2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story Part 1 (Patreon)

By Doris V. Sutherland

Since 2009 the Hugo Awards have had a category for Best Graphic Story. Although overshadowed to some extent by dedicated comic awards like the Eisners, this corner of the Hugos nonetheless remains a prominent honour in its field, with a handful of contenders and one winner chosen each year from the mass of published comics. As an exclusive for Patreon subscribers, WWAC presents the first instalment of a two-part series that will examine each of the six comics contending for the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story…

Invisible Kingdom Volume 2: Edge of Everything

Created by author G. Willow Wilson and artist Christian Ward, Invisible Kingdom takes place in a galaxy where two bodies hold sway. One is Lux, a mega-corporation that acts as the Amazon of the spaceways: its very existence depends upon an interplanetary public being convinced to buy, buy, buy. The other is the Renunciation, a religious order that foreswears worldly wealth and power, requiring its adherents to live the lives of ascetics. In theory, the two bodies should be rivals – but the facts turn out to be stranger than that.

The first volume of the series told a story across two plot threads, one following a shipload of Lux delivery personnel lead by Captain Grix; the other concerning Vess, a young “none” (as nuns of the Renunciation are termed) newly attached to the order. Both characters stumble upon the fact that Lux has for its own inscrutable reasons been funnelling profits to the Renunciation, and this information turns Grix’s crew – including Vess, who ends up on board the ship – into rebels against the might of Lux. The second volume follows the aftershocks from this turn of events.

While the narrative is driven by interplanetary power-politics, the focus is always on the individual characters. The arcs of Grix the would-be leader and Vess the would-be follower are bolstered by an engaging supporting cast.

Eline was, in the first volume, a corporate liaison from Lux; the crew’s rebellion has afforded her a less formal role – one that allows her to be rather more flirtatious in terms of both manner and dress. Rath is Grix’s younger brother and, as the child of the family, the most vulnerable member of the crew, Xether is a fearful sort and keen to evade conflict, even if doing so involves making a compromise with one oppressor or another. The final crewmember is Krov, a burly mechanic who tends to fade into the background; in many space operas he would be the muscle for the fight scenes – but Invisible Kingdom is not really that sort of story.

Some new characters join the cast during the course of the book, the most significant being the space pirate Captain Turo He is introduced as a villain, holding little Rath at gunpoint and forcing the crew to give their ship over to him as salvage; but as we get to know him he turns out to be a more morally ambiguous figure than first impressions would suggest.

“I’m not a mindless killer”, he says. “I just play one to make civilians fall in line. Whatever you’re running from, it might benefit you to make it my business. I’m a rotten enemy, as you know. But I’m a much better friend. And you’re going to need friends out here, Captain Grix.”

Turo views both corporation and church with contempt: “Lux makes junk and sells it back to the people they stole it from in the first place – and the Renunciation fleeces any freethinkers dumb enough to believe they’ve escaped Lux.” To Grix and company he remains a thoroughly untrustworthy individual, but the reader will have to admit that he makes some good arguments via his self-justifying soundbites. “It amazes me that people are willing to sacrifice lives…dozens of lives to make sure rich Dunians get their sparkly new shiftwear on time”, he points out; “Yet somehow I am the pirate, the lawbreaker, and what you do is entirely legal.”

When Turo happens across a damaged Lux security ship, Grix reluctantly agrees to help him to salvage it so that her share of the plunder can go towards fixing her own craft. The surviving Lux crewmembers – loyal to the corporation – end up alongside the rebels, pirates and runaway none: a tangled mass of divided loyalties just perfect for a tightly-packed drama.

