Comic-Con International has announced the judge’s choices and the full ballot for the 2021 Will Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.
Six inductees will automatically be inducted this year, while voters will choose from a field of 16 once voting opens later this year. There’s no word yet on when voting will occur.
The six judge’s choices are:
Alberto Breccia, an Argentinean artist who worked on Sherlock Time and Mort Cinder with Héctor German Oesterheld,. One of his last works was Perramus, a criticism of Argentina’s military dictatorship at the time. He received an award from Amnesty International in 1989 for his work on it.
Stan Goldberg, whose career spanned from Timely Comics to Archie Comics, where he drew many of Archie’s titles as well as the Archie comic strip. He also worked for Marvel in the 1960s, creating the color designs for Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk and more.
Francoise Mouly, editor and publisher of Raw Books and Graphics, where Maus was first serialized. Later she became art director at The New Yorker and went on to found Toon Books.
Lily Renée Phillips, a comic artist from the 1940s who drew Werewolf Hunter, Jane Martin, Senorita Rio and The Lost World for Fiction House, and also worked on Abbott & Costello Comics.
Thomas Nast, considered to be the father of the American cartoon; he worked as an editorial cartoonist in the 1800s, where he advocated the abolition of slavery, opposed racial segregation, and deplored the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. He popularized the elephant to symbolize the Republican Party and the donkey as the symbol for the Democratic Party, and he created the “modern” image of Santa Claus.
Rodolphe Töpffer, a Swiss artist whose “picture stories,” like Histoire de M. Jabot (1833), Monsieur Crépin (1837), Monsieur Pencil (1840), and Le Docteur Festus (1846) are considered precursors to the modern comic strip.
The nominees that voters will choose from are:
- Ruth Atkinson
- Dave Cockrum
- Kevin Eastman
- Neil Gaiman
- Max Gaines
- Justin Green
- Moto Hagio
- Don Heck
- Klaus Janson
- Jeffrey Catherine Jones
- Hank Ketcham
- Scott McCloud
- Grant Morrison
- Alex Niño
- P. Craig Russell
- Gaspar Saladino
You can read more about each of them on the CCI website. The judging panel for this year consists of comics retailer Marco Davanzo (Alakazam Comics, Irvine, CA), Comic-Con Board Member Shelley Fruchey, librarian Pamela Jackson (San Diego State University), comics creator/publisher Keithan Jones (The Power Knights, KID Comics), educator Alonso Nuñez (Little Fish Comic Book Studio) and comics scholar Jim Thompson (Comic Book Historians).
Voting for the Hall of Fame will be held online, along with the rest of the awards categories that haven’t been announced yet. CCI also says that new voting procedures for 2021 will be announced soon, which is good, given the controversy from last year.