Medar de la Cruz has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in the Illustrated Reporting and Commentary category. The Brooklyn-based illustrator won for the illustrated story “The Diary of a Rikers Island Library Worker,” which appeared in the New Yorker last May. De la Cruz is an artist who also works in New York City jails as a library assistant for the Brooklyn Public Library. Phones and cameras aren’t allowed inside Rikers Island, so his drawings are based on his memories of the prison.
The other finalists in the category this year included Claire Healy, Nicole Dungca and Ren Galeno for “Searching for Maura,” which appeared in the Washington Post; “Is My Toddler A Stochastic Parrot?” by Angie Wang, which appeared in the New Yorker; and Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, for a “portfolio of deceptively gentle, mostly wordless cartoons full of juxtapositions that ably communicate complex, sophisticated messages.” You can see some of them here. Bennett also recently received a National Headliner Award, which recognizes journalism in a multitude of categories, in the Editorial Cartoon category.
This is the third year now where the Pulitzers have given awards in the Illustrated Reporting and Commentary category. It replaced the Editorial Cartoons category in 2022.
Publishing | Speaking of the New Yorker, Françoise Mouly writes about Gabe Fowler’s Rescue Party, a collection of pandemic-era comics coming from the owner of Desert Island Comics in Brooklyn. While his shop was closed during COVID, Fowler took to collecting and posting comics from artists around the world, and Pantheon will release the collection in July.
Publishing | Harlem World spotlights the two millionth comic book distributed by the Civics for All Comics Group, “pushing New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) into the top ten comic book distributors in the country.”
Civics for All Comics Group began as a collaboration between New York City Public Schools, creators Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, and Good Trouble Productions with the publishing of Action Activists #1 and Registered #1 in 2020. All the comics they’ve produced have been distributed in New York schools and can also be downloaded for free.
“We’re thrilled to celebrate this amazing milestone of 2 million printed issues with our friends at NYCDOE! Every comic we’ve created together has been a chance to dive deep into the stories that matter, making space for essential conversations in classrooms and libraries even as we entertain,” said Kelly Sue DeConnick, comics writer and co-founder of Good Trouble Productions. “We’re excited to keep the momentum of this educational journey going, ensuring that the lessons of history and the importance of civic engagement are accessible to all students. Here’s to the next 2 million!”
Publishing | The Last Kids on Earth book series, which already had a comic book spinoff series, is now getting a line of graphic novels. Artist Brian Churilla will work with author Max Brallier on the adaptations.
Legal | Photographer Jingna Zhang and comics creators Sarah Andersen, Hope Larson and Jessica Fink have filed a lawsuit against Google, which you can read in full here. The lawsuit alleges that Google used their artwork when training its AI-powered Imagen image generator, as their artwork was part of a bigger set of 400 million images called the “Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network,” or LAION-400M dataset. Andersen is also part of a lawsuit against the image generators Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for using the images in the LAION-400M dataset without permission from the artists.
Commentary | Writing for the New York Times, Sam Thielman looks at Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham’s work on Miracleman: The Silver Age.
Commentary | Who created Wolverine? The answer to that question apparently changed recently, as for Marvel Editor-in-Chief Roy Thomas will now receive partial credit, along with Len Wein and John Romita Sr., when Deadpool & Wolverine arrives in theaters this summer. Comics writer and historian Mark Evanier has a lot to say on the matter on his blog, starting here and continuing through several posts.
The root problem here is that there are not, nor has there ever been, an agreed-upon rulebook as to how to assign creator credits for comic book properties. There are industry customs and a big one is that the writer of the first story and the pencil artist of the first story are the co-creators of the property. Or if one person did both, he or she is the creator. That custom was bent a little in the case of Wolverine by crediting John Romita (he designed the visual) instead of Herb Trimpe (he drew the first story). That might in this case have been a correct decision. I know it did not bother Herb.
Inspiration | To end with something fun, CBCArts has created a virtual deck of cards filled with “Wisdom, inspiration and creative problem-solving from 67 Canadian artists,” including Kate Beaton, Sam Maggs, Chip Zdarsky, Seth and Sweeney Boo. You can pick a card at random, or find links to each artist’s card at the bottom of the page.