Comics Review: MADI: Once Upon a Time in the Future
It’s probably not a great sign that as every major character in MADI appeared, I could tell exactly what niche each of them would fill in a cyberpunk TTRPG.
Comics Review: Looking at the 2024 Lammy Award Finalists for Best LGBTQ+ Comics
Happy Pride Month, everyone! Thinking about Pride of course got me thinking about the Lambda Literary Awards, and more specifically its Best LGBTQ+ Comics category. One good thing to come out of the (cursed) (seemingly never-ending) (and yet here I go talking about it) (Stephen Geigen-Miller: part of the problem) SFFnal Awards Discourse is the reminder that there are many awards out there that are worthy of our attention – awards that, because of their mission, focus, and audience, can help bring works to our attention that we otherwise might have missed. For 35 years, the Lambda Literary Awards (the Lammys!) have honored excellence in LGBTQ+ writers and writing, as part of Lambda Literary’s overall mission. “Lambda Literary nurtures and advocates for LGBTQ writers, elevating the impact of their words to create community, preserve our legacies, and affirm the value of our stories and our lives.” ( – from the Lambda Literary website) It’s always a good time to lift up and center LGBTQ+ comics and LGBTQ+ creators, and this feels like an especially good time – and not, sadly, just because it’s Pride Month. But let’s not dwell on that, just now. Let’s celebrate works and creators that deserve to have their impact elevated, by taking a closer look at the 2024 Lammy Award finalists for Best LGBTQ+ Comics. A quick reminder that, as usual, these reviews contain spoilers. Also, I was shooting for capsule reviews, but there was so much to say about each of these graphic novels that they ended up being pretty big capsules. The books appear alphabetically by title, as they do on the Lambda Literary website, and aren’t ranked in any other way. A Guest in the House Emily Carroll Published by First Second A dark, genuinely unsettling small-town Canadian gothic – none of which describes my usual reading. Indeed, I’m still not sure if I exactly liked this new original graphic novel from acclaimed webcomic creator Emily Carroll – but I do know that I’m still thinking about it. Abby is a woman who’s drifting – not aimlessly, more like a detached observer – through life in a cottage-country Ontario town. Recently married to David, a dentist who just moved to town with his young daughter Crystal after the death of his first wife Sheila, Abby becomes convinced that their beautiful lakefront home is haunted by Sheila’s ghost – and that David may not be as innocent in her death as he says. But Abby’s grasp on reality is fluid at best and it’s unnervingly unclear whether she’s seeing ghosts and revelatory visions or the products of her own unquiet mind. One thing that is clear is that Abby is falling in obsessive love with her husband’s dead wife – or the person she imagines Sheila to have been. Increasingly unmoored, Abby and the story careen towards a bloody conclusion. Carroll contrasts Abby’s mundane, even banal everyday life, depicted in clear lines in black and white with light grey shading interspersed with pooled shadow, with sudden shocks of vivid color in Abby’s dreams, fantasies, and violent intrusive thoughts. It’s a brilliant use of the storytelling potential of color in comics, and it’s seductively appealing. It’s no wonder that Abby is drawn more and more to the pull of her internal life. This is, obviously, a deeply ambiguous story. Who is the guest in the house? Is it Sheila, haunting a home she never lived in? Is it Abby, who feels like a guest in Sheila’s life, and in her own life? Heck, I’m still only about 80% sure what happened at the end, given how consumed Abby is by either Sheila’s ghost or her own fractured relationship with reality. Genre readers (like me) will especially be primed to believe in Sheila’s ghost and David’s villainy, but the violent and obsessive intensity of Abby’s visions and dreams belie those comforting assumptions. This is an intense graphic novel, and an ambitious one. My ambivalence about it is entirely down to the ambiguous ending, which is a device that I usually dislike. But I can’t deny how apt, well-crafted, and effectively employed it is here. This is a powerful long-form debut for Emily Carroll, and I recommend it. Belle of the Ball Mari Costa Published by First Second Without a doubt the lightest work among the nominees, this YA high-school romance about a love triangle