User:Mphj7/Sandbox: Girl Genius

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Original review author: Mphj7
Webcomic name: Girl Genius
Author: Phil Foglio and Kaja Foglio.
Start Date: The first page as a webcomic went up February 2005, but it was published as a print comic February 2001.
End Date: In the very, very distant future.
Genre: Sci-fi/fantasy hybrid thingy.
Defining Flaw: The story simply was not built for a webcomic format.
Summary: Mad science is a superpower/mental disorder. A girl named Agatha is the last member of an old mad scientist dynasty. She causes continent-wide instability by existing.




Rating Summary


Art: Niceface.pngNiceface.png

I'll use this face in lieu of stars to explain why the art is rated so low.

Storyline: Niceface.pngNiceface.pngNiceface.png

Story-wise, it's pretty good ... when the story is actually going on. That's not always something that happens. Be warned.

Characters: Niceface.pngNiceface.pngNiceface.pngNiceface.png

IMO, most of the important characters are well-written.

Overall: Niceface.pngNiceface.pngNiceface.png

A broadly decent webcomic held back by some big problems.



Before I go any further, it should be said that I actually genuinely 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.[1] It first became a webcomic in the year 2005,[2] 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.[3] 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[4] and added it to the most wanted list in 2011.[5] 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.[6] But then, in 2023, I (yes, the person writing this article) posted a challenge to the review,[7] and was given a chance to write another. Due to procrastination and forgetfulness, it took me almost a whole year to follow through on that request, which I think is thematically appropriate for a discussion of Girl Genius.

Downfall

Girl Genius didn't have a "downfall" in the typical sense, since the things that made it bad were there from the start, and the things that made it good simply never went away. But if I were forced to pick a date, I would say around 2018, since that's when the creators started taking more breaks from the main story, making the experience of reading it a little more difficult.

Story and Plot

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. For centuries, they raided the continent with their monsters for fun.
  • In the 1600s, a guy named the Storm King founded the Knights of Jove to fight the Heterodynes. After he "died," the Knights of Jove kept existing as a secret society.
  • In the mid to late 1800s, the new heads of House Heterodyne were brothers named Bill and Barry. They broke from family tradition and instead became wandering heroes trying to help Europa's people with their sidekick Klaus. Their arch-enemies were House Mongfish, another Spark dynasty. They fought until Bill married Lucrezia Mongfish and made peace.
  • Suddenly, Mechanicsburg was attacked by an unknown person called the "Other" and Lucrezia went missing. The Other then went around wrecking Europa. Bill and Barry left to fight the Other and went missing in action.
  • Klaus Wulfenbach, an old sidekick of Bill and Barry, came back from exile to find Europa a chaotic mess with the Heterodynes gone. So he built an army and took over the continent.

Which leads us to the actual plot.

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.

These are all meant to be the same character's face.

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 stick 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 their shape altogether. 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 drawing facial anatomy, but he's been consistently inconsistent in that regard for decades at this point.

Left is colorized by Mark McNabb; right is colorized by Cheyenne Wright.

Another common criticism of the art is the coloring. 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.[8] 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 has a pretty well-made story. The problems come in with the way the story is shown to us readers.

To begin, let me go over some of the things I like about the writing of Girl Genius:

  • Planning ahead. The Foglios have had the general plot planned out since well before they started, so they leave foreshadowing details that only become important later. For example, the true identity of the "Other" was only revealed in Vol. 5, but you can find bits of Vols. 2 and 3 with Von Pinn[9] or the wasps[10] that show it was always intended. As a result, major plot twists aren't just pulled out of the creators' asses as they go along.
  • The premise itself. It's basically the old "mad scientist" character archetype being a different class of superhumans, which is a unique idea. The sparks themselves aren't insane all the time, but they slip into a "madness place" where they get their work done at the momentary cost of thinking straight. As a result, power pretty much always comes with a cost, and the protagonists need to be aware of their weaknesses to get stuff done.
  • Worldbuilding. In a lot of superpower fiction, people with superpowers either hide away from normal society (e.g. Harry Potter), or aren't hidden and they obviously stick out in human society (e.g. many superhero comics). But Girl Genius actually has the Sparks, the people with superpowers, as political leaders and warlords. The Heterodynes are a major dynasty of sparks that everybody feared, and it took the Storm King leading a coalition of everybody else to stop the Heterodynes from taking over the continent. Props for putting thought into that.
  • Protagonists. Agatha acts like an actual person with reasonable doubts. I've heard some call Agatha a Mary Sue because she's superhumanly competent, but that's just because it's her superpower as a Spark, which isn't exclusive to her. The deuteragonists Gil and Tarvek (also Sparks) both have character beyond "protagonist's love interest," and have a whole history with each other that started before the main plot did.
  • Antagonists. Two common mistakes when writing villains are making them so evil that they're stupid, or making them so sympathetic that the hero just looks bad. Girl Genius avoids both extremes. Baron Wulfenbach makes sense as an anti-villain since he's a well-meaning ruler who just made some reasonable misjudgements. As for unambiguous villains, even the purely evil ones like the Other and Zola have a consistent logic to their character instead of being one-dimensional obstacles.