All of the characters in Invisible Kingdom are nominally aliens, although in practice most of them are merely humans with unusual skin colours. The one exception is Vess, whose extra-terrestrial biology plays a role in the plot. The first volume established that Vess’ species has four sexes, each of which is necessary for reproduction; Vess herself belongs to the rarest of the four, and so faced backlash from her people when she decided to make a vow of celibacy (“I’m not going to settle down with three spouses and pop out a dozen babies just because I happen to be a universal genetic recipient”). In the second volume, Vess undergoes her “awakening”, a biological process that would ordinarily bond her with a viable partner – although here, separated from her own species, she ends up bonding with Grix.

Vess is reluctant to explain to Grix what is happening, and Grix herself is unfamiliar with the biology of Vess’ species; but Turo knows full well what is happening, something that serves to strengthen his role as trickster.

The awakening also grants Vess psychic abilities that enhance her connection to the spiritual plane, but this aspect does not come into play until near the end of the book. This opens up a new dimension to the story – including a path to the Invisible Kingdom of the title – but serves mainly as a lead-in to the third and final volume in the series.

Artist Christian Ward has made a name for himself in contemporary space opera comics with his work on ODY-C. His neon-hued art for Invisible Kingdom is distinctly retro, evoking a late-eighties/early-nineties era of digital imagery (Lawnmower Man, Max Headroom, Reboot) but never feels heavy-handed or self-conscious: while its predecessors may have arisen from technological limitations, Ward turns their CGI-splat aesthetic into an organic outgrowth of the comic’s setting. The fractal-looking starscapes suggest cyberspace as much as outer space, while the action on-board ship is similarly computerised: backgrounds become gabled masses of pixels while sound effects intrude like desktop error messages.

Yet none of this distracts from the character-based drama at the heart of the comic. Grix, Vess, Turo and the rest remain flexible, well-rounded and empathic characters across Ward’s artwork. The general emphasis on hardware and digital graphics, meanwhile, sets up a bold contrast for when Vess begins elevating the characters to a spiritual plane.

Invisible Kingdom Volume 2 is a triumphant middle act, one that expands upon the characters and setting of the first book while whetting the reader’s appetite for the finale.

Ghost-Spider Volume 1: Dog Days Are Over

The previous year did much to tarnish the character formerly known as Spider-Gwen. Back in 2015, Marvel Comics had a hit on their hands when writer Jason Latour and artist Robbi Rodriguez introduced a parallel-universe counterpart to Gwen Stacy and established her not simply as Spider-Man’s dead girlfriend but as a web-slinging superhero in her own right. Come 2020, however, both Latour and Rodriguez were accused of sexual misconduct, a development that lent an ugly aroma to the teenage heroine they co-created. It is just as well, then, that other creators had since taken the reins of the character.

Seanan McGuire took over as author with Spider-Gwen: Ghost-Spider, a ten-issue series that ran from October 2018 to July 2019. This gave every indication of being a transitional point in Gwen’s narrative rather than a coherent, self-contained work: starting out as one of several series in the Spider-Geddon crossover storyline, it went on to follow plot threads left by the previous creative team – Gwen’s struggles with her boyfriend, her band, the symbiotic entity that provides her powers, and the fact that her secret identity is now public knowledge, leading to her being mistrusted both in and out of her costume. Even her name was in a state of flux, with Gwen not deciding upon the new moniker “Ghost Spider” until the very last issue. The series had multiple pencillers, but Takeshi Miyazawa had become lead artist by the end.

McGuire and Miyazawa’s second Ghost-Spider series (the first five issues are collected in this volume) is oriented more towards building a new status quo for the character. The main twist to the premise is that Gwen has decided to escape the burden of her public identity by spending time in Earth-616, the world of the main Marvel universe, where few know of her superheroic secret. Here, she enrols in college and is mentored by Peter Parker (portrayed as an older, more experienced spider-person) but is still able to return home and spend time with her police chief father.

