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2020 Eisner Award Nominees

6/18/2020

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Update, June 29, 2020: Due to a technical or information-security problem, the Eisner Award voting has been restarted from scratch on a new online platform, and the new deadline for votes extended until tomorrow, Tuesday, June 30, at 11:59pm Pacific. Reportedly, voters who previously cast a ballot have been sent emails inviting them to vote again. I'm voting again at this very moment!
Voting for this year’s Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (the Eisners for short) will soon end, so file this post under "belated." Sigh. Unfortunately, the current COVID-19 lockdown and related stresses have slowed me down, so this comes late.
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But: onward. This year’s list of Eisner nominees (announced on June 4) is another extraordinary snapshot of a (as ever) divided field that encompasses multiple, sometimes divergent, communities, a field that often feels like many fields at once. Having been an Eisner judge (2013), I can attest to what a joy and challenge it is to access, read, and debate so many different kinds of comics with other judges assembled from several different disciplines. If the final results of the Eisner voting are often an index of popularity, or simply of the kinds of comics that get noticed readily in shops, the ballot is less predictable and more expansive, reflecting the painstaking efforts of longtime Eisner Award Administrator Jackie Estrada and the diverse, carefully-selected judging panels she recruits. Those panels are typically balanced to include comics creators, retailers, journalists, critics, and scholars, and, once recruited, are fully autonomous and, in my experience, absolutely honest about what they like and don’t. It’s a great, once-in-a-lifetime gig.

In my case, I spent a long weekend in a San Diego hotel conferring with my fellow judges. This year’s panel, however, has had to judge remotely, connecting via social media and Zoom (I can’t imagine). The process reportedly took two months longer than usual. But the panel sounds like it was an amazing group: journalist and scholar Jamie Coville; graphic novel reviewer Martha Cornog; my friend, scholar/teacher/designer Michael Dooley; comics writer and novelist Alex Grecian; podcaster and Comic-Con volunteer Simon Jimenez; and retailer and festival organizer Laura O’Meara. Michael has some telling comments and reflections on this year’s process, and his own values and priorities as a judge, in a PRINT magazine interviewer with Steven Heller that came out last week (worth a look). I agree with Michael that the list of nominees is the important thing, “the news that  readers can most usefully use”; like him, I didn’t particularly care about who won the final voting, but loved taking part in the crafting of the ballot. This year’s list is an excellent and illuminating guide to this particular moment in comics.
As I said, the comics community often feels like several disparate communities: different, even conflicting, publics and aesthetic formations. The Eisners, unlike guild awards such as the Oscars or Tonys, are voted on by a wide, dispersed group not held together by membership in a professional body, and the judging and voting processes reflect that. Jackie Estrada has deliberately set out to recruit diverse judges that can represent some of the many publics that make up the comics field and yet can also dialogue across boundaries and bring some focus to the awards. The continuing excellence of the yearly ballots bears out the wisdom of her efforts – congratulations, once again, to the judges and Jackie for a job well done!
Of particular interest to KinderComics are the nominees in the young readers’ categories, and this year they’re terrific:

​Best Publication for Early Readers

  • Comics: Easy as ABC, by Ivan Brunetti (TOON), which I’ve already used as a textbook
  • Kitten Construction Company: A Bridge Too Fur, by John Patrick Green (First Second/Macmillan)
  • The Pigeon HAS to Go to School! by Mo Willems (Hyperion Books)
  • A Trip to the Top of the Volcano with Mouse, by Frank Viva (TOON)
  • ¡Vamos! Let's Go to the Market, by Raúl the Third (Versify/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Best Publication for Kids

  • Akissi: More Tales of Mischief, by Marguerite Abouet and Mathieu Sapin (Flying Eye/Nobrow)
  • Dog Man: For Whom the Ball Rolls, by Dav Pilkey (Scholastic Graphix)
  • Guts, by Raina Telgemeier (Scholastic Graphix)
  • New Kid, by Jerry Craft (Quill Tree/HarperCollins)
  • This Was Our Pact, by Ryan Andrews (First Second/Macmillan)
  • The Wolf in Underpants, by Wilfrid Lupano, Mayana Itoïz, and Paul Cauuet (Graphic Universe/Lerner Publishing Group)
(I confess to some disappointment here. Where is Luke Pearson's Hilda and the Mountain King? Where's Jen Wang's superb Stargazing?)

