Results tagged “eisner awards”

Memorials and Remembrances for Those Who Have Passed

Every year at the Eisners, the awards ceremony takes time to remember the writers, artists, actors, and other creators who have passed away since their last gathering. It’s always a somber time, but good in that it celebrates the work of all those people. Check out the video below

After the jump, a band of four is charged with getting the ceremony underway again after a somber memorials section.

Graham Ingels, Matt Baker, & Reed Crandall: Will Eisner Hall of Fame Inductees

Graham “Ghastly” Ingels, the noted and famed EC horror comics artist, is inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame as a Judges’ Selection. Berni Wrightson, co-creator and first artist of The Swamp Thing, accepts the award for Graham and tells a great story about discovering the man whose illustrations inspired many horror comics careers.

Matt Baker is known for many things, but the two that always stand out are these: he was the first major African American comic book artist, and he was widely considered to be a master of “Good Girl Art.” Calvin Reid, of Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week, accepts the award in Matt’s honor. His official Eisner Award biography reads:

“Baker started his career in the Iger Studio, working on titles for Fox, Fiction House, and Quality. He later went on to work for St. John and Atlas, as well as drawing the Flamingo newspaper strip. Although he drew a variety of western, romance, and adventure titles, he is best remembered for his work on the Phantom Lady series. Baker was the artist on the arguably first graphic novel, It Rhymes with Lust, by Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller. Unfortunately, his career ended abruptly in 1959, when he died at the young age of 37.”

Reed Crandall drew for Treasure Chest Comics, Creepy, and Eerie among many others. He was an artist in both the Golden and Silver ages of comics. I wish I could tell you who accepted the award on his behalf, but the presenter was mumbling and, on top of that, I’m having trouble getting past the accent. So blame us both for dropping the ball on this one. Reed Crandall’s official Eisner bio reads:

“Reed Crandall (1917-1982) started with the Eisner/Iger Studio, where he worked primarily on titles for Quality Comics, including Hit, Crack, Smash, and Uncle Sam (which became Blackhawk), where he drew such features as “The Ray,” “Dollman,” and “Firebrand,” as well as some terrific covers. When Quality scaled down their line, Crandall began doing work at EC. He drew everything from science fiction to suspense to horror. When EC folded comics production in 1955/56, he did occasional work for Atlas/Marvel and Classics Illustrated. In 1960 he landed a contract with Treasure Chest Comics and drew stories for them for twelve years. Then in 1964 he began working for Warren and delivered some of the best work of his career for Creepy and Eerie. His last contribution to comics was published in 1973.”

The Will Eisner Hall of Fame inductions roll on after the jump with one of the most heartfelt and emotional speeches ever given at the Eisner Awards.

In this edition of Suvudu & You at the Eisners, we’ll see the presentations for:

• Best Humor Publication
• Best US Edition of International Material
• Best US Edition of International Material-Japan
• The Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer
• Part One of the Hall of Fame Awards

Best Humor Publication, Best US Edition of International Material, & Best US Edition of International Material-Japan

I was sure that Wonderbread: Beards of Our Forefathers would be winning the Best Humor category. Shows how much I know, but what does that say about my sense of humor? Jason wins for best US Edition of International Material (no shock there), but he also has the best excuse for not attending the Eisners. Check out the video below.

Continue on after the jump for a look at the Russ Manning award winner and the first recipient of the Will Eisner Hall of Fame Award and Induction.

Today, Suvudu takes you back to the Eisner Awards to view the doling out and accepting of:

• Best Publication Design
• The Spirit of Retailing Award
• Best Archival Project-Strips
• Best Archival Project-Comic Books

The Spirit of Retailing award is one of my favorite awards in the Eisners. I just love the idea that, in the middle of this awards show honoring some of the best creative talent that the industry has to offer, the whole she-bang takes a time-out to honor the folks working in the retail trenches. Also, I love watching the store submission videos (for those who do submit them). We’ll also be seeing Mike Mignola pick up an Eisner for Hellboy Library Editions 1 & 2 (a sight that would be come a familiar one as the evening went on). Then, in video two, we’ll see the winners for the Best Archival projects (comic strips and comic books).

So sit back and enjoy Suvudu’s Sunday showing of the Eisner Awards.