The story’s choice of villain is – given the allegations against Spider-Gwen’s creators – either ironically appropriate or uncomfortably close to home, depending on the reader. One of the teachers at Gwen’s new college is Miles Warren, who via his monstrous alter ego the Jackal has been a recurring Spider-Man villain since the seventies. His original motivation was an obsession with Gwen Stacy; learning that the object of his desire has seemingly come back from the dead, he naturally begins scheming anew. Assisting him is Gwen’s new classmate Benji, who uses a serum provided by the Jackal to become a giant were-rat.

All of this is just the beginning of a cheerfully convoluted tale of reality-hopping heroes and shapeshifting villains. Back in Ghost Spider’s homeworld, the Man-Wolf – an alt-Earth version of another longstanding Spidey antagonist, and one who turned up in McGuire’s previous run – is released from prison, his father being a corrupt mayor. This lycanthrope is also working alongside Miles Warren – albeit the alt-Earth version of Miles Warren, who never turned himself into the Jackal. The climax of the story arc has the two versions of Warren meet each other, with Gwen pitted against both regular Miles Warren and the Jackal.

On paper, this narrative of dual identities and multiple realities may sound a trifle incoherent. It works in practice, however, largely because Seanan McGuire never strays far from the core concept of the Spider-Man comics. Behind the vibrantly modern aesthetic and #MeToo-era antagonist, the comic’s basic building blocks are the same ones used by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and John Romita back in the sixties. Colourful heroics, teenage angst, fizzy humour, and the setting of a school where students and teachers alike have a tendency to hide bizarre alter egos: these are the elements that not only made Spider-Man a success when he first appeared, but also ensured that he and his spin-off characters have been durable enough to find true cross-generational appeal.

Artist Takeshi Miyazawa is best known for his work with G. Willow Wilson on Ms. Marvel and has also contributed to various Spidey titles over the years, making him a perfect fit for this teen-girl webslinger. His work here (aided in most issues by inker Rosi Kämpe) depicts a cast characterised by their gangly limbs and broad-strokes facial features – just the thing for a comic built upon kinetic action and emotional melodrama. Also deserving of credit is colourist Ian Herring, who makes inventive use of the magenta-cyan-yellow palette that tends to follow Gwen around.

It is quite possible that Ghost-Spider earned its place on the Hugo ballot because the award’s voting base has long been enthusiastic about McGuire’s work: her Wayward Children series, which likewise deals in teenage angst and jaunts between realities, has been a Hugo perennial for a few years now. Compared to that series, McGuire’s work on Ghost-Spider is less inventive and more conventional. But while it may not re-invent the franchise, it shows a clear understanding of why Spider-Man and his amazing friends are still popular characters – and how that popularity can be maintained.

Die Volume 2: Split the Party

Collecting issues 6 through 10 of the series by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Stephanie Hans, this book continues the intricate story of Die – so intricate, in fact, that it will be worth recapping the first volume of before discussing the second.

Back in 1991, a group of six friends gathered together to take part in a role-playing game. The game’s designer, Sol, introduced it to them as “fantasy for grown-ups” – and as narrator Ash comments, “we were deluded enough to think that’s what we actually wanted”. The fantasy became real for them when the friends were transported to the game world, eventually returning in 1993… all except for Sol.

Twenty-five years later, the five survivors – Ash, Chuck, Matt, Isabella and Angela – are still grappling with the trauma of their two-year ordeal. Then, as a birthday present, Ash receives a blood-stained die. This transports them back into the gameworld, where they are reunited with Sol: now the ruler of the fantasy realm, he has devised a new game for them to play before they can go free.

This is a premise that lends itself to a set of multifaceted characters. We meet each protagonist as a teenager, as an adult and as a fantasy hero; like dice thrown during a game, different faces will show at different points of the narrative.

Chuck, the resident douchebag, is introduced by Ash as “John Belushi in Animal House, with the coke swapped for sherbet”, although a more apt comparison would be Joss Whedon: he is always equipped with a genre-savvy one-liner, even when his frivolity is painfully out of place. He is the one least damaged by the initial trip to the fantasy world: indeed, he grows into a successful author, rolling in money from a film deal. His character type is the Fool, prone to undermining anything and anyone around him.

