Saturday, October 17, 2009

Girl Genius: Omnibus Edition #1 by Phil Foglio



The first comic book to win the Hugo award. That was what made me to try this one.
The story is very steanpunky tale of a young girl, Agatha, living in an alternative Europe ruled by mad inventors capable of making steam powered robots and biological constructs. She turns out to be very powerful “spark”, someone who is able to make such inventions, but at first she isn't aware of that herself. After getting abducted to the flying castle's by its' unofficial(?) ruler, baron Wulfenbach, she learns something of her abilities and real background.
This omnibus collects first three books. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be other volumes of these omnibus editions. It was probably very good idea to collect first three books together, as I believe that, if the first one would have marketed as a stand alone, there would have less people getting the later parts. The first part isn't too good, far too many pages are spent on gigantic robots walking around and far too little on the real plot. The later parts are clearly better, both in plot and in drawing style. The plot seem variable, there some very nice ideas and fun scenes, but they there are some slower moving and sometimes even a bit confusing parts. I might be even tempted to get the other parts, but at least part four seems to be kind of hard to find, and it isn't available directly from Amazon.

1 comment:

Kevin Standlee said...

The first comic book to win the Hugo award.

Not exactly. Watchmen won the 1988 Hugo Award in "Other Forms," a one-shot category awarded that year only. Until this year, Watchmen has been repeatedly billed as the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award, but that's no longer true.

Technically, the Graphic Story Hugo this year was a special one-shot category added by the 2009 Worldcon; however, the World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting ratified a change to its constitution that adds an identically-named-and-defined Graphic Story category to the permanent Hugo Awards through at least 2012. (If the 2012 WSFS Business Meeting does not re-ratify the category, it will automatically "sunset" and be removed from the Constitution.)