Quick Hits | A quick awards round-up

The Harvey Awards announce their Hall of Fame inductees, Tripwire honors comic creators and more.

It seems to perpetually be awards season, so today seems like a good day for another quick awards round-up post. Congrats to everyone being honored!

The Harvey Awards steering committee has announced four creators who will be inducted into their Hall of Fame this year: Neil Gaiman, Roy Thomas, Gilbert Shelton and Marge Buell.

“The first time I was given a Harvey Award, it was 1991, 31 years ago, I had a whole career or two ahead of me and Harvey Kurtzman was still alive,” Gaiman said in the press release. “It was the award that bore his name and was thus the most important award I had ever received. Now, with over three decades of comics career behind me, it’s just as thrilling to hear that I get to join a Hall of Fame named for Harvey. He was one of the greats, and so many of the people who have been inducted already have been people I looked up to over the years. So this is an unalloyed delight for me.”

The four creators will be inducted during the Harvey Awards ceremony at the New York Comic Con, which is coming up next weekend. Check out the list of all the nominees for this year’s Harvey Awards.

Last week UK-based Tripwire Magazine presented their annual Tripwire Awards in 19 comics categories during a ceremony at London’s Cartoon Museum. DC’s Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow did very well in several categories, including best new series, best collection and a best artist award for Bilquis Evely. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Destroy All Monsters took home the award for best graphic novel. You can check out all the winners on the Tripwire website.

The National Book Foundation will present a lifetime achievement award to Maus creator Art Spiegelman in November — the organization’s 2022 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which has never been given to a comics artist before.

“Art Spiegelman has captured the world’s imagination through the comics medium,” said David Steinberger, Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. “His masterful graphic novels tackle and illuminate topics from the Holocaust to the aftermath of 9/11, alongside the personal intimacy of the people, events, and comics that shaped him as an artist. Spiegelman’s groundbreaking work has shown us the limitless possibilities for comics as a literary arts form, and the Foundation is proud to honor his legacy.”

Previous recipients of the medal include Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Elmore Leonard, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison and Judy Blume, among many others. The award will be presented at the National Book Awards Ceremony on Nov. 16.

Speaking of the NBF, two graphic novels made the long list for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature this year — Swim Team by Johnnie Christmas and Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist For Justice by Dawud Anyabwile, Derrick Barnes and gold medal Olympian Tommie Smith. Finalists for the category should be announced on Tuesday.

Roye Okupe and Godwin Akpan’s Iyanu: Child of Wonder has won a Nommo Award in the graphic novel category. The Nommo Awards are presented by the African Speculative Fiction Society to recognize the best in African literature. The graphic novel is part of the YouNeek YouNiverse that has been published in the United States by Dark Horse Comics.

And I completely missed this when they were announced about a month ago — but in my defense, I was out of town riding roller coasters. In any event, this year’s Dragon Award winners in the comic book and graphic novel categories were, respectively, Immortal X-Men by Kieron Gillen and Mark Brooks, and Dune: House Atreides Volume 2 by Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson and Dev Pramanik. Belated congrats to the winners!

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