MoCCA reveals its Awards of Excellence winners for 2024

Rebecca Mock, Sofia Warren, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Mark Doox and more took home prizes from the annual festival.

This past weekend the Society of Illustrators held the annual MoCCA Fest in New York, one of the largest independent comic festivals in the United States. As part of the festival, SI gave out its annual Awards of Excellence, a “best in show” award given to a selection of books available at the festival.

Winners received a ribbon, a $100 financial prize and a pen tablet provided by the event’s sponsor, Xencelabs.

This year they gave out 15 awards to attending publishers and creators, as revealed on their Instagram. Winners included:

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‘Four-Color Heroes,’ ‘Doctor Aphra’ win at the GLAAD Media Awards

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation recognized comics from Marvel and Fanbase Press in their 35th annual Media Awards.

Four-Color Heroes and Doctor Aphra took home awards at the 35th annual GLAAD Media Awards, which recognize and honor media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the LGBTQ+ community and the issues that affect their lives.

GLAAD recognizes the comic arts in two categories — “Outstanding Comic Book” and “Outstanding Original Graphic Novel/Anthology.” The awards were given out Thursday night at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, across categories that recognized film, television, video games and more. Other winners included the TV show Yellowjackets and the video game Baldur’s Gate 3.

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Quick Hits | NFT collectibles company VeVe launches a digital comics platform

Plus: Dog Man teams with Little Free Library, the direct market at 50, Todd Klein and more.

Here’s another story coming out of Marvel’s South by Southwest panel in Austin yesterday — VeVe, an online collectibles site that sells NFT collectibles and artwork, has launched a digital comics storefront that now includes more than 300 titles from Marvel.

VeVe already has partnerships in place with Marvel, DC, Todd McFarlane and more to sell NFTs. Now they’ve expanded to selling digital comics that can be read in their app (much like Amazon), as well as “limited edition” versions of those same comics. These cost more but are collectible NFTs that can be sold in their marketplace and read using their augmented reality reader (which I’m very curious to see, especially if it can be used with the Apple Vision Pro). Each limited edition comic comes in a variety of variant covers, which apparently you buy “blind” and hope you get a rare one.

While Marvel is the only company currently on the platform, VeVe says they plan to expand that in the future.

“Being passionate readers and collectors ourselves, we recognized that digital comics fans have been calling for a more immersive experience,” said David Yu, CEO and co-founder of VeVe. “Our aim is to create a platform that makes comics discovery fun and easy—one that’s centered on function and design, fosters community and accessibility for all. We understood those pain points and created VeVe Comics to be the solution.”

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Cartoonist Cooperative announces nominees for the 2024 Minicomic Awards

The annual award recognizes creators making under-the-radar, short-form comics.

The Cartoonist Cooperative has announced the nominees for their 2024 Minicomics Awards, which they started giving out in 2022.

Founded by cartoonists Leslie Hung and Sloane Leong, the awards shine a light on “the unique, challenging, and under-recognized work in this short form medium.” The awards are presented across five categories based on genre, including horror, science fiction, fantasy, romance and autobiography.

The winners will be announced in a virtual ceremony on March 14 at 3 p.m. Pacific. The five winners will split a prize of $3,700.

Here are this year’s nominees:

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Eisner Hall of Fame announces 19 inductees for 2024

The inductees will be honored at a ceremony at this year’s San Diego Comic Con.

Comic-Con International has announced 19 inductees for the Will Eisner Awards Hall of Fame this year, as chosen by their panel of judges. These 19 will automatically be inducted, while additional choices for the general vote will be announced in April.

With four more inductees typically chosen by voting professionals, that means we’re looking at a Hall of Fame class of 23 people. So it’s a good thing they have their own separate ceremony now, prior to the evening’s ceremony where the Eisner winners are announced.

Last year the Eisners announced the split in the ceremony, which was also the first year they began honoring a larger group of people. Typically the Eisner judges would pick 2-6 people to automatically induct, and then voters would choose four more. Last year that number jumped to 15 automatic inductees.

