In the week leading up to the 2017 Will Eisner Awards voting deadline this Friday, the Comics Beat will feature a series of “For Your Consideration” posts highlighting a number of the nominees as a celebration of their well-deserved acknowledgement. We’ll feature some never-before-seen behind the scenes content and some of the books’ gorgeous interiors. We encourage all of our readers to check these titles out and all of the eligible comics industry members to vote for the titles they think best exemplify what make comics great.


For some reason, there’s just something powerful about stories that focus on what happens champions after they vanish into obscurity. Comics like The Umbrella Academy and Watchmen express our fears about impotence and growing up. Now, we can add Jeff Lemire’s and Dean Ormston’s new Dark Horse series, Black Hammer, to this prestigious list of titles.

Per publisher Dark Horse’s official summary for Black Hammer: “Once they were heroes, but that age has long since passed. Banished from existence by a multiversal crisis, the old champions of Spiral City—Abraham Slam, Golden Gail, Colonel Weird, Madame Dragonfly, and Barbalien—now lead simple lives in a timeless farming town. Even as they try to find their way home, trouble has a unique way of finding heroes wherever they are!”

Black Hammer is one of the coolest series to launch in the last year and is the crown jewel on a banner time in comics for Lemire. The series is up for the Best New Series Eisner. Lemire is up for the Best Writer award in part for his work on this series. Letterer Todd Klein is up for the Best Lettering Eisner in part for his work on the title, as well.


Check out of all of our 2017 Eisner coverage.