.
That last-ditch effort is pretty well summarized in the write-up above; Tara ends up in Callum’s semi-mercenary warband, the awesomely-named Last Men Standing, and far away to the north, in Orc lands, her departure allows Troth, who’s still pining for her, to make a political marriage with Faran and shore up support for the truce with the Humans among the Orcish leaders.
There are sparks between Troth and Faran, but also hints of them between Cal and Tara — but whether any of them will survive the coming crisis, let alone whether the halting, fraught attempts at connection, friendship, and maybe more will survive, is the question posed by the story.
And that brings up the question, because romantasy is having a moment: Is The Hunger and the Dusk romantasy? The honest answer is that it’s probably too soon to tell; this first volume is clearly setting the stage for a longer story and it’s going to be a journey before we can see the end and know whether it’s a Happily Ever After or not.
I will say that, so far, it feels more like a highly relationship-focused fantasy story than like something emerging more directly from the romance genre. There are a few too many desperate, bloody battles to the death and too few kisses, for romance to be the dominant note. The vibe I get is Critical Role with the romance subplots more foregrounded, instead of being spread out as moments and grace notes across the entire series. But more foregrounded doesn’t mean only; there are a lot of swordfights.
G. Willow Wilson’s writing is deft, establishing the characters and their world quickly and effectively, and building in enough history and conflicts that it’s clear why these people like each other but can’t simply express their feelings despite the flying sparks. Wilson’s worldbuilding is fun, too — after hinting at the Standard Fantasy Setting, she subverts some of those expectations. It’s the Orcs, for instance, whose civilization remains intact in this world. They have something resembling a government, education for the elites at least, and records and history that allows them cultural continuity. Humans, on the other hand, have none of those things. In a memorable moment, it’s noted that they don’t even remember the names of their gods.
Chris Wildgoose’s art is a fine partner to the writing, with a Joe Madureira feeling to his characters (Madureira wasn’t the first North American comics artist to integrate the influence of manga and anime with the American superhero art tradition, but he was one of the first to successfully do so with work from a big superhero comics publisher, and it put the style on the map in North America). Wildgoose draws feelings adeptly, which is essential to this story working as well as it does, and was not a foregone conclusion from an artist who’s also this good at drawing swordfights.
If I had to pull out one quibble, it’s that this first volume ends in an odd place. The Hunger and the Dusk: Volume 1 collects six issues of what was originally released as a serialized comic book. There’s what feels like a natural narrative break — and I have to reiterate my spoiler warning here — when Tara and Cal have a serious, bitter falling-out, and she leaves the Last Men Standing to head back north alone and tell the other Orcs that the treaty was a failure. But this collected volume continues for what was probably another issue after that point. I suspect this is down to a preference on the part of the publisher for a consistent format that collects six issues of comics into a volume, regardless of the exact shape of the story. It’s honestly not a big deal — I’d be eagerly waiting for the next volume regardless.
Because The Hunger and the Dusk is fun. It’s smart, and charming, and just fun, and I’m glad to see it as a Hugo finalist.
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book 2
Writer and Artist: Emil Ferris
Published by Fantagraphics
Set against the tumultuous political backdrop of late ’60s Chicago, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two is the eagerly awaited conclusion to one of the most acclaimed graphic novels of the past decade. Presented as the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes as she tries to solve the murder of her beloved and enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold.
In Book Two, dark mysteries past and present continue to abound in the tumultuous and violent Chicago summer of 1968. Young Karen attends a protest in Grant Park and finds herself swept up in a police stomping. Privately, she continues to investigate Anka’s recent death and discovers one last cassette tape that sheds light upon Anka’s heroic activities in Nazi Germany. She wrestles with her own sexual identity, the death of her mother, and the secrets she suspects her brother Deez of hiding. Ferris’s exhilarating cast of characters experience revelations and epiphanies that both resolve and deepen the mysteries visited upon them earlier. Visually, the story is told in Ferris’s inimitable style that breathtakingly and seamlessly combines panel-to-panel storytelling and cartoon montages filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster mag iconography.
To be honest, I’m struggling with this one — with my thoughts on it, and on how to turn those thoughts into a review. In 2017, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book 1 was a massive success both critically and commercially. It ended with a revelation and an intense emotional cliffhanger that deeply complicated the relationship between narrator and protagonist Karen and her beloved older brother Deeze, in a way that also upended the mystery that readers thought was the heart of the story. It was a book that left readers deeply invested, but with no answers, only many, many more questions.