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Nominees announced for the 2023 Bram Stoker Awards

Comics by Cullen Bunn, Leomacs, Adam Cesare, David Stoll, Amy Chu, Soo Lee, Junji Ito and Gou Tanabe were nominated this year.

The Horror Writers Association has announced the final nominees for the 2023 Bram Stoker Awards, which includes a graphic novel category.

The annual awards recognize “superior achievement” in horror and dark fiction, with a category dedicated to graphic novels. This year Dark Horse received three nominees, while BOOM! Studios and Viz Media each garnered one nomination. Last year’s winner was Kolchak: The Night Stalker: 50th Anniversary Graphic Novel edited by James Aquilone and published by Moonstone.

The nominees for the “Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel” category are:

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Nominees announced for this year’s L.A. Times Book Prize

Sammy Harkham, Derek M. Ballard, Emily Carroll and more were nominated this year.

The Los Angeles Times has announced the finalists for this year’s L.A. Times Book Prize, which includes a category for Graphic Novels/Comics. The prize recognizes books published in 2023.

The Los Angeles Times has given an award in the graphic novel category since 2009, when Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli won the award. Other previous winners include The Love Bunglers by Jaime Hernandez, Duncan the Wonder Dog by Adam Hines, Beverly by Nick Drnaso, Tillie Walden’s On a SunbeamThe Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis and R. Kikuo Johnson’s No One Else. Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith’s Wash Day Diaries won the award last year.

The winners will be revealed on April 19. Check out the finalists below.

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Quick Hits | Whatever happened to ‘Tales from the Quarantine’?

Plus: A ‘Doonesbury’ controversy (maybe?), Image launches a retailer award, and a Seattle comic shop’s staff unionizes.

Crowdfunding | Broken Frontier has a lengthy article up where they talk with many of the creators involved with Tales from the Quarantine, a project spearheaded by Frazer Brown of Red Cabin Comics that was funded in the early days of the pandemic and was meant to raise money for the Hero Initiative and other charities. The anthology was supposed to feature comics by a long list of creators, including Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Rachael Stott, Charlie Adlard, Jim Zub and Max Dunbar, among others. Almost four years after being funded, the anthology has yet to materialize in print, with many angry backers wanting to know what happened and creators left with little answers themselves.

“It was a damaging situation for our individual reputations,” said one of the anthology’s contributors, Lucy Sullivan. “The way the project was marketed suggested we were all complicit in its concept and production rather than, the reality, that we all gave our time and expertise for free in aid of charity. The only recourse was to publicly state this. Of course that put me on the blocked list, off the contributors’ emails and potentially amongst those threatened with police investigation. It was really quite stressful.”

Visit Broken Frontier to read more.

Comic strips | A former Iowa State Representative went to social media to question why this Sunday’s Doonesbury strip didn’t appear in any Gannett papers over the weekend. The strip in question featured a Florida teacher sharing facts about the Civil War, while one student questions if it is still legal for her to do so — a very real issue in the state.

But did Gannett actually remove the strip because of the content, as Cracked.com suggests? The Daily Cartoonist says another factor may be in play here — Gannett previously announced plans to limit the comic strips offered to their papers to a set 34, and Doonesbury isn’t on the list.

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Quick Hits | ‘Demon Slayer,’ Dav Pilkey, Bill Watterson top 2023 graphic novel sales charts

Plus: ‘Monica’ wins in Angouleme, the Bram Stoker Awards ballot and more.

Pulling information from Circana BookScan, ICv2 has listed the top 20 graphic novels sold in 2023 in the superhero, manga and “author” categories. They’ve also posted lists of the top adult and kid’s graphic novels.