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

  • The pacing. To say that this webcomic moves slowly would be an understatement. The whole arc in which Agatha was fixing up Castle Heterodyne started in 2007 and ended in 2011;[11] that's half a decade doing the same thing. Not only that, but in 2022-2023, the Foglios took a year-long break from the whole story, even though they started the break saying it would be "a few days" long.[12] You get the idea. The plot moves at a very slow pace that makes it easy for readers to lose track of what's going on, and salt is poured on this wound by the plot getting sidetracked. Given the fact that I praised the webcomic's ability to plan ahead earlier, this flaw actually becomes worse since we know the Foglios have an ending planned even if it seems so far off in the future.
  • WALLS OF TEXT. Seriously, some pages have roughly the same amount of text in the speech bubbles as they do actual artwork! Webcomics are supposed to be a visual medium, and while there are some things that are better communicated via text than artwork, depending too much on giant walls of text just makes things awkward to read through. Furthermore, there is sometimes just too much information dumped on us, even when that information isn't really relevant to the plot, leaving it up to the reader to decipher which information is or is not important. If they wanted to rely so much on text, the Foglios could have just written novels instead (which they did, actually; see #A comparison below).
  • The plot is hard to keep track of. This is a side-effect not only of the pacing problem disussed earlier, but also of the fact that they have so many details planned out before that they want to shove into the narrative. While foreshadowing is a good thing, it can get annoying when a character who hasn't been on-screen in over a decade suddenly comes back and is relevant to the plot.[13] This is made worse by how they sometimes just don't explain why certain characters are important, or how they sometimes do explain, but only in a line that is within a massive wall of text that doesn't stand out compared to all of the other walls of text. I have to admit that when I was reading Girl Genius for the first time, I had a hard time remembering which characters were important to the plot and why they were important to the plot.

At this point you may be thinking, "Hey, the problems with Girl Genius seem to stem from the fact that they chose a webcomic format instead of anything else for their lengthy, slow-paced story." Which leads me to my next point.

WIP

A comparison

As mentioned earlier, in 2011, the Foglios began releasing prose novelizations of Girl Genius. As of me writing this (May 2024), the novelizations have only caught up to the part of the story covered around 2014 in the webcomic.

WIP

Below, I have taken an excerpt from the third novelization (Agatha H. and the Voice of the Castle) and put, to the right of it, the corresponding page of the scene in the webcomic:

