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EGL 2018 Nominees: The List

3/15/2018

2 Comments

 
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NEWS! This morning, the organizers of the Excellence in Graphic Literature Awards announced their nominees for the first-ever slate of EGLs, to be awarded at the Denver Comic Con on June 16. The livestream of the announcement, hosted by KidLit TV, can be (re)viewed here. Also, PR Newswire has a press release including the full list of nominees. It's an interesting list, with books I love, books I admire, and books I'd like to get to know. 
The EGL Awards, as I posted this morning, aim to strengthen the link between comics publishing and the field of children's and Young Adult librarianship. School librarians, public librarians, and K-12 educators are well represented in the judging panels and advisory board, and indeed seem to be the Awards' center of gravity. The awards include eight categories organized by age range, as well as one diversity-themed prize, the Mosaic Award, and an overall Book of the Year prize with contenders drawn from the other categories. The age-based categories are divided into Fiction and Nonfiction for Children (Grade 5 and under), Middle Grades (Grades 6-8), Young Adults (Grades 9-12), and Adults. (You can find out more about the EGL categories at the Pop Culture Classroom, here.)
It seems to me that the EGLs have been rolled out in, for comics, unusually coordinated and deliberate fashion. I expressed reservations about the seeming outlook of the Awards when I first learned of them (see the comments thread here), and continue to wonder at the Awards' judging culture and, perhaps, selective filter—all based on my guesswork, I hasten to add. It does seem likely to me that the EGLs will filter out significant parts of comics culture and book-length comics publishing. However, this is also true of other industry awards that seek to cover the whole span of book-length comics, such as the Eisners; all have blind spots, and all speak to the interests of particular communities within the comics world. That said, this first EGL slate strikes me as solid and promising, with an encouraging diversity in aesthetic, genre, and tradition. I also like the range of publishers represented (though First Second Books is clearly the favorite, with five out of the eight nominees for Book of the Year).
I confess, I do see a few frank headscratchers among the nominees (what award process is without those, though?). The nonfiction choices for Children and Middle Grades are quite thin, and in general I feel more confident of the YA and Adult categories. Also, the Best of Year finalists make for, um, an odd set: apples and oranges and then some. Further, I'm not sure that all the nominees quite match the high literary aspirations implied by the Awards' name, suggesting that the "L" in EGL may be an awkward fit for some comics, even very good ones (but, um, the politics of respectability is perhaps too big a problem for one award to solve?). Here is the full list of finalists, as reported today:
​
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Fiction
  • Bolivar by Sean Rubin (BOOM! Studios)
  • Good Night, Planet by Liniers (TOON Books)
  • Real Friends by Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham (First Second)
  • The Big Bad Fox by Benjamin Renner (First Second)
  • Where's Halmoni? by Julie Kim (Little Bigfoot)
Nonfiction
  • Bats: Learning to Fly by Falynn Koch (First Second)
​
MIDDLE GRADE BOOKS
Fiction
  • As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman (Iron Circus Comics)
  • The Baby-Sitters Club: Dawn and the Impossible Three by Ann M. Martin and Gale Galligan (Scholastic/Graphix)
  • Cici's Journal by Joris Chamblain and Aurélie Neyret (First Second)
  • Soupy Leaves Home by Cecil Castellucci and Jose Pimienta (Dark Horse Comics)
  • The Witch Boy by Molly Ostertag (Scholastic/Graphix)
  • Brave by Svetlana Chmakova (YEN Press)—Honorable Mention
Nonfiction (?)
  • Solution Squad by Jim McClain (Solution Squad Publishing)
​
YOUNG ADULT BOOKS
Fiction
  • Home Time: Book One by Campbell Whyte (Top Shelf)
  • I Am Alfonso Jones by Tony Medina, Stacey Robinson and John Jennings (Lee & Low/Tu Books)
  • Quince by Kit Steinkellner, Emma Steinkellner and Sebastian Kadlecik (Fanbase Press)
  • Spill Zone by Scott Westerfield and Alex Puvilland (First Second)
  • The Wendy Project by Melissa Jane Osborne and Veronica Fish (Super Genius)
Nonfiction
  • Fire! The Zora Neale Hurston Story by Peter Bagge (Drawn & Quarterly)
  • Lighter Than My Shadow by Katie Green (Lion Forge)
  • Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim (Drawn & Quarterly)
  • The Senses by Matteo Farinella (Nobrow)
  • Spinning by Tillie Walden (First Second)
ADULT BOOKS
Fiction
  • Mis(h)adra by Iasmin Omar Ata (Gallery 13)
  • My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)
  • Park Bench by Chabouté (Gallery 13)
  • Roughneck by Jeff Lemire (Gallery 13)
  • The Sound of the World by Heart by Giacomo Bevilacqua (Lion Forge)
Nonfiction
  • Calamity Jane: The Calamitous Life of Martha Jane Cannary by Christian Perrissin and Mattheiu Blanchin (IDW Publishing)
  • Hostage by Guy Delisle (Drawn & Quarterly)
  • Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 by MK Czerwiec (Penn State UP/Graphic Medicine)
  • The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (Abrams)
  • The Hunting Accident by David L. Carlson and Landis Blair (First Second)
​
MOSAIC AWARD FINALISTS
  • As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman (Iron Circus Comics)
  • Good Night, Planet / Buenas Noches, Planeta by Liniers (TOON), English and Spanish editions
  • Monstress Vol. 2: The Blood by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (Image)
  • Mis(h)adra by Iasmin Omar Ata (Gallery 13)
  • Quince by Kit Steinkellner, Emma Steinkellner and Sebastian Kadlecik (Fanbase Press)
  • Soupy Leaves Home by Cecil Castellucci and Jose Pimienta (Dark Horse Comics)
  • The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (Abrams)
  • Where's Halmoni? by Julie Kim (Little Bigfoot)
​
BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALISTS
  • Bats: Learning to Fly by Falynn Koch (First Second)
  • Cici's Journal by Joris Chamblain and Aurélie Neyret (First Second)
  • Home Time: Book One by Campbell Whyte (Top Shelf)
  • My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)
  • Real Friends by Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham (First Second)
  • Soupy Leaves Home by Cecil Castellucci and Jose Pimienta (Dark Horse Comics)
  • Spill Zone by Scott Westerfield and Alex Puvilland (First Second)
  • The Hunting Accident by David L. Carlson and Landis Blair (First Second)

