It’s the awards season and yesterday was a huge day. Just over 24 hours ago the Eisner Awards were announced and last night the Aurealis Awards for best Australian speculative fiction were announced. Our congratulations to all the winners and nominees and a special shout out to Australian creators nominated for the Eisner Awards.
AUREALIS AWARDS
The Aurealis Awards are mostly dedicated to prose books but they have a category for Best Graphic Novel / Illustrated Work, one of the very few Australian book awards that recognise the comics medium with their own category and for this we really applaud the Aurealis Awards organisers. Anyway, the winner for Best Graphic Novel / Illustrated Work 2020 is…
Black Magick, Greg Rucka & Nicola Scott (Image Comics)
A big congratulations to Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott on a well deserved win!
The other shortlisted nominees for the award were:
- Haphaven, Norm Harper & Louie Joyce (Lion Forge)
- Yahoo Creek, Tohby Riddle (Allen & Unwin)
- Super Nova, Krys Saclier (Ford Street Publishing)
- Sherlock Bones and the Natural History Mystery, Renee Treml (Allen & Unwin)
EISNER AWARDS
The Eisner Awards announced yesterday have a very clear message: Female creators are absolutely killing it. A staggering proportion of winners are female creators and they have won most of the major categories, with Raina Telgemeier, Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell right at the top with double wins.
- Raina Telgemeier: Best Publication for Kids, Best Writer/Artist
- Mariko Tamaki: Best Publication for Teens, Best Writer
- Rosemary Valero-O’Connell: Best Publication for Teens, Best Penciller/Inker
These awards together with the 2019 sales data published recently shows clearly that comics are changing. New creators and titles are rising. Sales of comics in bookshops were higher last year than in the traditional comic stores. Creators, publishers and readers continue to move away from serialised comics and favour graphic novels. This shift is also bring out new voices and more diverse voices to the medium.
We also want to congratulate Australian creators Rachel Ang, Sarah Firth and Meg O’Shea who contributed to the Eisner Winner for Best Anthology: Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival.
Australian creator Matt Huynh was nominated for Best Webcomic with Cabramatta. He didn’t win but being in the shortlist of nominees is already a huge honour and Cabramatta is an excellent read. Finally, Australian creator Queenie Chan, also contributed to Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities, edited by Fusami Ogi et al. (Palgrave Macmillan), which was nominated for the Best Academic/Scholarly Work category.
The list of winners for the main categories are as follows:
- Best Continuing Series – Bitter Root, by David Walker, Chuck Brown, and Sanford Greene (Image)
- Best Limited Series – Little Bird by Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram (Image)
- Best New Series – Invisible Kingdom, by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward (Berger Books/Dark Horse)
- Best Publication for Early Readers – Comics: Easy as ABC, by Ivan Brunetti (TOON)
- Best Publication for Kids – Guts, by Raina Telgemeier (Scholastic Graphix)
- Best Publication Teens – Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (First Second/Macmillan)
- Best Anthology – Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival, edited by Diane Noomin (Abrams)
- Best Reality Based Work – They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker (Top Shelf)
- Best Graphic Album – Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden (First Second/Macmillan)
- Best Graphic Album Reprint – LaGuardia, by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford (Berger Books/Dark Horse)
- Best Adaptation from Another Medium – Snow, Glass, Apples, by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran (Dark Horse Books)
- Best U.S. Edition of International Material – The House, by Paco Roca, translation by Andrea Rosenberg (Fantagraphics)
- Best U.S. Edition of International Material (Asia) – It’s a tie between: Cats of the Louvre, by Taiyo Matsumoto, translation by Michael Arias (VIZ Media) and Witch Hat Atelier, by Kamome Shirahama, translation by Stephen Kohler (Kodansha)
- Best Writer – Mariko Tamaki, Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass (DC); Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me (First Second/Macmillan); Archie (Archie)
- Best Writer/Artist – Raina Telgemeier, Guts (Scholastic Graphix)
- Best Comics Related Work – Making Comics, by Lynda Barry (Drawn & Quarterly)
- Best Webcomic – Fried Rice by Erica Eng
You can read the full list of nominees and winners on The Beat.
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