Best Publication for Teens

  • Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass, by Mariko Tamaki and Steve Pugh (DC)
  • Hot Comb, by Ebony Flowers (Drawn & Quarterly)
  • Kiss Number 8, by Colleen AF Venable and Ellen T. Crenshaw (First Second/Macmillan)
  • Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell (First Second/Macmillan)
  • Penny Nichols, by MK Reed, Greg Means, and Matt Wiegle (Top Shelf)
I also want to note that Lois Lowry’s classic dystopia for young readers, The Giver, has been adapted by P. Craig Russell into a graphic novel nominated in the category Best Adaptation from Another Medium. In addition, children’s and YA comics creators were nominated in several other categories:
  • Mariko Tamaki (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me; Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass; Archie) for Best Writer
  • Raina Telgemeier (Guts) and Tillie Walden (Are You Listening?) for Best Writer-Artist
  • Rosemary Valero-O'Connell (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me) for Best Penciller/Inker
  • Léa Mazé (Elma, A Bear’s Life, Vol. 1) for Best Painter/Digital Artist
  • Lorena Alvarez (Hicotea) and Molly Mendoze (Skip) for Best Coloring
  • Jim Campbell (Lumberjanes: The Shape of Friendship; At the End of Your Tether; etc.), Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo), and Tillie Walden (Are You Listening?) for Best Lettering
A few more observations:
All told, there are some 180 Eisner nominees this year, spread over thirty-one categories (again, the full list is here). This year’s judges have moved even farther afield that usual, testifying to the increasing impact of not only children’s and YA comics but also digital comics, native webcomics, and other sectors beyond the traditional comic book shop. The ballot strays off the usual beaten paths and is an education in itself. While there are a number of categories in which I do not have a strong opinion (teaching through the pandemic has curtailed my comics reading these past few months), I’m greatly impressed by the lists for Best Short Story, Best Webcomic, Best Archival Collection/Project—Strips, Best Graphic Album—New, and the three journalistic and scholarly categories: Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism, Best Comics-Related Book, and Best Academic/Scholarly Work.
In fact, I just have to list the nominees in the following three categories, which are incredible:

Best Academic/Scholarly Work

(This is a great year for comics studies titles. Dig the diversity of topics and publishers!)
  • The Art of Pere Joan: Space, Landscape, and Comics Form, by Benjamin Fraser (University of Texas Press)
  • The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets, by Kevin Haworth (University Press of Mississippi)
  • EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, by Qiana Whitted (Rutgers University Press)
  • The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life, edited by Andrew Blauner (Library of America)
  • Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid, by Christina Meyer (Ohio State University Press) - I'm proud to co-edit, with Jared Gardner, the OSUP's Studies in Comics and Cartoons series, which published this volume!
  • Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities, edited by Fusami Ogi et al. (Palgrave Macmillan)

Best Webcomic

(As soon as the ballot came out, I went and read or re-read all the nominees, Wow!)
  • Cabramatta, by Matt Huynh, http://believermag.com/cabramatta/
  • Chuckwagon at the End of the World, by Erik Lundy, https://hollowlegcomics.tumblr.com/chuckwagon 
  • The Eyes, by Javi de Castro, https://www.javidecastro.com/theeyes
  • Fried Rice Comic, by Erica Eng, https://friedricecomic.tumblr.com
  •  reMIND, by Jason Brubaker, https://is.gd/T7rafM
  • Third Shift Society, by Meredith Moriarty, https://www.webtoons.com/en/supernatural/third-shift-society/list?title_no=1703

Best Short Story

(Again, a rich, revelatory list!)
  • “Hot Comb,” by Ebony Flowers, in Hot Comb (Drawn & Quarterly)
  • “How to Draw a Horse,” by Emma Hunsinger, The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/how-to-draw-a-horse
  • “The Menopause,” by Mira Jacob, The Believer, https://believermag.com/the-menopause/
  • “Who Gets Called an ‘Unfit’ Mother?” by Miriam Libicki, The Nib, https://thenib.com/who-gets-called-an-unfit-mother/
  • “You’re Not Going to Believe What I’m About to Tell You,” by Matthew Inman, The Oatmeal, https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
Finally, I commend the judges for inducting artists Nell Brinkley and E. Simms Campbell into the Eisner Hall of Fame, and for nominating fourteen others, out of which four will be inducted by the voters: Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse, Moto Hagio, Don Heck, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Francoise Mouly, Keiji Nakazawa, Thomas Nast, Lily Renée Peter Phillips, Stan Sakai, Louise Simonson, Don and Maggie Thompson, James Warren, and Bill Watterson. (That’s a hard list to choose from!)
A final note: The Eisner winners were to be have been announced at the usual gala ceremony on Friday night (July 24) during the San Diego Comic-Con; now, however, they will be announced online instead, sometime in July I hear, most likely as part of Comic-Con@Home. Details TBA. 
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    Author

    See Hatfield, comics and children's culture scholar

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