User:Mphj7/Sandbox: Girl Genius

--

Rating Summary

Before I go any further, it should be said that I actually unironically like Girl Genius. However, there are criticisms of the webcomic that I want to make anyways.

--

Background
Girl Genius is a comic series, both in print and web form, by Phil Foglio and Kaja Foglio. It began around the year 2000 as a serialized print comic, with Issue #1 being released on 28 Feb. 2001. It first became a webcomic in the year 2005, with the print issues being canceled that same year (though print paperback collections are still released). In 2011, the story began to get prose novelizations to accompany the webcomic. It's been going strong, in some form or another, for well over twenty years at this point. I'd say it shows no signs of stopping, but the Foglios do say the story will end at some point, so instead I'll say it shows no signs of stopping within a normal human lifespan.

Girl Genius has been on the Bad Webcomics Wiki radar for a very long time. The old forum made a thread on it back in 2010 and added it to the most wanted list in 2011. However, little progress was made since - despite the prominence of it's hatedom - Girl Genius is generally a well-recieved webcomic with many fans, some of whom are/were frequent users of the BWW. Naturally, many people did not want a webcomic that they love to be put on the Bad Webcomics Wiki. At the same time, many of the people who did think it deserved to be here simply didn't want to read through the entirety of a webcomic that they hated. In 2019, the user Lt. Art Major took one for the team and posted a review of the webcomic after reading up until around Volume 8 or 9. But then, in 2023, I (yes, the person writing this article) posted a challenge to the review, and was given a chance to write another.

Downfall
WIP

Setting
Before getting into the story and plot proper, I'll discuss the in-universe backstory first. Without giving any spoilers (because there are a lot of them), here's a quick rundown:


 * The setting is a fantasy-ish sorta-steampunk alternate Europe. There's this thing called "the Spark," which can best be summed up as "being a mad scientist but as a superpower and/or mental disorder." A person with the Spark is also called a "Spark" themselves. Though they're not all evil, Sparks still often damage the things around them, whether by accident or on purpose.
 * Thanks to these people, Europa is a bit of a mess. There's this one dynasty of Sparks known as House Heterodyne based in a town called Mechanicsburg in Transylvania. For centuries, they raided the continent with their monsters to crush their enemies, see them driven out before them, and hear the lamentations of their women.
 * In the 1600s, a guy named Andronicus Valois aka the Storm King fought the Heterodynes, and he founded a group called the Knights of Jove to do so. The fight ended in a draw of sorts. After Andronicus left this mortal plane, the Knights of Jove kept existing as a (spoiler-laden) secret society.
 * In the mid to late 1800s, the new heads of House Heterodyne were these brothers named Bill and Barry. They decided to break from family tradition and instead became wandering heroes trying to help Europa's people. They had a sidekick named Klaus Wulfenbach. Their arch-enemies were another Spark dynasty called House Mongfish. They fought until Bill Heterodyne decided to marry one Lucrezia Mongfish and make peace.
 * Suddenly, Mechanicsburg was attacked by an unknown person called the "Other" and Lucrezia mysteriously went missing. The Other then went around killing people and wrecking Europa. Bill and Barry went off to fight the Other, and they went missing too.
 * Klaus Wulfenbach, the old sidekick of Bill and Barry, came back from his exile to find Europa a chaotic hellhole with the Heterodynes gone. So he built an army and took over the continent, becoming a surprisingly sane military dictator.

Story Proper
It is vaguely around 1890-something, and our main protagonist is a teenaged girl named Agatha "Clay," or rather Agatha Heterodyne. She's the long lost daughter of Bill and Lucrezia, and thus a Spark like them. She doesn't know any of this at the comic's start because she was raised by foster parents who kept her parentage a secret from her.

Then she gets mugged and starts going crazy. At that point, Agatha starts to piece together that she might actually be an important person. However, since Agatha is the heir of two infamously powerful dynasties of mad scientist warlords, people like Wulfenbach and the Knights of Jove would rather have her in their pockets instead of running around on her own.