Isabelle is similarly snarky when introduced as a teenager, although her middle-aged self has become apologetic about her old, caustic persona. She shows a philosophical attitude towards the prospect of returning to the fantasy world. “I’m 43”, she says. “My impossible fantasy is being able to pay off my mortgage or have my mum stop sighing whenever kids turn up in conversation.” Her new attitude puts her into conflict with the ever-flippant Chuck: “If it’s fantasy and we treat it like reality, there’s no loss” she says. “If it’s reality and we treat it like fantasy, we become monsters.” Her character type is the Godbinder, with the ability to control gods and demons; always the philosopher, she remarks at one point that the difference between the two is the same as the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter.

Matt remains consistently melancholy between his teens and middle age, although the causes of his low moods change with time. He becomes a knight with the ability to channel his emotions into powers; different knights with different emotional states exist in the game world, but Michael is specifically a Grief Knight, who requires constant sadness for power.

Angela is the character most defined by loss. The first trip to the fantasy world cost her an arm, and she is also confronted with the passing of her beloved dog. Her character type is a Neo, an elfin cyborg capable of recreating in artificial form that which has been lost.

Finally, we have the main character, whose gender identity is ambiguous: they present as a somewhat effeminate male in the real world, switch from the masculine name Dominic to the more androgynous Ash among their friend-group, and becomes explicitly female in the game world. Ash’s character role is the Dictator, which she describes as “like a cross between Cleopatra and Machiavelli”; naturally, Dictator Ash acts as narrator.

The fantasy world ruled over by Sol is built partly from the main characters’ teenage memories, but in larger part from the lives and work of fantasists who lived before them; here, Die clasps onto intertextuality with both hands.

One memorable sequence of the first volume is set in the trenches in a war between Little England and Eternal Prussia, where the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien blurs into that author’s wartime experiences. A pipe-smoking Tolkien doppelganger puts in an appearance: “In a hole in the ground there died an Englander”, he says following the death of a Hobbit in the uniform of World War I British soldier. “Not a nice hole, but a dirty wet hole, a charnel hole…” Elsewhere the characters visit Glass Town, which resembles a turn-of-the-century utopia dreamt up by H. G. Wells – fitting, given Wells’ part in the development of tabletop gaming via his book Little Wars.

This narrative is rendered in the delicate digital paintings of Stephanie Hans. The characters’ personalities – from Matt’s sorrow to Chuck’s jut-jawed pugnacity – ooze from every panel in which they appear. The landscape they inhabit, meanwhile, is made up almost entirely of lights: be they the streetlights of the mundane world or the dragon-flames of the fantasy world, Die surrounds its physical cast with an intangible world of glows and flickers, sumptuous and tantalising as though we are seeing only occasional fragments of a larger whole.

All of this lays fertile ground for Die Volume 2: Split the Party, which comprises issues 6 to 10. As the trade title suggests, a large part of the story involves dividing up the main cast so as to better focus on specific characters as we learn about their individual histories and see deeper areas of their personalities.

Angela, the cyberpunk character, is the first to leave the group; as she travels she remembers her time spent working as a video game developer (a job deliberately unromanticised by Gillen, who underlines the gruelling workloads that come with AAA games). This has given her a technical-minded outlook on the game-world she now inhabits, but it also comes with emotional baggage. Through flashbacks we learn of her being caught in a love triangle between the father of her children and her female co-worker. Her character arc also involves the psychological ramifications of getting her arm back:

“You know that bit in a cyberpunk game where you get increasingly estranged from your humanity by extra prosthetics, and all that bullshit? The ‘Oh wow, I am no longer human!’? It’s the other way around now. Having this arm back is the thing that’s freaking me out. The me who had an arm is thirty years ago. Whoever I am now, back out in the real world, doesn’t have an arm.”

