Here’s one we missed. For several years now Wendy Pini has been creating a web comic based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” The story ended in mid 2010 so it becomes eligible this year. The story isn’t a straight adaptation of the Poe original. Rather it has been moved into a science fiction setting, with a strong m-m romance at its center. As I understand it, Poe hinted at a variety of sexual practices in the original (and could scarcely have done much more when he wrote it), but Pini appears to have gone all out for the m-m romance audience.
I haven’t had a chance to read it through, and from what I have seen the limited animation and the dialog are both pretty clunky, but the art, as one would expect from Pini, is sumptuous. You can find the whole thing online here.
With Ian Culbard’s adaptation of The Mountains of Madness also a potential nominee we could be in the bizarre position of having both Poe and Lovecraft on the Hugo ballot this year. I imagine that would outrage some people in fandom, and appeal mightily to the sense of whimsy of others.
FWIW my probable ballot looks like this:
- Grandville Mon Amour, Bryan Talbot (Jonathan Cape)
- The Unwritten #2: The Inside Man, Mike Carey & Peter Gross (Vertigo)
- Batwoman Elegy, Greg Rucka & JH Williams III (DC Comics)
- iZombie: Dead to the World, Chris Roberson & Mike Allred (Vertigo)
- Shadoweyes, Ross Campbell (SLG)
But that could change as there is some really good stuff that I haven’t looked at yet.
There is a non-animated version of Masque up also, but I don’t have the link handy at the moment. Wendy says it’s a much more basic webcomic layout with word balloons.
Have you seen the Chimpanzee Complex? A three-part story I’ve enjoyed enormously, and closest to hard sf I’ve seen in comics in the past few years.
Also, do you know if Blacksad (by Canales and Guarnido) is published in English? The fourth album (which is an individual story) came out in French (original) last year. I know a Finnish translation was published last fall, but I don’t know if it has a publisher in either UK or US. It’s something I’m pretty sure many fans of Grandville would also enjoy, and could arguably be counted within the wide borders of sf.
The Chimpanzee Complex is one of the books on our reading list from the Salon Futura podcast, but I haven’t got hold of it myself yet.
Blacksad #1-3 is available from Dark Horse as a collected volume dated 2010 but it looks like the individual volumes were published separately by other people. I don’t think #4 is available in English yet.