Best Publication Design & The Spirit of Retailing Award

What’s on the docket in today’s videos? We’ll be watching the awards for:

• Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team
• Best Painter/Multimedia Artist
• Best Cover Artist
• Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism
• Best Comics-Related Book

Presenting this round of Eisners are Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (most notably from Reno 911 fame) and Blair Butler (G4 TV). So, picking up where we left off yesterday…

Best Penciller/Inker & Best Painter/Multimedia Artist

The hosts are egging the contestants on to “lose their #%@$” in order to secure a television deal with the Bravo network (they explain why that seemingly unlikely marriage could work here as well). Initially, they don’t have much luck inciting the craziness, and then Jill Thompson wins best Painter/Multimedia Artist and plays it up for the crowd. It’s fun stuff. Check it out below.

The following two videos deal with the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. It’s a prestigious award that honors the body of work created over a lifetime. This year, the decision was unanimous: Frank Jacobs, the poet laureate of and long-time writer for MAD magazine, and John Broome, a man whose work in comics during the silver age left an indelible fingerprint on many familiar characters, won the honor.

Curious about the Bill Finger Awards? Here’s a quick definition about them from Comic-Con’s official site:

The Bill Finger Award honors the memory of William Finger (1914-1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the “unsung hero” of the character and have hailed his work not only on that iconic figure but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics.

What it doesn’t say is this (Kyle’s addition): after creating Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, Two-Face, the Bat Cave, the Batmobile, the Batplane, and the Batsignal, named Batman’s hometown Gotham City, and having an involved say in how Batman was shaped, Bill Finger was essentially screwed out of the credits for Batman. For years, his contributions went unrecognized. So, the purpose of the Bill Finger Awards is to recognize great comics writing, attempting to ensure that past writers get their due.

Murphy Anderson Accepts the Award for the Late John Broome

John Broome helped make comics what they are today. At the very least, he helped to forge the stories of many characters we know today. His resume included work on The Flash, Green Lantern, and “The Justice Society of America” to name just a few.

It’s one of the biggest events going on during Comic-Con: the Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards, or “The Eisners” for short. It honors some of the best of the best working in the industry and pays tribute to the most well-known of names (like Mike Mignola) to the integral but sometimes overlooked comics workers, like those nominated for Best Lettering. It’s an opportunity to celebrate, educate, and have a little fun.

So why is so little written about them?

Well, here at Suvudu we’re trying to bring the Eisners to you in a big way. We ran a shakedown of many of the Eisner categories, we tabulated our results, and we filmed the ceremony. Now it’s time to bring the show to you. This year’s show brings some humor to the preceedings as well as a few of those big names. It was an interesting awards ceremony and now it’s your turn to see how it all went down.

With that in mind, let’s start the show. And the nominees are…

Patton Oswalt Presents the Best Publication for Kids & Best Publication for Tweens/Teens

Patton Oswalt opens the awards with a touch of humor and some minor difficulty with name pronunciation. We can’t fault him there. Check out the awards and speeches in the video below.

Predicting outcomes is fun. Checking your predictions can be fun. Finding out that you predicted incorrectly? Maybe not so much fun. But then when it comes to the Eisner’s, there are so many talented nominees in each category, you have to go into your predictions knowing that you’re probably going to get it wrong. This year followed that model, with a few notable exceptions: Mike Mignola was the safest bet on the block, walking away with three Eisner’s and securing his place as the winningest individual of the night, and Dark Horse, the publishing outfit, that won eight Eisner awards. For those of you crunching the numbers, that means they walked away with nearly one-third (30%) of the Eisner awards. Wow.

So how did our predictions turn out? Take a look…

Best Short Story

I said: “Freaks,” by Laura Park, in Superior Showcase #3 (AdHouse)

Actual Winner: “Murder He Wrote,” by Ian Boothby, Nina Matsumoto, and Andrew Pepoy, in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror #14 (Bongo)

I wasn’t confident in this pick from the get-go, acknowledging that the competition here was fierce. Still, I chose, and chose wrong. “Freaks” is still a great story, but so is “Murder He Wrote.” So I have no complaints.

Also, an in-house congratulations is due to Nina Matsumoto for this Eisner victory. Nina publishes Yokaiden through Del Rey Manga and the home team couldn’t be happier!