Girl Genius, Vol. 9, p. 64 (from July 13, 2009).
She studied Agatha’s face and a slight moue of puzzlement crossed her face. “You are…genuinely upset about the deaths of the constructs back on Castle Wulfenbach. I am surprised to find you so sentimental.”
Agatha thrashed uselessly. She was vaguely aware of the Castle’s voice, making conciliatory noises, but she was too enraged to listen. “Those constructs were my parents!”
An expression of regret stole across Von Pinn’s face. “You know as well as I that they were not. They were merely expendable caretakers. As, in many ways, am I.
“But I have waited over two hundred years to fulfill my purpose. My beloved King charged me with the solemn duty of protecting you.” Von Pinn gave Agatha a brief shake. “He was a romantic fool in many ways, but I can not—” Another shake. “Will not—disobey him.”
“I don’t want your protection,” Agatha snarled. “You stay away from me or I will find a way to kill you!”
Infuriatingly, Von Pinn smiled. “Ah, that is where it becomes… interesting.” She made a low sound in her throat. “Truly, I serve too many masters. My creator did not charge me with your protection. My creator’s last orders to me were to keep you ‘safe.’ He meant ‘safe for those around you.’ He knew what you were. He knew what would happen if you were not watched. I once thought I could render you harmless by killing you, and still ‘protect’ you by guarding your tomb…”
Agatha was still furious. Her struggles had done nothing. All she could do was listen as Von Pinn continued.
“Sadly, due to the interference of my last mistress—may her bones burn green—I am instead compelled to defend your unworthy life with my own.”
Agatha’s eyes narrowed. Her fingers found the trigger of the death ray that she still clutched in one hand. She couldn’t see it, held as she was. “Really.” She said. “You’re prepared to die to protect me.”
“Whether I want to or not,” Von Pinn said.
Agatha grinned nastily down at her. “Fine. Then now’s your chance.” As the Castle howled in protest, she pulled the trigger on the death ray, and a large circle of floor boiled away beneath Von Pinn’s feet.
(Agatha H. and the Voice of the Castle [Night Shade Books, 2014; paperback ed. 2015], chap. 8, pp. 341-43.)

WIP

I specifically chose a page from the webcomic with a lot of wordy dialogue taking up the page. Maybe you'll notice that the novelization communicates the scene's points much more smoothly than the webcomic. The novel highlights things like emotions, body movements, tone of voice, and tension much more clearly. And the walls of loredump seem less heavy in the novel, even though it's pretty much the same words in both the novel and webcomic.

Author biography

Philandkaja.png

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

  • Phil Foglio has been doing comics since the 1980s. His pre-Girl Genius work includes the comic strip What's New with Phil & Dixie (1980-2003), artwork for over 50 cards for Magic: The Gathering, that cartoon devil associated with UNIX,[14] and many other things. It is worth noting that the way he draws human faces hasn't changed since the 1980s.
  • Kaja Foglio also did some art for Magic: The Gathering cards (though not as much as Phil) and also some Shadowfist cards, but doesn't have as big a claim to fame as her husband before Girl Genius. It is also worth noting that the idea for Girl Genius came from Kaja looking at some of Phil's art.[15]

Conclusion

WIP

A graphic novel disguised as a Monday-Wednesday-Friday webcomic. I would recommend it to those who can tolerate text walls and weird artstyles.

Notes

  1. https://girlgenius.fandom.com/wiki/The_Comic_Book
  2. https://web.archive.org/web/20070407174455/http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/gg101.cgi?date=20050221
  3. https://girlgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Agatha_H._and_the_Airship_City
  4. Link (Archive)
  5. Link (Archive)
  6. https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/badwebcomicswikiforum/girl-genius-t451-s40.html#p38182
  7. https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/badwebcomicswikiforum/girl-genius-review-challenge-t1980.html
  8. "Volume One was inked by Brian Snoddy and colored by Cheyenne Wright. Volumes Two and Three were colored by Mark McNabb. Volume Four was colored by Laurie E. Smith. From Volume Five onward, our regular color artist has been Cheyenne Wright." (https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/newreaders.php)
  9. Namely her voice-activated response and family connection to Agatha.
  10. Again, with how they react to Agatha's voice.
  11. I'm counting the start on this page when they first discuss Agatha's plan to fix the castle, and the end on this page when the Doom Bell rings.
  12. The break started in August 2022 and ended in August 2023.
  13. This actually happened with one character, that being Dr. Vapnoople.
  14. "One of the earliest pieces of UNIX artwork, done in 1976 by artist Phil Foglio, shows several daemons holding forks on a PDP-11 festooned with pipes and a bucket labelled NULL." (https://minnie.tuhs.org/Seminars/Saving_Unix/)
  15. "I was going through all of Phil's old files and I was filing all of the old sketches, and I was coming across weird airships and cats in tophats with walking canes, and all of this wonderful." (2008 interview with The Biblio File, 7m 15s; MP3 archive.)

Links

  • First Page: So you can read Girl Genius in order.
    • Future: So you can read Girl Genius ahead of order.
  • 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.