between a popular cheerleader, her jock girlfriend, and the nerdy girl with a crush, who the cheerleader manipulates into tutoring the jock in English to bring her grades up – only to have feelings between jock and nerd ensue – is sweet, frothy, and effervescent. Basically, it’s ginger ale as a graphic novel. But light doesn’t mean insubstantial. While it’s a confection, Belle of the Ball manages to avoid being slight by eschewing easy expectations. The cheerleader, Regina, is manipulative, yes – but she’s not a mean girl, she’s smart and sometimes kind, and mostly it’s just really important to her that everything in her life go to plan, including her girlfriend having good enough grades that they can both go to an Ivy League school. Chloe isn’t a dim jock; she excels at computer science but has trouble understanding the point of analyzing English literature on a deeper level – and just really wishes her girlfriend would relax. Hawkins, the shy, seemingly introverted nerd, has a crush on Regina, but she’s not creepy about it, and she has an expressive, exuberant, assertive, deeply femme side that she locked away to cope with high school (it’s not really a spoiler that she’s, in name and in role, the titular Belle). There are no direct SFFnal elements in the story, but it’s charmingly fandom-adjacent. Hawkins writes fan fiction, she and Chloe share a love of JRPGs, and there’s a very sweet – goofy, but adorable – scene between them at a Ren Faire with Hawkins dressed as an Elf Princess. It is, however, very strongly within the contemporary romance genre,
COMICS REVIEW: Looking at the 2019 Best Graphic Story Hugo Finalists
Welcome to the latest installment of my comics review column here at Skiffy & Fanty! Every month, I use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers. This month, I’m going to take a look at the nominees for this year’s Best Graphic Story Hugo Award. Warning: these reviews contains spoilers! As regular readers will know, I’ve been in the habit of using this space to both recommend works that might otherwise be overlooked by Hugo voters during nomination season and taking a look at the short list in advance of the deadline for voting. If you aren’t already familiar with this year’s ballot, you can read the complete list here, but if you don’t want to click away, here are the finalists for this year’s Best Graphic Story Hugo:
Comics Review – ON A SUNBEAM is brilliant and beautiful
Welcome to the latest installment of my comics review column here at Skiffy & Fanty! Every month, I use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers. This month, I’m going to explore one of this year’s Best Graphic Story Hugo nominees, a work (and a creator) that, to my embarrassment, I was previously unfamiliar with. What work might that be? The remarkable On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. Warning: this review contains spoilers! I knew nothing else about On A Sunbeam, but after it landed a Hugo nomination, I knew I was going to need to read it. I figured I’d give it a shorter review as part of an overview of the nominees (like this one from last year). Roughly three minutes after picking up and beginning to read a copy at this year’s Toronto Comics Arts Festival, I knew that approach was not going to fly. This is an important work by a remarkable talent, and it merits more than a capsule review. It is deep and heartfelt, and it is a major work of science fiction that deserves every accolade that it’s received.
COMICS REVIEW – Submitted for your consideration: Hugo Recommendations
Welcome to the latest installment of my comics review column here at Skiffy & Fanty! Every month, I use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers. This month, the SFFnal awards season is upon us once again, so I’m going to follow up on a similar post I made last year and recommend some candidates that might otherwise be overlooked that I believe are worthy of your Best Graphic Story Hugo nominations! (These reviews contain spoilers!)
Comics Review: Revisiting ABBOTT; a look at JOOK JOINT
Welcome to the latest instalment of my comics review column here at Skiffy & Fanty! Every month, I use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers. This month, I’m revisiting a limited series that debuted earlier this year, and is now available as a collected volume, and a promising new limited series that’s just getting underway — Saladin Ahmed and Sami Kivelä’s ABBOTT, and Tee Franklin and Alitha E. Martinez’s JOOK JOINT #1 and 2 (This review contains spoilers!)