Quite a list. I'm excited to see, for example, Liniers, Melanie Gillman, Tillie Walden, Katie Green, Thi Bui, Emil Ferris, Guy Delisle, and the team of Stacey Robinson and John Jennings. I'm also excited to see promising books from creators I don't know.
The division of Awards by age range, and the list of publishers represented, perhaps indicate the Awards' intended focus and community more clearly than anything I could say. Let's see what happens.
PS. It was a pleasure to see among the EGL jurors and advisors in this morning's video announcement my friends and colleagues Dr. Katie Monnin of the University of North Florida (we judged Eisners together in 2013) and Carr D'Angelo and Susan Avallone of Earth-2 Comics, my LCS!
2 Comments
Gwen Tarbox
3/16/2018 06:33:22 am

The non-fiction categories are so under developed! Also, I don’t want to disparage individual comics creators, but a couple of these texts are quite weak in terms of execution.

Reply
See Hatfield link
3/16/2018 10:27:19 am

Thanks for reading, Gwen! I agree with you, and I wonder about the wisdom of insisting on both fiction and nonfiction categories in each age range. It seems to me that there is little in the way of nonfiction comics for very young readers; i.e., the general assumption seems to be that information-rich nonfiction for the very young is a tough sell in comics form. Or maybe books that might work well for some preschool and early elementary readers tend to get shunted toward the middle grades? (What do people tend to say, age-wise, about e.g. the Cole/Degen “Magic School Bus” books, with their avalanches of science info?) Apart from the First Second “Science Comics” series represented here, the only other series of nonfiction comics for the very young that comes to mind is Kevin McCloskey’s series of “Level One” books from TOON: “We Dig Worms,” etc. History and biography comics generally seem to be aimed at older readers.

Of course this is a golden age for nonfiction comics of various kinds, from traditional informational texts to risk-taking varieties of creative nonfiction: autobiographical, journalistic, political. Some books even achieve a kind of aching personal poetry while imparting needful practical information: here I’m thinking of Leah Hayes’s excellent “Not Funny Ha Ha.” But, noticeably, these books tend to be aimed at older audiences. So, again, I wonder at the wisdom of requiring a nonfiction winner in the younger age categories; this seems to have resulted in one or two frankly desperate choices.


Also, having a Book of the Year category that pits, e.g., “Science Comics” against “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters” seems a bit... well, hard to explain. As the saying goes, there’s no comparison. Maybe the EGLs should dissolve the Fiction/Nonfiction categories for each age range, but give two Books of the Year, one in Fiction, one in Nonfiction?

(I imagine that the Fiction/Nonfiction split is meant to satisfy the needs of teachers and librarians, so it’s unlikely they’ll change anything. But the results, as we see here, have the potential to be awkward.)

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    See Hatfield, comics and children's culture scholar

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