Results tagged “eisner shakedown”

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.

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.

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.

Leading off our coverage of the 2009 Eisner Awards are the nominees for Best Cover Artist. Cover art differs from the internal art (in most cases) in that it allows for a richer visual experience in color, layout, and complexity. Cover art can range from shocking to cinematic, stylized to toned down, it can contain characters from the comic or it could be more of a mood piece. The one thing it had better be, though, is evocative of the story because comics, perhaps more so than any other medium, wear their souls on the outside as much as the inside.

Makes sense as the cover will also be competing for a potential reader’s eye on his or her favorite comics shop wall, right? And, of course, there is the potential for the art to become attached to a collectible item. But that’s another thing all together.

So who are being recognized as the stand-outs in their field this year? Here’s the list:

Of course, we could break down all their individual merits and describe the art too you…but that wouldn’t really be doing them justice. So come along as we take a look at what each artist is bringing to the table and view a sampling of their artwork. It’s a comics wall from the best of the best, coming up after the jump.

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…