Girl Genius is the name of the collected early histories of Lady Agatha Heterodyne, from her last days living in Beetleburg to whenever the Transylvania Polygnostic University grant runs out for the Professors Foglio and their associates.
Put another way, Girl Genius is the Foglios' long-running gaslamp fantasy graphic novel, published by Airship Entertainment with new pages coming out three days a week on http://www.girlgeniusonline.com.
The graphic novels in the canon currently consist of twenty-four complete volumes and one that is currently ongoing. Twenty of these have been published in printed form and the twenty-first in in the process of being printed. The completed twenty-second, twenty-third, and twenty-fourth volumes, as well as the ongoing twenty-fifth volume, are available on the web for free, as are all of the previous volumes that have print editions.
Girl Genius tells of the journeys of a young woman who discovers she not only has great hidden talents for Mad Science, but is the heir to both a heroic legacy... and an evil which nearly destroyed a world which runs on steam, aesthetics, and fabulous improbabilities.
Adventure, Romance, Mad Science![]
From the very beginning, the tagline for the Girl Genius saga has been: Adventure, Romance, Mad Science! The presence of Mad Science and Adventure in the story is obvious from the plot summary linked to below and the Romance is touched on. But while Agatha has strong feelings for the men in her life, she is also very pragmatic and doesn't let her emotions get in the way of consolidating her power so that she can take her rightful place as one of the major political players in her world. However, her goal is never to amass power for its own sake, but to use it to protect the people close to her and those she feels responsible for, such as the inhabitants of her family's home and seat of power for generations, the city of Mechanicsburg.
Another very important thing to keep in mind, which isn't evident from this tagline or the description below, is that Girl Genius is also extremely funny. Phil and Kaja Foglio are well known for their talents at humorous storytelling, and Phil excels at humorous drawings. You can read "A brief and deliberately incomplete summary of Girl Genius" to get a better idea of what the story is like, but beware! This article contains minor spoilers, and provides abundant links to articles with major ones.
Publication History[]
The series started as a quarterly "dead-tree" print comic, with extras like paper cutout novelties on the inside covers, such as a coder/decoder wheel, gift tags and Christmas ornaments. The comic also included extra stories (called "omake" in other realms) such as "An Agatha Heterodyne 1 Minute Mystery" and the Jägershots.
In 2005, the Foglios decided to take what many saw as a risk and change to a webcomic format, updating three times a week, with trade paperback reprints of collected material published about once a year. Girl Genius 101 started reprinting the material in the print comics from page 1; the Girl Genius Advanced Class contained brand-new material posted simultaneously with the older pages.
The experiment was wildly successful; their official fan group on Yahoo! had message numbers climb exponentially for the three months after the launch. Sales became quite healthy, allowing them to create and sell proprietary items such as winged trilobite pins as well as the books and the remaining copies of the original comic issues.
Major Awards[]
Main Article: Awards
Girl Genius, Volume VIII won the inaugural Hugo Award for "Best Graphic Story" at AnticipationSF on August 9, 2009.[1] Girl Genius continued to dominate this category (with Volume IX winning in 2010 and Volume X in 2011), until Phil Foglio removed the work from contention for 2012 during his acceptance speech ✣ for the 2011 win. He was afraid that the "Best Graphic Story" Hugo category would be eliminated if it always went to the same work. Whether or not that was a real danger, the category has survived to the present day, and (although Phil only intended to withdraw Girl Genius from contention for a single year) it hasn't won the category since then.
Phil also won the 2022 National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award for Online Comics - Long Form for his work on Girl Genius.
The Collections and Other Editions[]
Main article: List of Published Volumes
The collected material, both from the original dead-tree issues 1-13, and the subsequent web-published pages, are collected in trade paperback and limited hardback editions. There is also a black-and-white omnibus of the first three collected volumes, and various related publications, both physical and virtual.
Girl Genius is not Steampunk[]
Phil Foglio was asked in an interview[2] to define the term the Studio uses to describe their creation:
Phil: "Gaslamp fantasy" is a term that Kaja made up. She thought she was quoting something else... and actually coined a phrase. A lot of people claim that Girl Genius is steampunk...
Interviewer: Nnn, I wouldn't say that.
Phil: I wouldn't either for a variety of reasons, one of which is that we have no punks. But gaslamp fantasy is that kind of adventure... story pretty much unhampered by actual physical facts, or adheres to the physical facts that were known around the late 1800s....
Inspirations and Influences[]
Main article: Recommended Reading
During another interview,[3] Kaja Foglio explained some of the influences that lead to the ultimate form of the comic:
Kaja: Well, we started doing Girl Genius the way it is with... everybody knows the term 'steampunk'... with that aesthetic... At that time I was going through all of Phil's old files and I was filing all of the old sketches, and I was coming across weird airships and cats in top hats with walking canes and all of this wonderful... Victoriana sci-fi stuff.... ...I love airships, I love mad science, I love the Victorian stuff and the clanky machines and all of that business... I've always loved Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.... I look back more at, like, H. Rider Haggard adventure novels....
Literary[]
- Jane Austen
- H. Rider Haggard
- Kenneth Robeson
- Jules Verne
- H.G. Wells
Artistic[]
- Vaugn Bode
- Frank Kelly Freas
- Wendy & Richard Pini
- Charles Schultz
- Osamu Tezuka
Animation[]
- Tex Avery
- Chuck Jones
- Studio Ghibli