Broken Frontier

Since 2000, the husband and wife team of Phil and Kaja Foglio have chronicled the ongoing adventures of Girl Genius, the story of a young woman, Agatha Heterodyne, who discovers she is the heir to a legacy of mad scientists, geniuses of the Victorian age who are able to create bizarre, wonderful, and frequently destructive devices using only their minds and a sufficient supply of spare parts.

The creators coined the term “gaslamp fantasy” to describe the world they’ve created, and it works, though the true sense of whimsy and adventure the Foglios have wrought has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

Girl Genius was published as a print comic for 13 issues, before economics prompted the move to the webcomics format in 2005. Since then, the series has thrived, with the complete story available from the beginning, and several new pages per week, all available for free online, with regular trade paperback collections following. The series has won multiple awards, and the current storyline has kept the series as fresh and engaging as it has been since its debut.

This year has seen the release of Volume 8 of the trade paperback collections, which collects the webcomic from February through November 2008. The webcomic itself is already up at the beginning of Volume 10, so the authors are quite generous in giving their online readers ample material to read on a regular basis, and it seems their generosity has been rewarded with solid trade paperback sales. Not all that surprisingly, perhaps; this is a series you will want to have on your bookshelf as well as keeping up with the adventures on a weekly basis.

Given all that, it should be no surprise that it has won the Broken Frontier Award for Best Webcomic of 2009. So head on over to GirlGenius.net right now and dive into this world of mad scientists, diabolical machines, and Victorian undergarments straight away.