2003 Eisner Award Nominees Announced
By Beth Hannan Rimmels
Movie award season may be over but the award season for the comic book industry is just getting started. Today the nominees for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were announced. The 2003 awards are given to titles released in the 2002 calendar year.
This year's judges, who select the nominees, include comics reviewer Andrew D. Arnold (Time.com), journalist Jen Contino (The Pulse at comicon.com), Diamond Comics' purchasing agent Steve Leaf, retailer Jeremy Shorr (Titan Comics, Dallas Texas), and Eisner Award-winning artist Charles Vess (The Book of Ballads and Sagas, Stardust, Rose). Writers or artists who are judges either have to disqualify their own work from award consideration or have no title available for consideration in that calendar year.
This year's nominees represent many new, independent comic publishers, such as Absence of Ink, Sasquatch Books, Sparkplug, Too Hip Gotta Go, Shoto Press, Adhouse Books, Hotel Fred Press and Origin. Also represented are several mainstream book publishers, including Knopf, Harcourt, and Pantheon.
"What struck me most about this year's submissions is the wide range of publication formats and the attention to design and bookcraft we're seeing from publishers of every size and type," said Jackie Estrada, Eisner Awards Administrator since 1990.
The Eisner nominees featured its first web comic -- Justine Shaw's Nowhere Girl (www.nowheregirl.com), which was nominated for Best New Series. Shaw was also nominated for Talent Deserving Wider Recognition.
Traditional comic book publishers were still strongly represented, of course. The various imprints of DC Comics gained the most nominates with 23 total. Fantagraphics followed with 18. Marvel had its best showing in years with seven straight nominations and three partial nominations. NBM garnered six nominations. Dark Horse had four nominations plus one partial, and Image had four nominations.
No single creator dominated the awards as in years past. Bill Willingham had the most nominations with four for Fables. Those who received three nominations include Lynda Barry, Brian Michael Bendis, Kim Deitch, Mike Mignola, and Kim Deitch.
For automatic admission to the Hall of Fame, the judges chose Herge (Tintin) and EC Comics innovator Bernard Krigstein. Voters will choose four more inductees from a list of 12 nominees.
Ballots will be mailed out in early May to some 4,000 comics publishers, creators, and retailers. The results will be announced in an awards ceremony at Comic-Con: International: San Diego on the night of Friday, July 18 at the San Diego Convention Center’s new ballroom.
The Eisner Awards are presented under the auspices of Comic-Con International, San Diego, a nonprofit corporation 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 contribution of comics to art and culture.
See the complete list of nominees.