awards – SMASH PAGES

‘Monstress’ wins this year’s Dragon Award

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s long-running title from Image Comics takes home another award.

Monstress, the dark fantasy comic that blends steampunk and Asian mythology by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, has won this year’s Dragon Award in the “Best Comic Book / Graphic Novel” category.

I’ve honestly lost count of how many awards Monstress and its creative team have won since Image Comics started publishing the title in 2015. A quick search reveals that the book and its creative team have won multiple British Fantasy Awards, multiple Eisner Awards, multiple Hugo Awards, a Harvey Award and a World Fantasy Award. Takeda just won another award for “Best Painter” at the Eisner Awards earlier this summer.

The award was presented at DragonCon in Atlanta this weekend, along with others in categories recognizing science fiction and fantasy books, movies, video games and more.

Hilary B. Price wins the 2023 Reuben Award

Jay Stephens, Evan Dahm, Sarah Andersen and more win NCS divisional awards.

Hilary B. Price, creator of Rhymes with Orange and the youngest woman to ever have a nationally syndicated comic strip, has won this year’s Reuben Award.

The National Cartoonists Society presented the award last weekend at their annual conference in San Diego. Price was one of six nominees for the award this year, in a field that also included Daniel Clowes, Darrin Bell, Dana Simpson, Mark Tatulli and Will Henry.

Price launched the comic strip in 1995, and it’s remained an award-winning staple of the comics page ever since, winning multiple divisional awards from the National Cartoonists Society. She’s also been nominated for the Reuben Award multiple times in the past.

“Rhymes With Orange has been my expressive outlet from my mid-twenties through my mid-forties,” Price told us back in 2018. “There’s a lot of change in that time – from sleeping on a futon to having a box spring and mattress, from negotiating roommates to negotiating a mortgage, from weddings to divorces. I remember a relative noting that when the strip first started, it was a window into the life of a twenty-something, but as I aged, the topics hit a broader audience. For example, more people are in the settled down phase than in the just starting out phase, so gags about long term relationships hit a wider mark than the hook-up at parties gags.”

Annie Koyama will receive the 2024 Spurgeon Award

The curator of the the Koyama Provides grant program will be honored at this year’s Cartoon Crossroads Columbus festival in September.

Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, the annual comics festival that was co-founded by comics journalist and advocate Tom Spurgeon, has announced the recipient of this year’s Spurgeon Award.

Annie Koyama, the publisher of the well-regarded (and now defunct) Koyama Press and the curator of the Koyama Provides grant program, will receive the award during this year’s festival in Columbus, Ohio. Koyama Provides awards mini-grants to independent artists, providing them with funding to complete projects or start new ones.

Koyama received the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award in 2022, and at the time Comic-Con International said she had given out around $300,000 in grants. You can see many of the recipients on Koyama’s Instagram account, where she spotlights their work.

“I’m thrilled to have been chosen as the 2024 recipient of the Tom Spurgeon Award,” Koyama said. “I’m thankful to have found a way to stay connected to a community that I love, by directly supporting artists, especially cartoonists. Tom reached out to me in the early days of the press, when I had seemingly come out of nowhere and he continued to support the press and my plans beyond the press, for which I’ll always be grateful.”

Nominees announced for the 2024 Harvey Awards

The awards program expands to seven categories this year; winners will be announced at the New York Comic Con in October.

The nominees have been announced for the 2024 Harvey Awards, the annual awards program given out at the New York Comic Con. The awards recognize graphic novels, manga, digital comics and “adaptations” across seven categories, up from six last year.

This year it looks like the committee decided to break the “Best Children’s or Young Adult Book” category into two separate categories, which feels like the right thing to do, given the number of books in both these categories published every year. Trying to combine the two into a single category was always kind of weird — it would be like pitting monthly comics against graphic novels in the same category, or even TV shows against movies or video games or musicals. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

This year’s Harvey Awards presentations will be livestreamed from New York Comic Con, and nominees for their Hall of Fame will be announced at a later date. Congratulations to this year’s nominees:

Nominees announced for the 2024 Ignatz Awards

The Ignatz Awards, given out annually at SPX, honor outstanding achievement in independent comics and cartooning.

The Small Press Expo, or SPX, has announced the nominees for the 2024 Ignatz Awards.

The Ignatz Awards recognize the outstanding achievements of independent comics, graphic novels and alternative political cartoons and are typically given out during the Small Press Expo every Fall. Named for the mouse that appears in the Krazy Kat comics by George Herriman, the logo changes each year as a new artist draws the mouse and his weapon of choice, the brick. The logo for this year was drawn by 2023 Ignatz Promising New Talent Winner Deb JJ Lee.

This year’s nominees were chosen by a panel of comics professionals that included Caroline Cash, Martha Kuhlman, Dawn Bond, Lawrence Lindell, Kriota Wilberg and Emma Jensen. And here are their choices:

‘Saga’ wins another Hugo Award

More than a decade since its first win, the space opera takes home its second Hugo Award.

Saga, the long-running Image Comics series by artist Fiona Staples and writer Brian K. Vaughan, has won the 2024 Hugo Award in the “Best Graphic Story or Comic” category.

The winners of the 2024 Hugo Awards were announced yesterday during the Glasgow 2024, a Worldcon for Our Futures convention in Scotland.

The 11th volume of Saga was released last November, and since its debut in 2012, it’s been nominated for the award eight times. This is its second win.

