A (Spoiler Free) Guide for New Girl Genius Readers

This page is intended for people who have come across Girl Genius for the first time by reading the new Girl Genius omnibus Agatha Awakens and may be uncertain how to continue following Agatha's adventures or for anyone who is confused about all the different forms in which Girl Genius has been made available and how they relate to one another.

Purpose of this Guide
The reason this guide exists is to help you read all of the Girl Genius story that is currently available. Girl Genius is an ongoing "gaslamp fantasy" that exists in two forms: comic (graphic novel) and prose novel. Initially it was a comic, which is still ongoing. The story in this form is now roughly half complete. (At the end of September 2012, the Girl Genius comic was well over 1460 pages in length.)

The entire story to date, in comic form, can be read for free online or in different forms in print. For example, it has been collected into a series of eleven graphic novels so far. The comic is being adapted into prose novels as well, by the original authors. So far, two prose novels have been completed, based on the first six graphic novels, and the third is being written. The prose version of the story is not available for free online, but preview chapters are available.

This guide will help you read the story online or aid you in assembling an as-complete-as-possible set of print volumes. While the printed version of Girl Genius isn't free, most people enjoy reading it in more book form than on the web site.

Not Quite Spoiler Free
This guide is referred to as "spoiler free" because almost no information that refers to plot developments that might "spoil" the story for someone who isn't caught up on it will be given in this guide. Because the titles of some of the Girl Genius books actually contain a spoiler for the first three original volumes, it was impossible to omit all spoilers from this guide without leaving out some essential information. If you want to avoid all spoilers for Girl Genius, then read either the print volume Girl Genius Omnibus Volume One: Agatha Awakens or the first three volumes of the web version of the comic, starting here, before you continue reading this guide (please be aware that this portion of the story is a bit over 300 pages long).

Also be aware that the Girl Genius wiki, by its very nature, abounds with spoilers; so use caution when clicking on links that will take you away from this page. If you are not caught up with the story already, you may find out things you were not meant to know (or at least didn't want to know in advance).

The Comic
The primary form of Girl Genius is an ongoing, epic comic, created by Phil and Kaja Foglio. This guide lists the various ways you can read the whole work, distinguishing between the different print editions and providing "jumping off points" to the web comic, so you can easily continue reading the story on the web from the point at which any of the printed volumes leave off. The "jumping off point" links start with the phrase "Continue reading," to make them easy to distinguish from links to other parts of this wiki or other web sites.

Web
Girl Genius is available to read for free on the Girl Genius web site and is ongoing, with new pages published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The online version of the story

Be aware that the web version of the comic includes additional material inserted into the main story. This material consists of either single page insertions (such as from Girl Genius, Phil and Kaja Foglio's  in comic form, or  of the Hugo Awards themselves) and short stories, such as "The Revenge of the Weasel Queen." These short stories are usually not part of the main Girl Genius story. They can be best thought of as stories that are told about Agatha Heterodyne within the Girl Genius universe.

Navigation
Navigating through the story on the Girl Genius web site is done by means of Start, Back, Next and Today buttons at the top and bottom of every page of the comic. The button do what you would expect, Start takes you to the first page of the comic, Back takes you to the previous page, Next takes you to the next page, and Today takes you to the most recent page. If you are on the most recent page of the comic, you will only see the Start and Back buttons; if you are on the first page you will only see Next and Today.

If you want to go to a specific page in the comic, a single enormous drop down menu, near the bottom of the web page, right under the lower set of buttons, is provided. You will see a single line of text (the title of the current section) with a drop down arrow (that looks like a small black triangle) to the right. If you click on the drop down arrow, you will see a scrolling text box containing a list of all of the section titles for the online version of Girl Genius. Exactly what you will see when you view the drop down menu will depend on the device and browser you are using to read Girl Genius, but it will be some kind of control that lets you scroll through a long list.

Once you make a selection from this menu, you must click the "Go" button to the right to actually go to the selected page. Each entry in the navigation menu is the title of a small section of the web comic, except for the volume titles, which take you to the first page of each volume of the Girl Geniusstory. The titles of the various volumes are listed in this menu in the following format: ---First Page of Volume ELEVEN--- Each title refers to a page or sequence of pages in the comic. The title is intended to be (more or less) descriptive of the story contained on that page or in that sequence of pages. The exceptions to this are menu entries for volume titles (as already mentioned) and entries for extras, which are either side stories or single pages containing Girl Genius related images, such as ads featuring Girl Genius characters, comic versions of the Foglios' Hugo acceptance speeches, or photographs of the Hugo Awards themselves.

As you navigate the web comic using the Next and Back buttons, the text in the navigation menu will always reflect the section of the comic you are viewing. As long as you are viewing the same section, the text will remain the same, but, as soon as you move from one section of the comic to another, the menu text will change to reflect this.

Kaja Foglio is in charge of maintaining this menu (and the Girl Genius web site as a whole) and she often doesn't update it for long periods of time, making navigation of the end of the web comic a tedious matter of going through it one page at a time.

You can also use the Girl Genius Chronology in this wiki to help you find specific pages. It contains a detailed, page-by-page breakdown of Girl Genius.