That left high expectations, and a lot to try to pay off. It may have been an impossible task, so I’m deeply sympathetic to Emil Ferris and it’s not an indictment of her prodigious skills and talents when I say that I don’t think this second volume entirely succeeds.
Karen wasn’t a passive protagonist and the unravelling of the life she thought she knew began early in Book 1 with the plot-driving mysterious death of her neighbour, Anka Silverberg, and the illness and death of Karen’s mother over the course of the book. Karen’s attempts to make sense of her unmoored life drove her tentative steps towards the complexities of adolescence and the adult world. In Book 2, she becomes if anything more active, but her attempts to find answers are met with further and further spiraling. The more she learns, the less she knows, and Karen is left with less control and more unanswered questions.
That’s a powerful theme, worth exploring, but there is or should be a difference between a story that depicts a life spinning out of control, and a story that itself seems to be spinning out of control. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book 2 sometimes falls on one side of that line, sometimes on the other. Ironically, I think that it’s when Ferris simply lets Karen’s messy life continue to unfold that the book is at its best, and when she tries to herd all the narrative cats towards the finish line that she as a creator loses control. It feels at those moments like Ferris not being able to forget about her audience or their expectations.
It’s when Ferris successfully does forget the audience that the book is it’s most satisfying. Like Book 1, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book 2 is a tremendously digressive story, and that contributes tremendously to its vibrancy and verisimilitude. The proliferating subplots are chaotic, and often unresolved, but at their best, they feel like the unresolved chaos of life. I enjoyed Karen’s trips to the art museum on the one hand, and on the other her interactions with what’s probably the ghost of a malnourished Appalachian girl (no, it doesn’t make more sense in context, and no, it doesn’t get resolved). I didn’t need them to be plot-relevant, something Ferris kind of forces as Book 2 continues to unfold.
The sense of narrative overload is all the more noticeable because in this volume, the framing device that functioned so seamlessly in Book 1 begins to leak out of its frame. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters has always been presented — both narratively, and via brilliant design, visually — as Karen’s sketchbook and diary. In Book 2, Ferris seems to be coming up against the limits of that device thanks to the increased narrative complexity and the need to reach some sort of conclusion. As the story rushes towards the end, Karen increasingly mentions people and events, only to skip over them with an explicit “But maybe I’ll tell you about that later”. That’s perfectly acceptable in many first-person narratives, but it doesn’t feel like Karen’s diary.
This sense of the story getting away from the creator is unfortunate, because the art remains breathtaking, with Ferris using the medium of comics more fluidly, and applying colour more widely and more creatively. With the protagonist herself a young artist, it takes a remarkably deft hand for the narrative to distinctly showcase and focus both Karen and Ferris’s artistic growth.
The asides — the long looks at Chicago in the late Sixties, at Karen’s community and the people in it, her discovery of an underground but supportive, caring, and resilient queer community as she undergoes her own awakening into her queer identity (and the metaphor of monstrousness, of the hated and feared other, is here applied perfectly) is what makes My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book 2 sing, and I would have happily done without the rush to answer, if only piecemeal and in part, Book 1‘s questions if we could have spent more time simply being with Karen, in her life.
I say piecemeal because while we do learn the sad truth behind the death of Anka Silverberg, much remains unanswered by the time Book 2 ends. Many more questions, some of them far more urgent, have come into focus as the upheaval in Karen’s life continues and becomes even more dangerous. If this truly is the “conclusion”, as the publisher’s summary above states, then it’s one without a resolution.
Ferris had a pretty serious dispute with her publisher between the release of 1 and 2, so the likelihood of seeing a third volume that might bring Karen’s story to a more comprehensive conclusion is low, at least any time soon. And of course, that might not even be something that Ferris wants to do — the open-endedness and ambiguity may in fact be the point. But as I said above, it doesn’t feel planned. Despite its many moments of brilliance, I’m left unsatisfied with the journey My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book 2 took me on.
We Called Them Giants
Written by Kieron Gillen
Art by Stephanie Hans
Published by Image Comics
A poignant, romantic, and devastating story of a young girl who wakes up to find her world has turned upside down.