Nominees announced for the 2024 Dragon Awards

The awards, which include a comics category, have been presented annually during DragonCon since 2016.

The nominees have been announced for the 2024 Dragon Awards, which have been presented annually during DragonCon since 2016.

The awards include multiple categories for books, media tie-ins like movies and video games, and comics. Last year the “Best Comic Book” and “Best Graphic Novel” categories were combined into a single category — “Best Comic Book or Graphic Novel.” The comic book adaptation of Dune: House Harkonnen by Brian Herbert, Kevin J Anderson and Michael Shelfer won the award last year.

The nominees in the comics and graphic novel category — which are all single-issue comic series — are:

Your 2024 Eisner Award winners

Winners were announced during a ceremony in San Diego.

The winners of the 2024 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were announced Friday night in San Diego.

Roaming by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki took home three awards, for best graphic album, best writer and best penciler/inker, while Daniel Warren Johnson’s work on Transformers brought him awards for best continuing series and best writer/artist. Becky Cloonan also received multiple awards, winning for best short story and for best new series, for Somna with Tula Lotay.

Other awards presented tonight included the Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award, which went to Oliver Bly, creator of The Mushroom Knight. The Women in Comics Collective International, or WinC, received the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award, while the Bill Finger Award went to Jo Duffy and Ralph Newman.

During the ceremony, the inductees into the Eisner Hall of Fame were honored. They were actually inducted earlier in the day in a separate ceremony, but this year’s class included Jill Thompson, Jim Lee, Mike Mignola and Klaus Janson, who were selected by voters. Also, 19 people were automatically inducted by the judges this year; you can find the list here.

Here’s the full list of this year’s winners:

Nominees announced for the 2024 Ignyte Awards

‘Whisper of the Woods, ‘Brooms’ and more have been recognized this year in the comics category.

The nominees have been announced for the annual Ignyte Awards, which “celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre.”

While the awards cut across several genres of fiction, they also include an “Outstanding Comics Team” category. Previous winners in that category include Where Black Stars Rise by Marie Enger and Nadia Shammas, Nubia: Real One by L. L. McKinney and Robyn Smith, and These Savage Shores by Ram V, Sumit Kumar, Vitorio Astone, Aditya Bidikar and Tim Daniel.

The awards are sponsored by FIYAH Literary Magazine, which focuses on Black speculative fiction, and the winners are typically announced in conjunction with FIYAHCON.

Congratulations to this year’s nominees:

Nominees announced for the 2024 Ringo Awards

The awards will be presented during the Baltimore Comic-Con on Sept. 21.

The nominees for the 2024 Ringo Awards have been announced, marking the eighth year for the awards program named for the late Mike Wieringo, the artist of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Tellos and more who died in 2007.

Nominees were chosen by fans, along with a panel of judges, and the awards period included any materials published in 2023. The awards presentation will take place at The Baltimore Comic-Con on Sept. 21.

“Every year, the Ringo Awards jurors have the difficult task of ‘picking their favorite child’, so to speak,” said Marc Nathan, Baltimore Comic-Con promoter. “It is always a challenge to determine what makes the cut and what doesn’t, but as you can see from the final ballot, our jury’s hard work paid off and, with the inclusion of the public votes, we have an outstanding representation of some of comics’ best works from 2023. Creators should make their way to the voting site now and make sure your peers do the same!”

Congratulations to this year’s nominees:

Sunday Comics | Read these 2024 Eisner nominees online

Check out webcomics by Joe S. Farrar and Guilherme Grandizolli, Jared Lee and Cross, Evan Dahm, Haley Newsome, Cam Marshall, Velinxi and more.

With the Eisner Awards less than two weeks away, I thought I’d highlight some of this year’s nominees that you can find online.

Let’s start with the “Best Short Story” category, where Joe S. Farrar and Guilherme Grandizolli’s “The Lady of the Lake” is nominated. It originally appeared in BUMP: A Horror Anthology #3, which Farrar funded through Kickstarter and now sells on his ko-fi site. But in celebrating the nomination, Farrar posted the short story in full on Twitter, which I think is always a brilliant move, as it’s hard to vote for something if you haven’t read it.

Quick Hits | Counting down to San Diego

Are hotels too expensive during Comic Con? (Yes!) Plus news on the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award, the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award, DSTLRY goes exclusive, 23rd Street Books and more.

The 55th annual San Diego Comic Con is coming up in two weeks, so expect to see a lot of news between now and then not only on upcoming comics and the like, but also on the convention itself, pop culture trends, its impact on the economy and whatever other angle news outlets can squeeze from the event. I’m sure there are mainstream journalists chomping at the bit to do cosplay round-ups as I type this.

One question that comes up every few years related to the con is, “Will it always be in San Diego?” San Diego is an events city with a huge convention center and a welcoming downtown area, and SDCC means big business for the businesses in the area. But this article by Rob Salkowitz for Forbes notes that the Comic-Con International team is concerned about hotel price gouging in the city during the convention, as hotels are putting fewer rooms into the block offered by CCI every year because they can book them for more on the open market.

“We would never want to leave, but if push came to shove and it became untenable for us, it’s something that we would certainly have to look into,” David Glanzer, Chief Communication and Strategy Officer for Comic-Con International, told Forbes. “As event planners, we’re always contacted by different cities and it would be reckless for us to not at least acknowledge that.”

CCI has a contract with San Diego through 2025, so any changes would have to come after that.

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