OVERDUE NEWS: On May 2, the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival (A2CAF) and its sponsoring organization, Kids Read Comics (a nonprofit that encourages comics reading and making among young people), announced the shortlist of nominees for the 2018 Dwayne McDuffie Award for Kids' Comics. This shortlist consists of ten titles chosen from among the more than 100 comics reviewed by this year's judges: librarian and critic Alenka Figa; artist and Green Brain Comics employee Shayauna Glover, and writer and podcaster Ardo Omer. (The full list of 100-plus titles can be found at the A2CAF website.)
The Dwayne McDuffie Award for Kids' Comics began in 2015 and is awarded annually at A2CAF (formerly the Kids Read Comics Celebration). This year's A2CAF will take place on June 16-17, presented, once again, in partnership with the Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Note that the McDuffie Award for Kids' Comics is distinct from the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics, also launched in 2015 but not specific to children's or Young Adult titles. That McDuffie Award is given out annually at the Long Beach Comic Expo. Think of the two awards as siblings! Personal PS. I got to meet and interact with the late Dwayne McDuffie just once, in November 2010, when he and his wife Charlotte (Fullerton) McDuffie visited my senior Honors class, English 492: The Comic Book Superhero. Back in the nineties, I had read quite a few Milestone Comics, a line Dwayne co-created, edited, and substantially guided, and I wanted my students to know about that. I can't remember how it is that I was able to contact Dwayne, but he was happy to come to CSUN and talk about his work. We prepared for his visit by reading the first volume of Milestone's Icon, which Dwayne had done with artist Mark Bright, plus excerpts from Jeffrey Brown's monograph Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans, and by watching Season One of Justice League Unlimited, on which Dwayne had worked as producer and story editor. It was a great visit and impacted me tremendously, even though it was just a single classroom session. I won't forget it. I found Dwayne to be accessible and generous, wonderful with students, and disarmingly candid about his career, his aspirations and disappointments, and the conditions under which he worked. He was genuine and frank, justly proud of his work in comics and media, aware of its social stakes, but too wise to make overreaching claims. He registered his frustrations openly, honestly, but in a way that was never acrid or dispiriting. His sheer intelligence and enthusiasm held the room, and it was then that I realized that Dwayne was, no exaggeration, a genius, a true prodigy and polymath. My students were thrilled and enlightened, and many took the opportunity to speak to him personally. When Dwayne died suddenly about three months later, several of them contacted me about it; they were stunned. I think we were all a bit crushed. I fondly remember going to dinner afterward with Dwayne, Charlotte, and my fellow scholar Adilifu Nama (Super Black). The conversation was stellar, and a new world, or new angle onto comics, opened up to me. I think Dwayne McDuffie would be proud to see the awards created in his name, and I can't think of a better name for them. Readers, please consider donating to The Dwayne McDuffie Fund to help establish a nonprofit to award academic scholarships to diverse students and to keep McDuffie's legacy going.
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NEWS! This morning, the organizers of the Excellence in Graphic Literature Awards announced their nominees for the first-ever slate of EGLs, to be awarded at the Denver Comic Con on June 16. The livestream of the announcement, hosted by KidLit TV, can be (re)viewed here. Also, PR Newswire has a press release including the full list of nominees. It's an interesting list, with books I love, books I admire, and books I'd like to get to know. The EGL Awards, as I posted this morning, aim to strengthen the link between comics publishing and the field of children's and Young Adult librarianship. School librarians, public librarians, and K-12 educators are well represented in the judging panels and advisory board, and indeed seem to be the Awards' center of gravity. The awards include eight categories organized by age range, as well as one diversity-themed prize, the Mosaic Award, and an overall Book of the Year prize with contenders drawn from the other categories. The age-based categories are divided into Fiction and Nonfiction for Children (Grade 5 and under), Middle Grades (Grades 6-8), Young Adults (Grades 9-12), and Adults. (You can find out more about the EGL categories at the Pop Culture Classroom, here.) It seems to me that the EGLs have been rolled out in, for comics, unusually coordinated and deliberate fashion. I expressed reservations about the seeming outlook of the Awards when I first learned of them (see the comments thread here), and continue to wonder at the Awards' judging culture and, perhaps, selective filter—all based on my guesswork, I hasten to add. It does seem likely to me that the EGLs will filter out significant parts of comics culture and book-length comics publishing. However, this is also true of other industry awards that seek to cover the whole span of book-length comics, such as the Eisners; all have blind spots, and all speak to the interests of particular communities within the comics world. That said, this first EGL slate strikes me as solid and promising, with an encouraging diversity in aesthetic, genre, and tradition. I also like the range of publishers represented (though First Second Books is clearly the favorite, with five out of the eight nominees for Book of the Year). I confess, I do see a few frank headscratchers among the nominees (what award process is without those, though?). The nonfiction choices for Children and Middle Grades are quite thin, and in general I feel more confident of the YA and Adult categories. Also, the Best of Year finalists make for, um, an odd set: apples and oranges and then some. Further, I'm not sure that all the nominees quite match the high literary aspirations implied by the Awards' name, suggesting that the "L" in EGL may be an awkward fit for some comics, even very good ones (but, um, the politics of respectability is perhaps too big a problem for one award to solve?). Here is the full list of finalists, as reported today: CHILDREN'S BOOKS Fiction
MIDDLE GRADE BOOKS Fiction
YOUNG ADULT BOOKS Fiction
ADULT BOOKS Fiction
MOSAIC AWARD FINALISTS
BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALISTS
Quite a list. I'm excited to see, for example, Liniers, Melanie Gillman, Tillie Walden, Katie Green, Thi Bui, Emil Ferris, Guy Delisle, and the team of Stacey Robinson and John Jennings. I'm also excited to see promising books from creators I don't know. The division of Awards by age range, and the list of publishers represented, perhaps indicate the Awards' intended focus and community more clearly than anything I could say. Let's see what happens. PS. It was a pleasure to see among the EGL jurors and advisors in this morning's video announcement my friends and colleagues Dr. Katie Monnin of the University of North Florida (we judged Eisners together in 2013) and Carr D'Angelo and Susan Avallone of Earth-2 Comics, my LCS!
NEWS! The first-ever set of nominations for the Excellence in Graphic Literature Awards is fixing to go live, in about an hour, thanks to KidLit TV.
The EGL Awards are sponsored and organized by the nonprofit Pop Culture Classroom, and represent an effort to tie a major comics award more directly into the worlds of children's and YA graphic novel librarianship. The Comics Journal's Alex Dueben interviewed two of the people behind the EGL Awards, John Shableski and Illya Kowalchuk, back in January (and I tentatively raised some concerns about the Awards in the comments thread). It'll be interesting to see this first slate of nominees! You can access the livestream of the nominations (10:00 am PCT, today, Thursday, March 15) at KidLit TV, here. |
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