Girl Genius

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Girl Genius
Agatha, main character of Girl Genius
Agatha, main character of Girl Genius
Author(s) Phil & Kaja Foglio
Website www.girlgeniusonline.com
Current status Update on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Launch date April 18, 2005 (as webcomic)

Girl Genius is an ongoing comic book series written and drawn by Phil and Kaja Foglio and published by their company, Studio Foglio LLC under the imprint Airship Entertainment.

As of April 18, 2005, Girl Genius has become a webcomic, and quarterly publication of the comic has ceased. The authors have opted to continue publishing collection books as before. The new Girl Genius website has two streams; "The Comic" - for those who have never read the comic before - and where the back issues will be released over time; and "The Advanced Class", where all new material is released.

Both streams of Girl Genius update on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Girl Genius is a steampunk tale set in an alternate history "where the Industrial Revolution became an all-out war" due to the appearance of "Sparks" — mad scientists with supernormal abilities in one or more sciences, usually conjoined with serious lack of common sense or sense of proportion. The main character, Agatha Heterodyne, is the descendant of a family of Sparks, the Heterodyne clan, most of whom, except her father Bill and her uncle Barry, had been notorious for their villainy and ruthlessness. (The family name is presumably derived from the telecommunications term heterodyning, a method of creating frequencies.) Her father and uncle, the famous Heterodyne Boys, established a Golden Age in Europe for years, but disappeared mysteriously about the time of Agatha's birth. Her uncle Barry returned secretly to Europe with Agatha, but disappeared again when she was seven.

At the beginning of the series, Agatha is ignorant of her true heritage, and is being raised by two "constructs" (artificial people, rather like Frankenstein's monster) originally built by her father and uncle, under the name of Agatha Clay.

After her expulsion from the renowned Transylvania Polygnostic University, and her loss of a locket she had been told to always wear (which, unbeknownst to her, suppressed her own "Spark" abilities at the price of causing her blinding headaches and a mysterious lack of competence), Agatha's Spark begins to show, drawing the attention of the ruthless ruler of much of Europe, Baron Klaus Wulfenbach - a former associate of her father and her uncle, and a former unsuccessful suitor for her mother's hand.

[edit] "Gaslamp Fantasy"

Kaja Foglio coined the term "Gaslamp Fantasy" (an alternative to steampunk) to describe the work. In her April 24, 2006 LiveJournal entry, Kaja Foglio explained how the term came to be coined:

"I called it Gaslamp Fantasy because, around the time we were bringing Girl Genius out, there was a comic called Steampunk on the shelves and I didn't want any confusion. Plus, I've never liked the term Steampunk much for our work, it's derived from Cyberpunk (a term which I think actually fits its genre well) but we have no punk, and we have more than just steam, and using a different name seemed appropriate. I mis-remembered a term that I had come across in the foreword to an H. Rider Haggard book, where the author was talking about Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Rider Haggard and that sort of pre-pulp adventure material, and came up with "Gaslamp Fantasy." I felt a bit foolish when I discovered that I had made up my own term, but it works and I like it."

Steampunk: Victorian Adventurers in a Past that Wasn't! suggests a further difference between regular steampunk and gaslamp fantasy is "...that technology is not just limited to machines but also encompasses biology. Thus alongside the Clanks (robots), dirigibles and walking gunboats of the world we have constructs - biological creations which range from Frankenstein's creature types to talking cats."

[edit] Awards

Girl Genius has won the following awards:

[edit] Published collections

  • Girl Genius Omnibus Edition Vol 1 (reprints V1-3 in smaller, black & white edition)
  • ISBN 1-890856-40-1

Volume 6 will be called Agatha Heterodyne and the Golden Trilobite.

Volume 5 as well as all future collections reprint the website content from where the comic series was discontinued.

The character of Agatha Clay was nominated for the Squiddy Award for Best Comics Character in 2002.

In 2005, Phil Foglio was nominated for an Eisner Award in the Best Writer/Artist—Humor category for his work on Girl Genius.

[edit] Trivia

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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