Bookmarks
If you are reading the entire Girl Genius story online, it is an excellent idea to use bookmarks in your browser to keep track of where you left off. However, be aware that every bookmark you create to a Girl Genius page will be named "Girl Genius Online Comics!" It is a good idea to delete the old bookmarks when you have used them so you don't end up with a long confusing list of identically named bookmarks.

Print
This article will adopt the naming scheme being used by Phil and Kaja Foglio in the online store where they sell their books (TopatoCo ) to distinguish between the various print editions of Girl Genius. The original graphic novels are referred to as studio collections and the new book from Tor is referred to as the color omnibus. The List of Published Volumes provides more detailed (but not necessarily spoiler-free) information about the printed editions of Girl Genius.

The Foglios have used specific naming schemes in the titles of the books in the various Girl Genius print edition series to make it easier to keep them straight. Titles in the studio collection series start with "Agatha Heterodyne," titles in the color omnibus series start with "Agatha" (first name only), and the titles of the prose novels (see below) start with "Agatha H."

Studio Collections
The Girl Genius saga is available in print as a series of graphic novels called studio collections published by Airship Entertainment, a company founded by the Foglios for this express purpose. The story in this form is available in a series of paperback and hardcover volumes, currently eleven in number, with a twelfth volume in progress on the web site. The table below has links to the main articles on each volume in the Studio Collection series in the first column and links to the first page in the web comic that immediately follows the last page of the printed book in the second column, enabling you to pick up the story where the printed volume left off.

The remainder of the Girl Genius story will be brought out in studio collections, as well as the new color omnibus editions, so if you are already a proud owner of some studio collection titles, don't worry; your collection is not obsolete!



Color Omnibus
In February 2012, science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor started publishing color omnibus editions of Girl Genius in hardcover. Currently, there is only one volume in this series, which collects the story from the first three studio collections. The table below has links to the main articles on each volume in the Color Omnibus series in the first column and links to the first page in the web comic that immediately follows the last page of the printed book in the last column, enabling you to pick up the story where the printed volume left off.

The second column (Contains) lists the studio collections that make up that volume of the omnibus. (Only the last part of the title is given, for brevity.) Each omnibus edition is broken up into sections that correspond to and are named for the studio collections that make it up, but these sections are called chapters in the color omnibus editions. The third column (Extras) indicates whether or not that volume of the omnibus contains any additional material. It also contains a link to a note describing the material omitted from the studio collections that comprise the omnibus, if any.

The remainder of the Girl Genius story not covered in the volume above will be published in future color omnibus editions, so you don't need to buy books in the studio collections series to complete your Girl Genius collection. You can read the rest of the story on the web for now and buy the remaining color omnibus editions as they are released.



Black and White Omnibus
This book is obsolete but is included to help people distinguish it from the new color omnibus in situations where such confusion is possible, such as ordering books online. This book is titled Girl Genius Omnibus Edition #1. It does not have the subtitle Agatha Awakens.

In 2006, the Foglios published their own omnibus edition of the first three studio collections. This was printed in black and white and was only available in paperback. This book was also in a smaller format than the color omnibus from Tor (8 by 5.5 inches, as opposed to 10.3 x 6.7 inches). Now that Tor is printing the color omnibus series, there will be no further volumes in the black and white omnibus series. This volume is not being sold in the Girl Genius store on TopatCo, but you can still find it for sale on the web, if you look for it.

Comic Books
Girl Genius was originally published as a series of comic books, which ran for 13 issues. These were reprinted in the first four studio collections. The remaining studio collections reprint the pages of the comic from the web site. After issue 13 of the comic book series was published, the Foglios decided to stop publishing the individual comic books and moved the entire work online. (A preview volume called Girl Genius: the Secret Blueprints was published before issue #1 of the comic books. It contains background information on the world of Girl Genius and is sometimes referred to as issue #0. It has not been made available on the Girl Genius web site, but is is available in PDF form, see below.)

There was much material printed in the original comics that has not be made available elsewhere, either online or in print. This is unfortunate, but many, if not all, of the original comics, can still be found for sale online or in comics shops for reasonable prices. Perhaps the Foglios will make this material available in a more convenient form some day; we can but hope.

PDF Editions
The studio collections are also available in PDF editions from the online seller Drive Thru Comics. These PDF editions are, for the most part, identical with the print editions of the studio collections, although they may contain the contents of an earlier printing of a book than the current print edition. You can also find Girl Genius: the Secret Blueprints available in PDF form from this seller.

The Prose Novels
Phil and Kaja Foglio are in the process of adapting their graphic story into prose form, rewriting it as a series of novels. One reason for this is that it lets them include a lot of background information that they couldn't fit into the comic version of the story.

Two Girl Genius novels, Agatha H. and the Airship City and Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess, have been published so far. Agatha H. and the Airship City covers about the same material as the first color omnibus but from a slightly different point of view and with some added details. Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess covers the same material as the main story in the studio collections Circus of Dreams, Clockwork Princess, and Golden Trilobite. When the second color omnibus comes out, it will most likely contain the main story pages from these three studio collections.

Girl Genius Radio Theatre
Occasionally, Phil and Kaja Foglio have written "radio plays" involving the characters and settings of Girl Genius. These have been performed by the Foglios and their friends and associates, usually at various conventions the Foglios have attended. Some of these performances have been recorded and are available online.

The "radio plays" are not part of the main Girl Genius story. They can be best thought of as stories that are told about Agatha Heterodyne within the Girl Genius universe.