The Forbidden Planet International Blog

The Hugo Awards, given out at the annual science fiction worldcon each year, are one of the major SF awards in the calendar; in the last couple of years a graphic category has been added to the awards mix alongside the books and other categories. A problem that some have identified though is that a number of those eligible to vote in the Hugos are perhaps not big comics readers and they’re not overly familiar with what works to nominate and vote for. So Cheryl Morgan organised a round table discussion for the fine Salon Futura podcast with writer Maura McHugh, the Geek Syndicate’s David Monteith and myself, discussing comics work that we thought would be worthy of consideration.

Since the Hugos are a science fiction award we had to leave aside some brilliant comics work we’d enjoyed, such as Psychiatric Tales, because the comics have to have some science fiction/fantastical elements to be elligible. Fortunately this has still left us with a slew of works that we could suggest to Hugo voters for their consideration, from Grandville Mon Amour to Batwoman to iZombie to the Unwritten. It’s great the Hugos are embacing comics now, hopefully this third year of the category will see a more diverse range of nominees – voters could certainly do worse than pick up on some of the titles suggested in the podcast.