MAD Mag cartoonist and National Cartoonist Society President Tom Richmond posted a recap of the Reuben Award weekend. The interesting part to the tie for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year was that the votes were tallied twice and still ended up in a tie.
The big surprise of the night was that there were TWO winners of the Reuben for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. The voting this year resulted in a tie between Brian Crane (“Pickles”) and Rick Kirkman (“Baby Blues”). When I got the results from the accounting firm that does the tallying, I had to go back and see if there was a precedent for this. There was. In 1968, editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant and comic strip creator Johnny Hart (“The Wizard of Id”, “B.C.”) tied for the Rueben. In occurred to me that even though it was a tie at the time, the NCS does have members from overseas who may well still have had ballots in transit, so we sat on the results for a week to see if more votes would come in postmarked in time but delayed with long travel. Sure enough, we got a number of overseas ballots that were still valid shortly thereafter… but once they were all in and counted it was STILL a tie. That’s preordained, I would say. A big congratulations to both Brian and Rick, both deserving of the Reuben, and both honored!