 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
MIDDLE GRADE BOOKS Fiction
YOUNG ADULT BOOKS Fiction
ADULT BOOKS Fiction
MOSAIC AWARD FINALISTS
BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALISTS
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. 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. Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
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