Looking through the lists (which don’t provide exact numbers, just rankings), it looks like the first volume of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba by Koyoharu Gotouge is the big winner, topping both the manga chart and the adult graphic novel chart. Or maybe I should say “a big winner,” because over on the kid’s graphic novel chart, Dav Pilkey rules supreme, as Dog Man and its Cat Kid Comics Club spinoff took 13 of the 20 positions, including the top 3.

Also, I’m not exactly sure how the superhero and author categories are defined. For instance, the Invincible Compendium shows up on the author list — which makes sense, given how popular the Amazon show is — with Robert Kirkman listed as the author. But I would have expected it to be on the superhero list, given it’s about superheroes and Kirkman isn’t the sole author.

Then for superhero graphic novels, IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin hardcover topped the list, followed by Tokyopop’s Nightmare Before Christmas: Battle for the Pumpkin King manga. I think you could make the argument that the Last Ronin is a superhero title, but the Nightmare Before Christmas manga seems like it’s in the wrong place. But maybe I’m misunderstanding the catgeories.

All that aside, sales numbers for comics disappeared during the pandemic when the industry went from a single distributor to multiple distributors, so seeing any kind of data like this is appreciated and interesting.

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Quick Hits | Posy Simmonds wins the 2024 Grand Prix at Angoulême

Plus: News on the Eisners, Brett Lewis, Bill Griffith and more.

British cartoonist and illustrator Posy Simmonds has been awarded the Grand Prix at France’s annual Angoulême International Comics Festival. Simmonds beat out Daniel Clowes and Catherine Meurisse to capture the prize, and is only the fourth woman to be awarded the Grand Prix in its 50-year history.

Simmonds, 78, has done it all in her career, including comic illustration, daily press cartoons, weekly comic strips, best-selling albums, children’s books and screen adaptations. Her debut graphic novel, True Love, is one of the first British graphic novels, and she went on to create the well-regarded Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe and Cassandra Darke. She began her career doing comic strips for the Sun, the Times and the Guardian, where she spent the majority of her career. Later in life, she would start creating children’s books, and her most famous, Fred, went onto become an Academy Award-nominated short film, Famous Fred.

“I always think in a perfect world, the gender of a prize winner shouldn’t be remarkable,” Simmonds told the Guardian. “But it’s an imperfect world and the comics and bande déssinée world has always been a masculine milieu, a bit of a boys’ club. But, bit by bit, especially over the last decade, women have infiltrated it, so I’m pleased to be one of them, of course.”

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Nominees announced for the 35th Annual GLAAD Media Awards

Nominees this year include ‘Poison Ivy,’ ‘Roaming,’ ‘Heartstopper’ and more.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, have announced the nominees for the 35th annual Media Awards, which recognize and honor media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the LGBTQ+ community and the issues that affect their lives.

The awards feature two categories dedicated to comics — one for comics books and one for graphic novels. Last year Poison Ivy and the anthology Young Men in Love won in those categories, with Poison Ivy receiving another nomination this year. Dark Horse Comics received five nominations this year across the two categories, followed by DC with four and Marvel with three.

Check out the nominations for both categories below, and visit the GLAAD site for the rest of the nominations across TV, film, and more.

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Kate Beaton, Rachel Smythe + more win at the 2023 Harvey Awards

The awards were presented last night in conjunction with the New York Comic Con.

Last night the Harvey Awards were given out at New York Comic Con, in the six categories the awards program reintroduced in 2018.

Kate Beaton’s critically acclaimed Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands added another accolade to its shelf, taking home the award for “Book of the Year.” And Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus defended the “Digital Book of the Year” category, taking home the Harvey for a second year. And somehow the big blockbuster film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was able to squeak out a victory against The Stuff of Legend – The Board Game in the always odd “Best Adaptation” category.

Six creators were inducted into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame: Chris Claremont, Walt Simonson, Louise Simonson, Marv Wolfman, George Pérez and Bill Griffith.

A committee of “diverse industry voices including creators, publishing professionals, retailers, educators and librarians” determined the nominees, and the winners were chosen by creators and other industry professionals. Check out the full list of winners below.

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