Girl Genius - the Comic

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I don't think I have posted this before, but for those of you who grew up on Dungeons and Dragons and Dragon Magazine in particular, you might remember a certain cartoonist called Phil Foglio. While I have moved very far indeed from gaming, he's kept one foot in it and does lots of illustrations for fantasy card games.

But he always did a few other projects on the side, including Buck Godot, a funny SF series, and the illustrations to many of the Myth Inc. novels by Robert Aspirin. His website is Studio Foglio

Anyway, a few years back he and his wife started a new comic called Girl Genius, which I think is pretty clever and funny. I won't go into details, which you can find out for yourself, though basically it is about a quasi-Medieval Europe where "sparks" (mad scientists) are in charge. It's in a fairly new genre called gaslamp fantasy, though it reminds me a fair bit of the "Lord Darcy" fantasy series by Randall Garrett (haven't read those in ages).

What's very cool is that they have started putting the old comics on line for free (though I do own them all already) and the new pages go up three times a week here: Girl Genius

If you poke around you'll find there is even a link to a Yahoo group discussing the comic and offspins. The posts are generally amusing, but are made by people still very much in the gaming community.