Awards Comic Books Comic history Comic strips

2021 Eisner Award Nominees – Comic Strip Division

Skip to comments

D. D. Degg June 9, 2021 1 minute 0 comments

The annual Eisner Awards, in association with the San Diego Comic-Con, have announced the nominees in their various groupings. While there is no exact comic strip or editorial cartoon categories, there are some divisions and nominees to which we can relate among the mostly comic book awards.

The most direct comic strip category is the Archival Project award:

Best Archival Collection/Project—Strips 

• The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age,
  edited by Trina Robbins (Fantagraphics)

• Gross Exaggerations: The Meshuga Comic Strips of Milt Gross,
  by Milt Gross, edited by Peter Maresca (Sunday Press/IDW)

• Krazy & Ignatz 1919-1921 
  by George Herriman, edited by RJ Casey (Fantagraphics)

• Little Debbie and the Second Coming of Elmo: Daily Comic Strips,
  August 1960–September 1961, by Cecil Jensen, edited by Frank Young (Labor of Love)

• Pogo The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips: Volume 7: Clean as a Weasel, 
  by Walt Kelly, edited by Mark Evanier and Eric Reynolds (Fantagraphics)

(The Pogo Volume 7 is Pockets Full of Pie, I’m guessing the “7” is a typo)

There is a web comic category:

Best Webcomic

• BFF, by Clément C. Fabre, Joseph Saffiedine, and  Thomas Cadène, translation by Emma Wilson, 
  https://www.webtoonfactory.com/en/webtoons/114-bff-saison-1/

• Crisis Zone, by Simon Hanselmann,
  https://www.instagram.com/simon.hanselmann/

• DPS! Only, by Vel,
  https://tapas.io/series/dpsonly/info

• Isle of Elsi, by Alec Longstreth,
  https://www.isleofelsi.com/comics/ioe4/page-208/

• The Kiss Bet, by Ingrid Ochoa,
  https://www.webtoons.com/en/romance/the-kiss-bet/ep-1-the-kiss-bet/viewer?title_no=1617&episode_no=1

• The Middle Age, by Steve Conley,
  middleagecomic.com

A surprise nominee is the New York Times long-form comic
“I Needed the Discounts” by Connor Willumsen, in The New York Times (January 3, 2020)
in the Best Short Story category.

A couple familiar names pop up in the Best Humor Publication

• Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, by Tom Gauld (Drawn & Quarterly)
• FANGS, by Sarah Andersen (Andrews McMeel)

More names that have been mentioned here in the past:

Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, by Derf Backderf (Abrams) for Best Reality-Based Work.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)
for Best Graphic Memoir,
and a personal favorite: Pulp, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Image)
for Best Graphic Album—New.

Our friend Michael (Comics Riff) Cavna is a nominee for Best Comics-Related Journalism:
The Comics Blog, by Michael Cavna and David Betancourt,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/comics/

The 50th anniversary Doonebury publication gets a nod for Best Publication Design:
Dbury@50: The Complete Digital Doonesbury, 
by G.B. Trudeau, designed by George Corsillo and Susan McCaslin (Andrews McMeel)

We are sorry to say that we have only two of the history books up for the Best Comics-Related Book (though a third is/has been on order).

• American Daredevil: Comics, Communism, and the Battles of Lev Gleason,
  by Brett Dakin (Comic House/Lev Gleason)

• Ditko Shrugged: The Uncompromising Life of the Artist Behind Spider-Man and the Rise of Marvel Comics,
  by David Currie (Hermes Press)

• Drawing Fire: The Editorial Cartoons of Bill Mauldin,
  edited by Todd DePastino (Pritzker Military Museum & Library)

• The History of EC Comics,
  by Grant Geissman (TASCHEN)

• Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books,
  by Ken Quattro (Yoe Books/IDW)

• Masters of British Comic Art,
  by David Roach (2000AD)

More unfortunate is that we only have one of the Best Academic/Scholarly Work books:

• Comic Art in Museums,
  edited by Kim A. Munson (University Press of Mississippi)

• Comic Studies: A Guidebook,
  edited by Charles Hatfield and Bart Beaty (Rutgers University Press)

• The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging,
  by Rebecca Wanzo (New York University Press)

• Webcomics,
  by Sean Kleefeld (Bloomsbury)

• Who Understands Comics: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension,
  by Neil Cohn (Bloomsbury)

All nominees in all categories can be seen at The Eisner Awards page.