Six Comics Field Veterans Make Up Nomination Committee

SAN DIEGO -- Comic-Con International (Comic-Con) is proud to announce that the judging panel has been named for the 2012 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. This blue-ribbon committee will select the nominations to appear on the Eisner Awards ballot. This year's judges are: Brigid Alverson comics journalist and reviewer; Calum Johnston, the owner of Strange Adventures: Comix & Curiosities, in Nova Scotia; Jesse Karp, school librarian, teacher, reviewer and author; Larry Marder, comics industry veteran; Ben Saunders, professor, curator and author; and Mary Sturhann, secretary on the Board of Directors of Comic-Con International.

The judges will meet in San Diego in late March to select the nominees that will be placed on the Eisner Awards ballot. The nominees will then be voted on by professionals in the comic book industry, and the results will be announced in a gala awards ceremony on Friday, July 13 at Comic-Con in San Diego.

Read more at the official web page.

The 23rd annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were held last night in the Indigo Ballroom at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront. The deserving winners were:

Best Short Story
"Post Mortem," by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark, in I Am an Avenger #2 (Marvel)

Best Single Issue (or One-Shot)
Hellboy: Double Feature of Evil, by Mike Mignola and Richard Corben (Dark Horse)

Best Continuing Series
Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory (Image)

Best Limited Series
Daytripper, by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá (Vertigo/DC)

Best New Series
American Vampire, by Scott Snyder, Stephen King, and Rafael Albuquerque (Vertigo/DC)

Best Publication for Kids
Tiny Titans, by Art Baltazar and Franco (DC)

Best Publication for Teens
Smile, by Raina Telgemeier (Scholastic Graphix)

Best Humor Publication
I Thought You Would Be Funnier, by Shannon Wheeler (BOOM!)

Best Anthology
Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard, edited by Paul Morrissey and David Petersen (Archaia)

Best Digital Comic
Abominable Charles Christopher, by Karl Kerschl, www.abominable.cc

Best Reality-Based Work
It Was the War of the Trenches, by Jacques Tardi (Fantagraphics)

Best Graphic Album--New
Return of the Dapper Men, by Jim McCann and Janet Lee (Archaia)
Wilson, by Daniel Clowes (Drawn & Quarterly)

Best Graphic Album--Reprint
Wednesday Comics, edited by Mark Chiarello (DC)

Best Adaptation from Another Work
The Marvelous Land of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, adapted by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young (Marvel)

Best Archival Collection/Project--Strips
Archie: The Complete Daily Newspaper Strips, 1946-1948, by Bob Montana, edited by Greg Goldstein (IDW)

Best Archival Collection/Project--Comic Books
Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer Artist's Edition, edited by Scott Dunbier (IDW)

Best U.S. Edition of International Material
It Was the War of the Trenches, by Jacques Tardi (Fantagraphics)

Best U.S. Edition of International Material--Asia
Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, by Naoki Urasawa (VIZ Media)

Best Writer
Joe Hill, Locke & Key (IDW)

Best Writer/Artist
Darwyn Cooke, Richard Stark's Parker: The Outfit (IDW)

Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team
Skottie Young, The Marvelous Land of Oz (Marvel)

Best Painter/Multimedia Artist (interior art)
Juanjo Guarnido, Blacksad (Dark Horse)

Best Cover Artist
Mike Mignola, Hellboy, Baltimore: The Plague Ships (Dark Horse)

Best Coloring
Dave Stewart, Hellboy, BPRD, Baltimore, Let Me In (Dark Horse); Detective Comics (DC); Neil Young's Greendale, Daytripper, Joe the Barbarian (Vertigo/DC)

Best Lettering
Todd Klein, Fables, The Unwritten, Joe the Barbarian, iZombie (Vertigo/DC); Tom Strong and the Robots of Doom (WildStorm/DC); SHIELD (Marvel); Driver for the Dead (Radical)

Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism
ComicBookResources, produced by Jonah Weiland
www.comicbookresources.com

Best Comics-Related Book
75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking, by Paul Levitz (TASCHEN)

Best Publication Design
Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer Artist's Edition, designed by Randall Dahlk (IDW)

HALL OF FAME
Judges' Choices: Ernie Bushmiller, Jack Jackson, Martin Nodell, Lynd Ward
Elected: Mort Drucker, Harvey Pekar, Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman

The Eisner Awards are part of, and underwritten by, Comic-Con International, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to creating awareness of and appreciation for comics and related popular art forms, primarily through the presentation of conventions and events that celebrate the historic and ongoing contributions of comics to art and culture.

Friday, July 22
Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards

The 23rd annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards will be held Friday, July 22 in the Indigo Ballroom at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront. This year's title sponsor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), will be giving out a new Vision A-Series APU notebook computer to one lucky attendee toward the end of the evening. The Eisner Awards, considered the "Oscars" of the comic book industry, will be given out in 28 categories, for works published in 2010.

Saturday, July 23
Will Eisner: Visionary
11:00-12:00, Room 9

Will Eisner -- artist, storyteller, entrepreneur -- played a central role in comics from the Golden Age to the Computer Age. During his career, Eisner reinvented sequential art and himself to overcome obstacles and create new media. A combination of idealist and realist, he led the way and helped create the comics and graphic novels that we know today. Learn about Will Eisner from those who personally knew and worked with him. Join moderator Charles Brownstein (executive director of the CBLDF, author of Eisner/Miller), Denis Kitchen (artist, author, publisher, Eisner's agent and longtime friend), Paul Levitz (writer, former president/publisher of DC Comics), Scott McCloud (artist, author, theoretician about comics and sequential art), Diana Schutz (executive editor, Dark Horse Comics), and Jeff Smith (writer/cartoonist, Bone, Rasl) to learn more about the "Father of the Graphic Novel."

For more information and times, check the official Comic-Con International website.

Colin Smith's "Too busy thinking about my comics" blog has a wonderfully sincere and interesting piece comparing Eisner's Spirit work with his later graphic novels:

So; while there's no creator in the history of comics that I respect more than Mr Eisner, I just feel that I'd benefit from owning up to the fact that I think his work on the Spirit is, as a general principle, far, far superior to anything which he produced from the publication of "A Contract With God And Other Tenement Stories" in 1978 onwards.

...and...

The weekly context in which The Spirit's adventures were published demanded both innovation and clarity, emotion and excitement, and just like the very best of any and all popular entertainment, it was largely unpretentious, lacking in worthiness and completely involving. If the message of a typical Spirit tale tended to be somewhat obvious, and most of the themes were never anything other than straight-forward, the storytelling carried the reader onwards towards the story's moral closure with an exceptional vigour. And The Spirit himself, so often decried by Mr Eisner as being no more sophisticated a character than a man in a mask, served so effectively as an everyman, as the reader's POV, as a symbol of an individual caught outside the madness of everyday life trying to impose some sanity upon it. Constantly beaten, wounded, heart-broken, confused, the Spirit moves me far more as a symbol of one type of 20th century person than any of Mr Eisner's later characters do.

Read the full post here.

Rip Jagger's blog has a nice article and pics featuring Wally Wood's splash pages for The Outer Space Spirit...

In 1952 at the end of The Spirit's original run as a newspaper insert, Will Eisner was losing interest in the strip. Television among other things was cutting into the viability of maintaining the strip and Eisner wanted to put his talents elsewhere. Already the strip was being written by Jules Feiffer, so a proper replacement artist needed to be found.

Read the full article here.

Rip also has a short article (with pics) on the Pop-Up Spirit book.