Awards

The Maisie Kukoc Award, presented to a mini-comic of merit as part of the Stumptown Festival, was given to Damian Jay for The Natural World #3-4

The 2011 Eisner Award nominations have just been announced, and every year is colored a bit by the make-up of the judging panel, but this year's nominations seem to have gone out of their way to recognize some new faces and names -- the leading vote getters were The Return of the Dapper Men with five and Morning Glories and Locke & Key with four each. It's a vastly eclectic list, and recognizes the incredible diversity of today's comics industry.

Voting in the 2011 Inkwell Awards, honoring the best in the art of inking, has just been opened. The nominees are below; the awards will be presented...well, the PR doesn't really say. There are some amusing categories below -- Klaus Janson needs more attention and Todd McFarlane is small press -- but giving the hard working inkers of the world some props is always a good thing.

Via pr this morning, AdHouse publisher Chris Pitzer announced that the already much-lauded DUNCAN THE WONDER DOG by Adam Hines has won the first Lynd Ward Prize for graphic fiction. In a tweet, Drew Weing mentioned that his SET TO SEA had been named a Lynd Ward Prize Honor book. More honors may be announced when the actual PR goes out. Named for the seminal woodcut artist who created some early American graphic novels, the prize is sponsored by the Penn State University Libraries and presented to the "best graphic novel, fiction or non-fiction, published in the previous calendar year by a living U.S. citizen or resident." DUNCAN THE WONDER DOG has already been nominated for the LA Times Book Prize, and been named one of publishers Weekly's Best GNs of 2010. The book is currently sold out in print form but a second printing will be on sale imminently; a digital edition is currently for sale here.

Awards season is really shifting into high gear. The Doug Wright awards, honoring the best in English-language comics (or translations of French) by Canadians living at home and abroad, will be presented May 7th at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. In addition to the three main prizes, David Boswell, creator of Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman, has been inducted into The Giants of the North, the Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame -- only recently we were discussing with someone far better informed than us how Boswell is a legend of the Canadian comics scene, so it's a fitting honor for him. The rest of the finalists reflect a strong slate that has been much honored in other recent awards -- the Canadian scene is kicking it!

Nominations for the Stumptown Awards, held in conjunction with the Stumptown Comics Festival in Portland, OR on April 16-17th have been announced. Nominees were selected by a judging panel which consisted of Michael Allred (Madman), Brandon Graham (King City), Laura Hudson (Editor, ComicsAlliance.com), Michael Ring (Owner, Bridge City Comics), and Jason Leivian (Owner, Floating World Comics) and will be presented at the show.

The Eagle Awards, the long running British comics awards, have announced the 2011 nominees. Winners will be announced at the London MCM Expo in May. Online voting is now open at the above link.

Whatever you thought of the hosts, the win in the Best Animated Short Film for Shaun Tan -- which we correctly predicted -- was a nice win for a very talented artist. Although the Australian Tan is more of an illustrator than a cartoonist, his best known work, THE ARRIVAL, is certainly an example of graphic storytelling -- so if he isn't exactly on our team, he's pretty darned close.

Maybe it's just the way Twitter brings all your snarky friends from around the world together to be snide at once, but from the very beginning of last night's Oscar™ telecast, it was obvious that the youth movement of Anne Hathaway and James Franco was going to be dire.

As we point out every year, picking the big categories at the Oscars is easy -- sentiment and other awards and past voting practices make for a formula that is easy to call, even when it changes over Awards season -- see: THE KING'S SPEECH. So to truly ace your Oscar picks and win the big prize, you've got to master the obscure categories like Best Documentary Short and Best Animated Short. We don't handicap the first caegory -- although you can't go wrong picking anything about horrible genocide topics like AIDS, Rwanda, the Holocaust and so on.

Chinese artist Xiao Bai was just presented with the Gold Award in the International Manga Awards. The prize, founded by Japan's former otaku-loving prime minister Taro Aso are presented to recognize international achievements in the manga style. Bai won for “So Far, So Close,” a time travel story about a woman who meets her own son.

Eisner judges have selected four automatic inductees into the Hall of Fame instead of the usual two because, in the words of administrator Jackie Estrada, "The judges felt that some significant contributors to comics' history were being consistently overlooked by the regular voters. Choosing only two creators to induct was proving too difficult this year. The solution they chose was to single out individuals from four aspects of the medium."