Lori wakes to find the streets empty. Everyone has gone. Or at least, nearly everyone. She’s thrown into a world where she has to scrape by in the ruins of civilization, nearly starving, hiding from gangs when…
They arrive.
The award-winning team behind dark fantasy smash DIE release their first stand alone original graphic novel.
I’m on record as being a great admirer of Gillen and Hans previous collaboration, the four volume dark portal fantasy, DIE, and as such I was excited to read this, their follow-up collaboration, an unrelated standalone graphic novel. Unfortunately, I found We Called Them Giants a bit underwhelming.
Lori, a cynical young woman in foster care, wakes up one morning to discover that everyone else in the world has disappeared — almost. While searching for other… survivors?… she connects with a classmate from school, the sunnily optimistic Annette, and the mismatched pair work together over the following months to scavenge supplies, find shelter, and evade the other remaining people, a violent gang calling themselves the Dogs. And over this time, they become increasingly aware of two, gigantic bipedal creatures, one red and one green, with incredible technology and very different views of the value of human life.
If some of that sounds a bit on the nose (barring, to be fair, the alien giants part), well, that’s one of my concerns with this graphic novel. Some of the character dynamics and the worldbuilding here feel obligatory. Of course Lori is an alienated loner. Of course she and Annette have radically different temperaments and have to learn from one another’s strengths. Of course there’s a Mad Max-esque brutal gang trying to rule the post-apocalypse.
I can understand, especially in a comparatively brief work (We Called Them Giants is a breezy 104 pages) the need to get all the pieces on the board without the process taking up too much narrative real estate, but it does mean that the tropey bones show through the tissue of the story.
Another issue for me is that — and this is something I’ve mentioned finding frustrating in other comics and graphic novels — this work is really, really close to the line between “comics” and “illustrated story”.
This is very much a narrated work; there’s some dialogue, contained in conventional work balloons, but the majority of the text, which is essential to advancing the story and the reader’s understanding of it, is in the form of captions containing first-person narration from Lori, our viewpoint character. That means that the words and pictures are connected, but separate, compounded by the fact that Stephanie Hans’s art — which once again, is gorgeous — is sometimes more akin to a series of related tableaux than to more traditional comics art.
Trying to police boundaries is of course silly; I’m not saying that We Called Them Giants doesn’t count as comics, or that it doesn’t belong in the same category as the other finalists — which is after all called “Best Graphic Story” not “Best Comics Story”, right? I am saying that it leaves many of the other tools of sequential art in the box and leans hard on the story and the art, and that by doing so, this heartfelt but brief story seems slighter by comparison with some of this year’s other finalists, which are beautiful, heartful, explore their themes and ideas more deeply and also are stories that could only work as comics.
The word that keeps circling around in my head is “incomplete”, even though this standalone graphic novel very much is intended to be a complete unit of story. What I mean, I think, is that We Called Them Giants feels like the first chapter of a story we’re missing the last three quarters of. Contrary to the impression I’ve probably given this time out, I really don’t object to a story that’s open-ended or leaves readers with a lot of unanswered questions. But here, as in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book 2, it feels like the questions are unanswered not because it serves the narrative or the themes, but because the creators didn’t have the time or space for the story that they needed to tell. It’s the difference between the journey continuing off the map, and running out of road.
Once Again, No Conclusion To Speak Of
There’s much to admire in each of this year’s Best Graphic Story Hugo Award finalists, although clearly some worked better for me than others!
I have no idea which graphic novel the voters will decide to award the Hugo, and I don’t want to suggest which they should. Because beyond my preferences — and clearly, I do have preferences! — more than anything I’m delighted, as I mentioned in my introduction to my reviews of the first three nominees, by how varied this year’s works are. We have standalone graphic novels, and entries in beloved long-running series; we have new original works not tied to any other IP, and a Star Trek story; we have formally inventive works and ones that use the comics medium more straightforwardly; we have works with deep ties to popular SFFnal subgenres, and works that are more subtly speculative or fantastical.
I’m genuinely impressed by the voters for nominating such a wide and interesting set of works. The comics medium is thriving, and so is the Best Graphic Story Hugo category, and that makes me very, very happy.
Disclosures: I have no personal or professional relationships with the creators. I obtained the graphic novels for review via my public library.