Best Limited Series

I said: Hellboy: The Crooked Man, by Mike Mignola and Richard Corben (Dark Horse)

Actual Winner: Hellboy: The Crooked Man, by Mike Mignola and Richard Corben (Dark Horse)

Mike Mignola’s big night begins. He would go on to collect two more Eisner Awards, making him the night’s biggest individual winner.

Holy crow what a title! Since there’s so much to talk about, let’s skip the formalities and jump right in.

Best Publication for Teens/Tweens

• Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, adapted by P. Craig Russell (HarperCollins Children’s Books)
• Crogan’s Vengeance, by Chris Schweizer (Oni)
• The Good Neighbors, Book 1: Kin, by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh (Scholastic Graphix)
• Rapunzel’s Revenge, by Shannon and Dean Hale and Nathan Hale (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
• Skim, by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (Groundwood Books)

It’s a good thing you don’t have to be a teen in order to read these books, or I’d be suffering from a case of jealousy. Rapunzel’s Revenge marks a fresh re-imagining of the tired old fairy tale, where in Rapunzel is more a**kicker than damsel-in-distress, Skim is an honest coming of age story with more depth than you might expect, Crogan’s Vengeance is a fun pirate read, Good Neighbors, Book 1 is great faery fantasy fun (written by one of the Spiderwick Chronicles authors and sometimes compared to the work of the next author on this list), and then there’s Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, an incredible interpretation of the Alice in Wonderland idea.

Despite the amazing competition, I think this one comes down to Coraline, which has had an incredible year, and Skim, who, though quieter than the other main characters found in the nominated books, is perhaps the most compelling (and that’s saying something). In the end, I think Coraline continues to roll along and picks up the award (it has been, after all, an incredibly entertaining title over the past year). However, I hope Neil Gaiman will forgive me if I silently pull for Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s creation to pull it out.

Want a dark horse here? The Good Neighbors, Book 1. Though if the series continues, it’ll have plenty more chances in coming years.

Best Humor Publication

• Arsenic Lullaby Pulp Edition No. Zero, by Douglas Paszkiewicz (Arsenic Lullaby)
• Chumble Spuzz, by Ethan Nicolle (SLG)
• Herbie Archives, by “Shane O’Shea” (Richard E. Hughes) and Ogden Whitney (Dark Horse)
• Petey and Pussy, by John Kerschbaum (Fantagraphics)
• Wondermark: Beards of Our Forefathers, by David Malki (Dark Horse)

Easily one of my favorite categories. There’s so much great work here ranging from black humor to crazy, but I’m looking and thinking we’re coming down to Wondermark: Beards of our Forefathers and Aresenic Lullaby Pulp Edition No. Zero. So which way am I predicting? I’m following my own sense of humor here and thinking that Wondermark is taking home the Eisner. Hilarity ensues.

It is only fitting that the most prestigious awards in comics should be dolled out during the biggest comics event in the US (maybe in the world). The Eisner Awards, as I’m sure our readers are all very aware by now, are a very big deal in the industry. Like the Oscars, the Pulitzers, and Grammys, the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards is the pinnacle award, the gold standard. Winning here is tough. By the time the field is narrowed down by category, your fellow nominees are just as talented as you are.

Of course, a win here is a big deal, as evidenced during last year’s win by the Umbrella Academy group, who perhaps say it better than I can.

This year’s Eisner Awards could see even more moments like the one above. As Comic-Con announced (and as I wrote earlier) there are quite a few newcomers in the field this year. Three of whom, Canadian cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki (writer and artist of the teen angst graphic novel Skim) and French biographer Emmanuel Guibert (Alan’s War) have four nominations a piece, giving them all a good shot at walking away with a win somewhere.

So, it’s happened. I’m writing a catch-up post. When I first decided that shaking down the Eisner Awards would be a cool feature, I didn’t quite understand the work involved in putting it on and trying to select a winner when each and every nominee is worthy of an award. Let me go on record as saying, I don’t know how the actual judges do it. I imagine that there are a few Nerf weapons involved somewhere in the decision making process. Also, I think having as many judges as they do for the Eisner’s, while probably not speeding things up, is surely a help to making the right selection. Whereas, when I’m the only one reviewing a category, all my predjudices and preferences as a reader come into play all on their own and without the checks and balances of a group. So, my hat is off to you, Eisner judges.

