This was an odd little experiment, which I undertook because I'm so on the hook for Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling novels, but then I haven't been down for much else she's written. I'm not sure what the official name for this series is -- Lords of [Something] would be my guess -- but it's four different paranormal romance novels with an overarching plot written by four different writers. I find this sort of thing fascinating -- when novel writers collaborate like television or comic writers.

The last series like this I read was the Crimson City novels. Most of them are by someone called Liz Maverick (which is surely not a pen name at all), but the second is by Marjorie M Liu. who, before she racked up all the awards for Monstress, wrote this fucking brilliantly weird PNR series called Dirk & Steele. I mean, she really moved the markers for what you can pull off in the sometimes boring vampire/werewolf snorefest you can find in the genre. Liu took the kind of premise that made me exclaim, wait, what?? like a hundred times when I was reading the first novel, Crimson City, and in her story, grounds it so completely in believable interpersonal concerns that my brain stopped screaming every 15 minutes about how nothing about the world made any sense. That's some godamn writing right there. 

Singh's outing in the Lords of [Something] maybe wasn't at this level, but I actually made it all the way through to the end of the novel, which is something I cannot say about the other three books in the series. Some of this is just the silliness of the premise, because all of the books are riffs on various fairy tales. There's one based on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, for example, where our fair haired maiden finds a rock hard cock which was just right, and I just couldn't stop my brain from squealing immaturely, and then breaking into laughter.  

Lord of the Abyss is very loosely based on Beauty and the Beast, and it works in the places that Singh tends to excel, and otherwise is kind of a mess. She does an excellent job writing characters out of trauma and abuse. She doesn't go for the magic vagina, the ladybits that can cure all, but constructs believable psychologies warped by neglect, and then slowly, carefully, draws them out. But the world, and the magic, is slapdash, so the parts of the plot that intersect with that are shaky at best. 

So, fun to see a writer I tend to enjoy, at least in one limited context, pull off something in a shared world. Didn't captivate me like Psy-Changeling, but it was a perfectly cromulent way to pass the time. 

ETA: Ok, I actually looked, and the series is called Royal House of Shadows, which seems kind of stuffy and conceited, but what do I know. 

So I started reading them yesterday and I'm mostly done.  On a sunbeam is a web comic (I can't link from work) and I'm making my way through it, I've read the first few episodes and find it interesting.

Again it was hard to choose within an interesting bunch, my favourite was Abbott, ranking the rest was hard.  

Eventually I just decided an order but it was work.

Abbott features a female investigative journalist who can see more than she wants to at scenes and a series of grotesque murders.  Stands alone and leaves room for sequels.

Black Panther: Long Live the King - Black Panther at home in Wakanda fighting a creature that is destabilising the country.

Monstress: Volume 3: Haven - this is so pretty, the artwork is very special and the story winds around and keeps me reading.  You need to have read the previous two books before this.

On a Sunbeam is a story of some people travelling around in a spaceship exploring buildings along with some exploration of the past of some of the characters.   Unusual and interesting.

Paper Girls - Volume 4 - this one really needed that I read the rest before embarking on it, lost doesn't quite describe it enough.

Saga - Volume 9 - I've read the previous stories, the artwork is lush and the story interesting, now I want to know what's going to happen next.

I read this for one of my summer classes. We had to read and annotate 10 comics/graphic novels. Here's the annotation I wrote for that class:

Maika Halfwolf is on a quest to discover information about her shadowy past. Along the way she must battle an ancient entity who shares her mind and body and makes her the target of every faction in her war-torn world.

Monstress: Awakening is the most beautifully illustrated comic book I have ever seen. Every panel is like a painting and so full of detail I could spend minutes taking in each one, yet the art never overwhelms the page or the story. Even the body horror and gore manage to look beautiful. In addition to beautiful art, Monstress contains creative character design and diverse characters. It is refreshing to see a fantasy world populated with resilient, chromatic, female characters whose existence is normalized. These women are the rule not the exception. 

Monstress also includes incredible world building. Immediately in the book there is the sense that this is a fully realized world, and there is little awkward exposition to explain it. It is left to readers to put the story together for themselves. Some of the more complex aspects of the world are explained at the ends of chapters in short lectures. The conceit works at conveying information that clarifies the story, but if this information is really that important, it deserves space in the actual comic rather than being relegated to a clever info dump.

Monstress is a fresh take on fantasy worlds. It deserves a spot in the graphic novel canon for its artwork alone.

This is part of a series of posts reviewing categories in this year's Hugo ballot. I'll be discussing the entries, the voter packet, and my ballot. I've nominated and voted most years since 2011, when I figured out that all I had to do was join Worldcon to get to do so.

I'd only read 2 of these in advance of the finalist announcement. Two more are properties I'm familiar with from earlier volumes.

• Black Bolt, Volume 1: Hard Time, written by Saladin Ahmed, illustrated by Christian Ward, lettered by Clayton Cowles (Marvel) - 3.5 stars, loved the art and liked the writing. Still laughing that his name is Blackagar Boltagon. 

• Bitch Planet, Volume 2: President Bitch, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, illustrated by Valentine De Landro and Taki Soma, colored by Kelly Fitzpatrick, lettered by Clayton Cowles (Image Comics) 4.5 Stars, this one I adored to much to even put into words.

• Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood, written by Marjorie M. Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image Comics) -  4 Stars, a stronger book than the first one in terms of pacing, and with the same gorgeous art.

• My Favorite Thing is Monsters, written and illustrated by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics) - Interesting concept, but very slow. I didn't actually finish this book.

• Paper Girls, Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, colored by Matthew Wilson, lettered by Jared Fletcher (Image Comics) - 3.5 Stars, did not love.

• Saga, Volume 7, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics) - 3 Stars, fine, but kind of a low point for the series so far.

So Bitch Planet is definitely at the top, followed by Monstress and Black Bolt. The other three could go in any order, but maybe I'll just leave them off because I don't really feel strongly about them at all. 

I still want to get to the meat of the mystery - the creature that lives in Maika and that occasionally is brought out, with disastrously fatal results.    This ties to her mother, and others who are on the opposite side of the war from Maika, but again this moves slowly and is hampered - at least for me - by the historical aspect. 

I liked it, it just didn't move me the way many of my favorites do.