The story is divided into two acts:
 * Act 1: Agatha realizes who she is, runs from Wulfenbach, briefly gets possessed by the Other, spends a couple in-universe days (several IRL years) fixing the Castle, and then a big battle for Mechanicsburg happens with a pyrrhic Heterodyne victory. It goes from Vol. 1 to Vol. 13.
 * Act 2: Agatha gets warped two years into the future, runs from Wulfenbach again, almost accidentally destroys Paris, spends a long time in England, and... OK, this arc is still ongoing. It goes from Vol. 14 to, as of me writing this, the present.

Along the way, Agatha meets several new faces. She's in a perpetual love triangle with two lads, named Gil and Tarvek, from opposing political factions. She's also got sidekicks like the lost foreign warrior-princess Zeetha, the totally-not-ninja Violetta, and the artificial talking cat Krosp. Then there are tons of antagonists who are either one-shot or recurring because we can never be sure about that.

Art review
If you've heard someone criticize Girl Genius before, it's very likely you've heard them specifically blast the artwork, more particularly the shading and the facial anatomy. In honesty, I don't really blame them.

The way Phil draws human faces is... inconsistent. Since I'm not an art buff, it doesn't bother me too much, but I will say that the longer you look at the faces, the more issues you see. In particular, some of the things that stuck out to me were how facial features seemingly grow or shrink between pannels, how the eyes may change how close they are to the nose, how the mouths may change how close they are to the chin, and how the heads sometimes just change shape. I should also note that all of the above not (usually) done in a cartoonish, stylistic sense to exaggerate facial expressions, but rather is just the "normal" Girl Genius face art. Now that I said all of that, let me point out that Phil Foglio is a professional artist who has been doing this stuff for decades. You'd think that he'd get more consistent with drawinf facial anatomy, but he's been consistently inconsistent in that regard for decades at this point.

Another common criticism of the art is the coloring. Though I must say that most of the people pointing this out are usually talking about Vols. 2 & 3, which is when the coloring takes a dip before it gets better from Vol. 5 onward. This is because Vols. 2, 3, & 4 actually have a different person coloring them than the rest of the webcomic does; 2 & 3 were done by one Mark McNabb, 4 was done by Laurie E. Smith, and from 5 onward the coloring is done by Cheyenne Wright. See the pic on the left for a comparison between McNabb's coloring and Cheyenne Wright's coloring, and you can pretty easily see why the former is usually bashed by critics while the latter is often praised by fans.

Having said all of that, I don't really think the artwork is so bad that it prevents me from enjoying the webcomic. The sloppily-done faces and the McNabb Dark Age don't really detract from the detail in everything else and from Cheyenne's generally good coloring. I have heard some people complain about the artwork to such an extent that you'd think they were talking about Sonichu instead of Girl Genius, but I don't really see it.

As one last thing in regards to the art, I will say that Lt. Art Major (who reviewed this webcomic before me) really did not like the shading of Girl Genius. Frankly, I don't know enough about the ins-and-outs of art to know the specifics of why the shading got on his nerves so much. So I'll just put the two pictures he disliked the most right below here and let you decide:

Writing review
In general, Girl Genius

WIP

Let me go over some of the things I like about the writing of Girl Genius:

Now that I've said all of that, let me go over my main criticisms of the writing:

WIP

Author biography


The webcomic is co-written by Phil Foglio and Kaja (Murphy) Foglio, a married couple hailing from Seattle.


 * Phil Foglio
 * Kaja Foglio

WIP

Conclusion
WIP

Links

 * First Page: So you can read Girl Genius in order.
 * Future: So you can read Girl Genius ahead of order.
 * Books: So you can read Girl Genius in order, but without looking at the art.
 * Girl Genius Wiki: So you can read Girl Genius out of order.
 * The Chronology: So you can read the TLDR of Girl Genius in order.
 * TV Tropes Page: So you can read Girl Genius in alphabetical order.
 * Amazon: So you can order Girl Genius to read.