Now, I’m not here to make excuses about all the other stuff that’s been going on. Nope. I’m here to get on with the Shakedown and with that in mind, we’re off again, into the world of graphic storytelling at its finest!

So, where were we when last we left off? Oh yes, how about we start with…

Best Reality-Based Work

• Alan’s War, by Emmanuel Guibert (First Second)
• Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story, by Frederik Peeters (Houghton Mifflin)
• Fishtown, by Kevin Colden (IDW)
• A Treasury of XXth Century Murder: The Lindbergh Child, by Rick Geary (NBM)
• What It Is, by Lynda Barry (Drawn & Quarterly)

Despite the brilliance of What It Is, Fishtown, and Alan’s War, I see this one as a race between The Lindbergh Child and Blue Pills. They couldn’t be more different (well they could, but you know what I mean). Blue Pills, the story of an HIV-negative man’s romance with an HIV-positive woman, is more than just a love story, but an honest examination of how such a relationship can change the way in which the author sees and interprets the world around him. In the other corner, Rick Geary handles The Lindbergh Child like a good crime writer, keeping to the facts as closely as possible and avoiding, almost always, allowing his own theories to leak on to the page. I’m going with Blue Pills, the mciteoir, but don’t be surprised if its Lindbergh. And the dark horse candidate? Fishtown. Honestly, I’ll say it again, I don’t know how the judges do this stuff.

Okay, so technically this is part of the Eisner Awards, but I love the category so much that I wanted to break it out and feature it on its own. The Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailing Award highlights a handful of stores each year that exemplify the best in comics retailing. Everything from customer service to store design, community involvement to the sorting and displaying of the stock are taken in to consideration. And the nominations are open to everyone, so stores, pros, and customers can all get in the act and nominate a shop.

That’s when the weeding process takes place. Judges (not me, thank goodness) consider each store and narrow the list down what we have now. It’s as diverse as a good New Editions wall and a lot of fun to go through. But the real fun comes from touring some of these stores via their submission videos* (we’ll look at those after the jump).

So, this year the nominees for the 2009 Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailing Award are:

• Acme Comics, Greensboro, NC;
• Big B Comics, Ontario, Canada;
• Comic Book Ink, Tacoma, WA;
• Comic Oasis, Las Vegas, NV;
• Comics & Vegetables, Tel Aviv, Israel;
• Comicopia, Boston, MA;
• Cosmic Monkey Comics, Portland, OR;
• Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy, Austin, TX;
• Drawn To Comics, Glendale, AZ;
• Happy Harbor Comics, Edmonton, AB, Canada;
• Krypton Comics, Omaha, NE;
• Legends Comics, Victoria, BC Canada;
• OK Comics, Leeds England;
• Phantom of the Attic, Pittsburgh, PA;
• Tate’s Comics, Fort Lauderdale, FL;
• The Comic Vault, Chicago, IL;
• Up, Up & Away, Cincinnati, OH.

Congratulations to the nominees! Now, let’s take a video tour of a few of these shops…

Last week, my friend on this site wrote a post that posed the question: what’s next after Twilight? Well, as a guy, I’m pretty much going to say anything (which isn’t exactly true—more about that in a different post, though), but it got me thinking:

While it’s great to look towards the future, I’m curious about our reading pasts.

As such, I decided to throw out this little query to the twitter followers of bantamspectra: What was your favorite YA sci-fi growing up (YA being a rather loose term that I figured would cover both middle-grade and teen offerings—and then realizing almost all my selections were in the middle-grade range)?

The response made me realize I need to read more.

Personally, I had a few favorites in mind when I asked this question, and clearly I was hoping for vindication of my choices. In no particular order:

THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH by Norton Juster—My mother used to make us watch this movie all the time, as it was one of her favorites, and I always used to hate the live-action stuff in the beginning. But the cartoon—the bulk of the movie—really caught my imagination, and when I realized that it was first a book, I was excited. I remember reading this on a long bus trip with the Cub Scouts to the Franklin Institute in Philly and finding out for the first time that no matter how good a movie is, the book is almost always better.

