Eisner Award Nominations 2026

The nominations for this year's Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (honoring work published in 2025) were announced last, Friday May 15. ​I look forward to this announcement every year! The Eisners are a great resource when it comes to seeking out great new comics.

Once again, this year's ballot is diverse, wide-ranging, and unpredictable. Kudos to this year’s judges: editor, critic, and Comics Courier founder Tiffany Babb; librarian, teacher, and Diverse BookFinder contributor Jerry Dear; pioneering comics scholar and COO of Delphi Creative Dr. Randy Duncan; Books with Pictures retailer and ComicsPRO board member Katie Pryde; and writer, editor, and Women in Comics Collective International founder Regine L Sawyer. Quite a panel, and quite a ballot!

Unsurprisingly, I’m not familiar with all of the works on this  year's ballot, or even most of them. The ballot includes more than 170 works in 32 categories. For the record, here's how my own reading experience to date matches up with the ballot:

• The number of categories in which I knew not a single nominee: nine.
• Categories in which I knew only one nominee: seven.
• Categories in which I had read all the nominees: none.
• The number of omissions I was sad to see: at least ten. (I don't mean to gripe; there are disappointing omissions every year, and Eisner judges feel this as keenly as anyone. But, oh, some missing items do hurt a bit!)
• The number of happy surprises: oh, maybe twenty? Again, one hell of a year.

Once again, I'll try to read every nominee in the three young readers’ categories (below) in time to vote by the deadline, June 5. Er, thanks in advance to the LA Public Library (I already have a bunch of titles on hold). Besides the young readers' categories, I've also listed below the categories for publications about​ comics, which I track closely.

Note: clicking on a title below will send you to a publisher's page about that title.

Best Publication for Early Readers

• All the Hulk Feels, by Dan Santat (Abrams Fanfare & Marvel)
• The Faraway Forest: Wally’s Route, by Debbie Fong (Chronicle Books)
• The Fire-Breathing Duckling, by Frank Cammuso (TOON Books)
• Night Light, by Michael Emberley (Holiday House)
• Steve, A Rare Egg (Steve the Horse, Book 2), by Kelly Collier (Kids Can Press)

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Best Publication for Kids

• The Cartoonists Club, by Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud (Graphix/Scholastic). Reviewed here on 10/8/2025.
• Chickenpox, by Remy Lai (Henry Holt Books for Young Readers)
• Creature Clinic, by Gavin Aung Than (First Second)
• Night Chef: An Epic Tale of Friendship with a Side of Deliciousness, by Mika Song (Random House Graphic)
• Oasis, by Guojing (Godwin Books/Henry Holt)
• A Song for You and I, by K. O’Neill (Random House Graphic). Featured in my Favorites of 2025.

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Best Publication for Teens

• Angelica and the Bear Prince, by Trung Le Nguyen (Random House Graphic)
• Clementine: Book Three, by Tillie Walden (Skybound/Image Comics). Featured in my Favorites of 2025.
• Everyone Sux but You, by K. Wroten (Henry Holt Books)
• Hello Sunshine, by Keezy Young (Little, Brown Ink)
• This Place Kills Me, by Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux (Abrams Fanfare). Featured in my Favorites of 2025.
• Trumpets of Death, by Simon Bournel-Bosson, translated by Edward Gauvin (Graphic Universe/Lerner)

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Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism

• CANON, by Colin Blanchette and Alex Eklund. I'm actually profiled in CANON's special issue about The Comics Journal's notorious "Top 100."
• Comic Book Creator, edited by Jon B. Cooke (TwoMorrows)
• Dummy, edited by John Kelly (The Dummy Corporation)
• Shelfdust, edited by Steve Morris, www.shelfdust.com 
• SKTCHD, by David Harper, www.sktchd.com
• SOLRAD: The Online Literary Magazine for Comics, edited by Daniel Elkin, www.solrad.co (Fieldmouse Press)

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Best Comics-Related Book

• Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, by Dan Nadel (Scribner)
• Facing Feelings: Inside the World of Raina Telgemeier, by Raina Telgemeier (Scholastic)
• How Comics Are Made, by Glenn Fleishman (Andrews McMeel)
• Making Nonfiction Comics: A Guide to Graphic Narrative, by Eleri Harris and Shay Mirk (Abrams)
• Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts, by Chip Kidd (Abrams)
• Ooops…I Just Catharted!: Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics, by Rupert Kinnard, edited by William O. Tyler (Stacked Deck Press)

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Best Academic/Scholarly Work

• Comic Art in Korea, by John A. Lent (University Press of Mississippi). RIP to Dr. Lent, a mentor and inspiration, and one of the most generous and productive scholars I've ever encountered.
• Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature, by José Alaniz (UP of Mississippi)
• Graphic Narratives of Resistance: Advocating for Representation and Social Justice in French-language Bandes Dessinées, by Jennifer Boum Make and Charly Verstraet (Edinburgh University Press)
• Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings, edited by Fernanda Díaz-Basteris and Maite Urcaregui (Rutgers University Press)
• Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905–1989, by Andrea Horbinski (University of California Press)