Customer Reviews

Girl Genius Volume 1: Agatha Heterodyne & The Beetleburg Clank

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mostly, when you see the phrase "fun for all" it really means "fun for nobody", but that does not apply here.
The Foglios' illustrations and writing are vivid & joyous, and their sense of humor displays minds born with the belief that "the world is mad, so why not enjoy it?"

Clever riffs on the old Universal Horror classics mix with wild sight gags & a great fondness for the spectacular in their work.

There's a plot, too. That's always nice.

The Hipster gives it a Big Thumbs UP!

Agatha Clay is a young woman with a mysterious past. She lives in a world complicated by Sparks (think mad scientists with the ability to create devices and living things that bend or break the known laws of science) and ruled by Baron Wulfenbach, a Spark who conquered Europe to stop the chaos. Agatha's doesn't know her origin or about her imminent Sparkhood. When a mugging and theft allows her talents to break loose without warning, all hell begins to break loose, too.

Girl Genius is beautifully drawn and wonderfully manic. Its characters are human, animal, robotic (called Clanks), and artificial biological constructs. The huge story includes Agatha, the Baron and his son Gilgamesh (himself a developing spark), the King of Cats, Jagermonsters, pirates, the most fearsome nanny in the known universe, a traveling circus, Translyvania Polygnostic University, various monsters, and Punch and Judy. The backstory underlying it is fascinating, imaginative, and enormously detailed. The villains are not totally evil, and the good have their dark sides, but don't take any of it too seriously. This is comedy that is both broad and pointed, and it works beautifully.

This comic is a whacko masterpiece of adventure, romance, and discovery. After fifty years of reading all sorts of comics, this is now my all-time favorite.

My wife and I play the Girl Genius card game, though up until recently I have known little of the background story. One day, curious, I looked it up and found this volume and ordered it. Before I was finished, I was already in love with Agatha. This volume gives little of the flavor of the full story that folds over the next 5+ volumes, but it does give insight into a richly imagined world.

In some ways, it is a very common story. There is a student who seems not particularly good at anything, though the reader is made aware early own that there is more than meets the eye. There is a university where she learns, that seems to be taking part in caring for her and hiding something of a secret. There is a mysterious set of events in her past, and her family's past. She has an "item of power" that is taken and sets gears into motion. She meets a guy she both despises and admires at the same time.

Somehow, though, the Foglios have found an excellent way to balance the "steam-punk", the cliche story line, and the relatively small beginnings of a comic that are meant to hint at things to come in a way to come up with something that feels fresh and, more importantly, fun.

If you are thinking about ordering this volume, by the way, I recommend getting the next couple as well. It reads fast and I assure you that you are going to want more.

The art is really the best part of the series. All the bits and bobs and mechanically doodads make for a very pretty comic. (And they serve as good plot devices too!)

I zoomed through the first book too quickly and hadn't yet ordered the rest of the series, which I would say is the only bad part about the book.

The drama is top notch and the fantasy setting keeps it moving forward. You'll find that the plot reveals little secrets along the way that you would never expect. The best comic I've seen from the Foglios in a long time.

Great characters set in a wondeful universe! I was overjoyed reading through it and puzzling out the world history, dropped in a way that wasn't heavyhanded but left me enough clues to keep me interested and moving forward. Agatha is great hero and seeing her evolve is really entertaining.

Anyone who writes will tell you that writing comedy is hard. Foglio has a history of writing brilliantly whimsical sci-fi comedy (the Buck Godot stories), and erotic comedy (XXXenophile). He's done it again with this inventive steampunk comic. In the Heterodyne universe Mad Scientists (called "Sparks") use bizarre technology to whip up fish flensing robots of doom in a matter of minutes. (They're effectively wizards in a technology setting). The heroine, Agatha Clay, is a late blooming but incredibly powerful spark who may destabilze an already tottering Europe.

Agatha is fun: she's plucky, smart, and just a bit insane at times. All Foglio women are gorgeous, and Agatha is no exception. But her beauty is incidental to her brains in the storyline. In general the characters are complex, with heroic despots and maniacal heroes.

As with Foglio, the backgrounds are intricate, detailed and often very, very funny. The steampunk setting is beautifully rendered, in a world where everything, from microscopes to zepplins, is ornamented and elaborate. Its worth rereading just to look at the backgrounds. The storyline is also intricate, and is not resolved in this volume. However, Foglio has a knack for weaving complicated plotlines that resolve elegantly, and I am sure that this series will eventually do the same.

