Phil and Kaja Foglio’s gaslamp fantasy series Girl Genius is set in a world of automatons and dirigibles, tyrants and heroes, and stories of the famous adventurers, The Heterodyne Boys. It’s a world where a small portion of the population are Sparks, geniuses born with the ability to invent death rays and revenants and robots capable of leveling cities, but usually without the common sense to determine when building something like that is a fantastically bad idea.
Into all this comes Agatha Clay, a bumbling college student with a lot of big ideas, and a track record of creating things that either fall to pieces or explode. Sometimes both. Nothing she makes ever works, at least until the day the locket she’s been told to never take off is stolen. Suddenly Agatha finds herself a hostage aboard a tyrant’s city-sized dirigible, Castle Wulfenbach, surrounded by the brightest and maddest of the Empire, and building actual working inventions in her sleep. And all that’s before she finds out that she is somehow the long-lost heir to the Heterodyne Family.
The ongoing Girl Genius comic series first started in 2001, and has since won the Hugo Award three times for Best Graphic Story; it most likely would have kept on winning if the Foglios hadn’t withdrawn the series from the competition so they could give other artists a chance. In 2011 the Foglios released the first of the novelized versions of the ongoing story, Agatha H and the Airship City. The book retells the story from the graphic novel, with some interesting additions that can give readers a little more back story about the characters and world that the original version may have missed.
I’m a little late in reading this, since I wasn’t sure how well the Girl Genius story would work without the artwork. Phil Foglio’s art was what first drew me to the series; I’ve been grabbing up anything with his name on it since his What’s New With Phil and Dixie strip in Dragon magazine, and of course the comic book adaptation he did for Robert Asprin’s Myth Adventures. But even the artwork wouldn’t have sustained fourteen years and twelve published volumes of the ongoing series; the intricate world that the Foglios have created for Girl Genius just gets more and more complex, with ever-changing political alliances and revelations about characters’ histories, and a society filled with every possible technological advancement created by inventors who never stop to plan beyond the question “why not build a biological construct with claws and acid saliva and a total disregard for the sanctity of human life?” The novelization puts that story in a format where you can breeze through two years worth of graphic novel content in almost a single setting, and it’s pretty much word-for-word from the original comic book.
There were a couple of times when I thought a slightly less faithful reproduction would have been better. One of the hallmarks of Phil Foglio’s artwork is how he crams every panel with detail. Look through any page of the comic and you’ll usually find products with bizarre labels (“Lab Assistant In a Can! Expendable!”), characters in the middle of an argument, or various animals reacting to something. Unfortunately the visual jokes don’t always work well when they’re written out; the bit in the first issue, with Gilgamesh and the goldfish? That’s one of my favorite sight gags, and the goldfish’s expressions make me laugh every time I see it. Having it spelled out in written form feels a little clunky and unnecessary.
I think the Foglios wanted to fix some minor plot elements to make the story flow better, since there are a few tweaks to the story in the book. I read through the first two volumes, just to compare. (Not a hardship; all twelve volumes and counting are available to read for free on the Girl Genius website, and have I mentioned how much I love every page of it?) Nothing’s been messed with on a Stephen King or George Lucas level, thankfully, just a couple of places where a relationship was removed, or something was made slightly clearer than it was in the comic. I wasn’t aware when reading the comic that Agatha already knew what her foster parents were, and this is made pretty obvious in the novel, although she still doesn’t know who they are. There’s also an extra scene where Agatha meets the character of Zulenna for the first time (not a good first impression for either of them), and characters like Boris and Bangladesh Dupree have interesting back stories that were added to the novel. And I wish that the scene with Agatha’s first dinner aboard Castle Wulfenbach had been in the graphic novel; the image of all the gifted children showing off their invention skills by having their homemade clanks set the table and serve dinner was surprisingly delightful.
Mostly what this book has to offer is that it’s just plain fun. Phil and Kaja are the type of authors that like to throw in descriptions of the most random things, and then not bother with explaining what the heck was going on. Castle defenders have to be on the lookout for hazards like an invasion of intelligent sea urchins, and the first scientific achievement of a developing Spark can involve equal parts explosions and pools of raspberry jelly. Chapter headers include samples of children’s rhymes, peasant sayings, popular tavern songs, and, my personal favorite, a typical last entry from the journal of an emergent Spark. I think the novelization of the story adds a nice extra level to a story that was already rich with detail.
But if you’re going to start this series from beginning, you really need to read the graphic novels first. Go on, I’ll wait.