I don’t know what the term “meta” means in the world of blogging and online publishing, but I have a feeling that, in shaking down this category, I’m getting pretty close. At the very least, we’re approaching blogging’s fourth wall. I can feel it. I can sense you reading. I can…

But anyway. This category merits some discussion. As we travel further and further down this information superhighway* that is the internet, more and more content is become available exclusively online without the need for physical subscriptions. So what we’re seeing, as internet publishing becomes more and more established, is an uptick in the quality of both presentation and content available at the other end of your internet connection.

Now the trick is, how do you classify these things? Are they periodicals? Some of them are, yes. But is a blog a periodical? It certainly doesn’t seem like one, but a blogger can be a journalist. Similarly, the blog can be an offshoot of a store or publisher**. So, you wind up with hybrid titles like the one attached to this category. Want to know something interesting? Only one of these includes a physically published entity along with its companion site, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see a solely web-based category here soon. But you never know right?

Some observers have a not entirely unjustified feeling that the Eisners do not quite give manga its due: It’s indeed the rare manga nominee that is found outside of this one specialized category. Of course, as a manga editor, I may be ever-so-slightly biased, but I simply can’t improve upon the commentary on this issue that’s offered by Deb Aoki at About.com, in which she asked a number of bloggers, critics, and comics creators to list their own choices for Eisner-worthy manga, and listed the interesting results here. That’s a great manga reading list—even for manga newbies—as are some of the very worthy nominees in this category: the depth and breadth of styles on offer show that manga is not at all monolithic, forbidding, and foreign—manga is just good comics. After the jump, the nominees…

Welcome to a very interesting category: one recognizing—a genre? A medium? A style? A distribution method? All of them?—whose extraordinary success may soon eliminate the need for the category’s existence in the future. This category recognizes comics that were first published on the web—but as web distribution becomes an increasingly important business model, as creators use web serialization to bring their stories directly to readers, and readers become ever more reliant on portable media devices, more and more comics may begin life as “webcomics.” For now, a look at the nominees, which include a rising indie comics star, a legend with a cult following, and four fascinating talents who deserve wider recognition, shows something of the extreme creative variety this format has been brewing.

July 23^rd (or 22^nd, depending on when your tickets will get you in the doors), that’s when Comic-Con International kicks off in San Diego. That’s just about 14 weeks. From this side of the equation (the publishing side) those are 14 very fast weeks. But just because we’re doing a lot of planning right now, that doesn’t mean we don’t have time to delve into one of Suvudu’s favorite genres: comics!

More specifically, we’re training our eyes on the Eisner Awards for Suvudu’s first Eisner Shakedown. The nominations have been announced, the date is set, now all that’s left to do is speculate. And that’s what we’re going to do. Starting today, Suvudu will be giving you a category-by-category shakedown of this year’s Eisner nominees. We’re hoping not just to highlight those extraordinarily talented writers/artists/creators who have been nominated, but to give you a little insight into each category as best we can*.

Hey, we’re not the Eisner judges, so we can’t tell you who has the inside track to take home an award, but we can help get the discussion started. So on we go and it’s my sincere hope that you’ll use the comments section and the forums to share your thoughts on the nominees, the Eisner’s, the categories, or even comics in general.

With only 14 weeks and 26 categories, there’s no time to lose, so we’ll kick it off today (in about 30 minutes or so) with a look at the nominees for Best Cover Artist. Stay tuned…

It’s official, Winter is dead, Spring is here, and Summer is closer than you think. You can measure that any way you like: temperature, blooming trees and flowers, craving iced tea instead of hot tea, your cold is replaced by your allergies. Sure, those methods are all good and well, but around here we measure the change of the seasons differently…by the awards nominations.

And the Granddaddy of my awards season has released its list of nominees. Oh yes, it’s Eisner Award time again!

You can keep your super-mega film awards and the who’s-hot-in-pop-music-this-year awards with their red carpets, fancy catered meals, double-mortgaged clothing and jewelry, and television broadcast rights. Give me the Eisner’s, where they keep it real and where, as we witnessed last year, newcomers can shine as brightly as legends.

Speaking of newcomers, they raked in the nominations. Looking through the list further we see another interesting development. Who has the most nominations? Dark Horse, that’s who. So get ready to make some room for the Equines of Anti-light at the podium**. Let’s take a look at those nominations and start investigating match-ups. There’s many selections on the ballot that’ll make this year’s awards muy-interesting!