This collection includes just the first few black and white stories. The subsequent ones are now in color. As of 7/1/04 we're up to issue 11, so there will probably be more collections to come.

This is the first volume in Phil Foglio's ongoing series featuring Agatha Heterodyne and a cast of hundreds. The book collects the first few issues of what was originally a comic book series. The publishing schedule, though, seems to have been troubled for a variety of reasons, and "Girl Genius" now appears in webcomic form (with ensuing regular compilations in print form).

Kaja Foglio, wife and co-creator, describes this as "gaslamp fantasy": crypto-Victorian science and pre-pulp adventures in a world filled with mad scientists, giant steam-powered robots, weird technology, mysterious cults, and cackling villains. A great deal of which is played for laughs, simultaneously embracing and sending up the usual tropes of the genre. The humor throughout balances between sly drollery and slapstick.

One of the major attractions is Foglio's art, which many gamers will well know from his years of penning the "Phil & Dixie" feature in "Dragon" magazine. It's drenched in color and is highly detailed, to the point that you wonder how he ever completes a page. There's almost always 18 different things going on in the background, none of which is ever really relevant, but Foglio apparently really enjoys jamming in the sight gags.

I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff, and the Foglios have done a great job in creating an internally consistent alterna-Earth with its own physical and magical laws and history and politics, and they've also introduced seemingly dozens of plot strands. This latter is both good and bad. In later issues, there is some loss of cohesiveness, and the story seems to wander off into side treks, and none of the storylines ever seem to get wrapped up. (It's sort of the "Lost" of the comics world.)

On the other hand, it's got enormous fleets of dirigibles! And scar-faced pseudo-Teutonic bad guys! And talking cats! And endangered heroines in corsets! So, you know, all of the good stuff. Check it out!

OK, so tea only plays a small role in the whole scheme of things, but it spoke to me. :)

Steam-punk girl power! If you like stories about intelligent, attractive, personable, confident, go-getter, (perhaps just a little bit insane) women then this comic is for you.

Girl Genius is full of fun, expressive artwork, fabulous clothing designs, lovable characters, and can't-wait-for-the-next-issue story. What more could one want?

The Girl Genius story begins with a bang. Or, if you insist, with a bizzare electrical storm in the middle of the street as Agatha Clay walks to school. Before the morning is out, Agatha is mugged, her school is visited by Klaus Wolfenbach (the Machiavellian mad scientist who rules Europe) and her mentor and headmaster lies dead, the victim of his own bomb. (He is also a mad scientist.) Within hours, a new mystery siezes the attention of Klaus and his dashing son Gilgamesh. And Agatha is somehow at the center of it, though Klaus and Gilgamesh have very different ideas about what she is and what she will become. How little they know ....

And we the reader have learned a great deal about the Foglios' fascinating world of monsters, machines, and mad science, as well as the characters at the center of it. A quick check at [...] will show that Girl Genuis subverts or redefines tropes (literary devices) as often as it confirms them. It begins here, in Volume One.

Agatha Heterodyne and the Beetleburg Clank is in black-and-white. The artwork mixes detail with drama to very good effect, and as much is shown as spoken. The goldfish, for instance ... funny, but also revealing of Gilgamesh's character. And a good thing too, considering what he has in mind for Agatha.

Now that the story is in its ninth volume, we can say that there are plot questions from the very beginning of the story that have been reinforced but not resolved. It looks like this story has been plotted out from the beginning. That doesn't make it good, but it means that it can be very good indeed. And so far it's meeting that promise.

The Girl Genius webcomic from which these books are derived was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story of 2008.

Postscript: The new edition of this volume is in color. The color work was done by Cheyenne Wright, who shared the Hugo awards for Volumes 8 and 9. The color is used sparingly, with almost none on the first pages and low-saturation tones predominating. Wright was careful not to overwhelm Phil Foglio's superb line art (for example the nimbus-and-rays in which Gilgamesh W. is first presented) while using the color to hint at the story development. One could wish for a smoother transition to the second volume, but not for a better stand-alone work.

I'm not a huge fan of comics and I certainly don't spend a lot of money buying comics that were originally online. Yet this series is so fantastically awesome that I find the investment in the paperback printings entirely worth it. These volumes are just thick enough to sit comfortably on my bookshelf and thin enough to read while on my back. You should really read these in color to get the full impact of their rich and vivid world.

This is definitly a must-have series for anybody who likes Steampunk. The characters are fun, the bad guys are grandiose, the outfits rock and occasionally stuff gets blown up. What more could you ask for?