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Comic-Con: Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Winners Revealed

August 10, 2016

This year saw a strong showing for Image Comics, with titles from the publisher including Paper Girls, Southern Bastards and The Fade Out responsible for awards including best new series, best continuing series, best writer and best penciller/inker.

Indie publishers Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly also produced multiple titles that picked up awards, including Kate Beaton's Step Aside Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection, which won best humor publication — the first time in the Eisners' long history that a woman has ever won that category solo — and the English language edition of The Eternaut.

In addition to the regular categories, longtime DC Entertainment writer Elliot S. Maggin was awarded the prestigious Bill Finger Award for comic book writing — named for the co-creator of Batman and many of that franchise's defining elements — while Moomins creator Tove Jansson, Human Torch creator Carl Burgos and The Simpsons' Matt Groening were inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame. Matthew Inman, cartoonist and creator of the webcomic The Oatmeal was awarded the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award, while British comic book store Orbital Comics & Gallery won the Will Eisner Spirit of Retailing title, recognizing the store's contribution to the industry.

The full list of the winners is below:
Best Lettering: Derf Backderf
Best Colorist: Jordie Bellaire
Best Digital comic:Bandette by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
Best Penciller/Inker: Cliff Chiang
Best Painter/Multimedia: Dustin Nguyen
Best Publication Design:Sandman Gallery Edition, designed by Josh Beatman/Brainchild Studios
Best Journalism:Hogan's Alley, edited by Tom Heintjes
Best Comics-Related Book:Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created MAD and Revolutionized Humor in America by Bill Schelly

Best Academic/Scholarly Work--The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings

Best US Edition of Int'l. Material:The Realist by Asaf Hanuka
Best US Edition of Int’l Material Asia:Showa (1953-1989) by Shigeru Mizuki
Best Adaptation from Another Medium:Two Brothers by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba
Best Publication for Early Readers:Little Robot by Ben Hatke
Best Publication for Kids:Over the Garden Wall by Pat McHale, Amalia Levari and Jim Campbell
Best Publication for Teens:Super Mutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki
Best Archival Collection/Project Strips:The Eternaut by Hector German Oesterheld and Francisco Solano Lopez
Best Archival Collection/Project – Comic Books:Walt Kelly’s Fairy Tales edited by Craig Yoe
Best Humor Publication:Step Aside Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection by Kate Beaton
Best Writer: Jason Aaron
Best Writer/Artist: Bill Griffith
Best Cover Artist: David Aja
Best Short Story:Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine
Best Single Issue/One Shot:Silver Surfer No. 11 by Dan Slott, Michael and Laura Allred
Best Anthology:Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics and Graphic Novels, edited to Tom Devlin
Russ Manning Award for Best Newcomer: Dan Mora
Best Reality Based Work:March Book 2 by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell
Best Graphic Album (Reprint):Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
Best Graphic Album (New):Ruins by Peter Kuper
Best New Series:Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang
Best Limited Series:The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips
Best Continues Series:Southern Bastards by Jason Aaron and Jason LaTour

Bill Finger Award for Comic Book Writing: Elliot S! Maggin
Hall of Fame: Tove Jansson, Carl Burgos, Matt Groening, Rube Goldberg, Jacques Tardi, Lynda Barry
Will Eisner Spirit of Retailing: Orbital Comics and Gallery, London, UK
Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award: Matthew Inman, The Oatmeal

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April 22, 2016

Reposted from CSUN TODAY

“The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art,” an anthology that explores black identity on the comic pages and in comic books and graphic novel, and co-edited by California State University, Northridge professor Frances Gateward, has been nominated for a Will Eisner Comic Industry Award.

Named for acclaimed comics creator Will Eisner, the awards, sometimes called “the Oscars of comics,” are given by Comic-Con International to highlight the best publications and creators in comics and graphic novels. “The Blacker the Ink” has been nominated for an Eisner in the category of best academic or scholarly work.

Gateward, an associate professor in CSUN’s Department of Cinema and Television Arts who heads the media theory and criticism option, said the nomination was unexpected, but welcomed.

“I have geek credit now,” she said, laughing. “[The nomination] feels fantastic. What really excites me is that most of the publications I write for tend to be academic. I am a cultural critic, and I’d like to think I have a wider audience than that. This nomination means that people outside of academia have seen my work, and that’s a great validation.”

Gateward co-edited “The Blacker the Ink” with John Jennings. The duo earlier this year received the Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular Culture and American Culture, from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.

The 15 essays in the book, written by academics, explore a gamut of sequential art — from the early days of newspaper comic pages to graphic novels — with subjects such as race and science fiction, gender construction, colonialism and African-American history.

Gateward said comics have always been part of popular culture, serving as a way to illustrate or comment on contemporary society. How people are portrayed, however, depends on who controls the publication.

The emergence of African-American newspapers in the early 20th century, she said, offered an alternative portrayal of African-American life to those found in the stereotype-riddled images of more mainstream publications.

“The people in power wanted to define what blackness was, rather than let black people define themselves,” she said.

As African-American artists began to publish independently — and to find jobs at Marvel and DC Comics — they began to tell their own stories in the comic pages and graphic novels.

“Stories of who we are and what we are capable of began to change,” Gateward said.

Today, there can be a black-Latino Spiderman, and people, regardless of race, are reading the story, she said.

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