Even when separated from the wider party, none of the characters are ever truly alone as each one is given a denizen of the fantasy world (sometimes more than one) who acts as a familiar, muse, or haunting spectre. Some of these are figures from the protagonists’ pasts, as when Angela is given a robotic reincarnation of her departed dog, while others are geared more towards the characters’ present. The god-binding Isabella has the dubious honour of being forced to travel with Chuck, and enters communication with Mistress Woe – her own personal Mephistopheles – to gain a degree of control over her rambunctious companion.

These magical sounding-boards allow the comic to explore its characters’ backstories. Chuck, the eternal frat boy, is naturally granted an elfin babe to take to bed; yet this figure acts as a therapist as well as a sexual fantasy, with Chuck opening up to her about the various failed marriages he has passed through in pursuit of a deeper relationship. “Hey, it’s like implants”, he says. “If you can touch them, they’re real. But real real? What the fuck do I know about ‘real’?”

Matt has both a talking sword that voices the nagging doubts of his depression, and a trio of knights in surgical masks who embody anxieties about his family’s medical history. Ash, meanwhile, has both a vampire ex-husband and a grown-up son, the latter sired during her first trip to the game-world. The ex-husband, Zamoma, is modelled upon Lord Byron – which leads into another layer of intertextual worldbuilding.

The story reveals that the fantasy world was not created by Sol, as the characters had previously thought, but has been shaped by generations of past visitors. This becomes evident when the travellers meet a doppelganger of Charlotte Brontë, one more tangible than the Tolkien shade encountered earlier – as Charlotte herself played a part in shaping this realm of magic.

As with the earlier volume’s mingling of Tolkien’s fantasy with his wartime experiences, the story is drawing connections between role-playing and reality. The Brontës’ personal history did indeed have ties to both secondary-world fantasy and tabletop gaming: Charlotte’s elder brother Branwell owned twelve toy soldiers, and between them the four siblings not only gave each soldier a name and personality but dreamt up an entire fantasyland. Die’s Isabelle describes the resultant body of work as combining “Ideas ripped from the pages of books and newspapers. Arabian Nights. Colonialist tales. Conservative magazines. A big Byron crush. Plus magic, politics, romance.”

That “big Byron crush” accounts for the figure of Zamoma; Ash has already made this connection, having read some of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia: “It was like reading an ex’s diary. There he was, that beautiful shithead, in a 19th century girl’s teenage fanfic…”

While Kieron Gillen is not the first writer to have modern characters visit the Brontës’ fantasy world – see also Pauline Clarke’s Twelve and the Genii from 1962 – his fascination with the mechanics of role-playing and worldbuilding certainly adds a novel twist to his treatment of the topic. Much more than a mere paean to escapism, Die explores the harsh reality behind the fantasy, its topics ranging from the tragic circumstances of the Brontës to the gruelling workloads forced onto contemporary game developers. The main characters have all of the emotional complexity necessary to tackle these themes.

Stephanie Hans’ artwork is as lush as ever, if not more so: this time around, she is given a wider variety of settings to depict. The world of Die has always mingled the conventional trappings of medieval fantasy, the nineteenth-century unsettlement of Gothic motif and the glowing digital projections of cyberpunk, but the second volume adds still more to the mix with the flashbacks to the Brontës’ backstory. Here, Hans switches from her palette of coloured lights to sepia-tinged line-art, a transition that she pulls off perfectly thanks to the grounded, expressive nature of her characters.

One weakness of Die Volume 2 is that it really does not work as a standalone book. It assumes familiarity with the first volume, and ends with a hook for the third volume. The Hugos’ Graphic Story category has always leant towards serialised work, however, so this can hardly be called a fatal flaw. Die is a complex, intriguing and emotionally resonant work of intertextual fantasy, and deserves recognition.

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This concludes the first part of my journey through the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story finalists. Join me next month as I take a look at the remaining three contenders…