Eisners, and a drunken eagle—
Maybe they don’t go all that well together. I’ve been juxtaposing too much, lately. Let’s set them to one side, and the other. First, the Eisner Awards, named for comics giant Will Eisner: the Oscars,™ see, are sort of the Eisners of the movie industry. Heidi MacDonald over at the Beat has some paradigm-shaking news—
Eisner Awards Accepting Webcomics Submissions
The judges for the 2005 Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards are accepting submissions for a possible Best Digital Comic category.
Criteria:
Any professionally produced long-form comics work posted online or distributed via other digital media is eligible. The majority of the work must have been published in 2004. Audio elements and animation can be part of the work but must be minimal. Web comics must have a unique domain name or be part of a larger comics community to be considered. The work must be online-exclusive for a significant period prior to being collected in print form.
Submission:
For webcomics: Send URL and any necessary access information to the Eisner Awards administrator, Jackie Estrada.
For CD or DVD comics: Send disc to Eisner Awards, 4657 Cajon Way, San Diego, CA 92115.
Deadline: March 25, 2005 (but sooner is much preferred)
Things are moving fast: the first webcomic to be nominated at all for any sort of Eisner was Nowhere Girl, back in 2003. At this rate, we’ll have only four or five years of the best webcomics being ghettoized in the Best Digital Comic category and locked out of all the others (since they’ve already got an award of their own, you know). —I kid! Heidi says that somewhere, Scott McCloud is smiling, and I have no doubt he is, so I went to see for myself, and tripped over a link to this good Columbia Journalism Review article on comics journalism, which
reminds us all (you didn’t forget, did you?) of Brought to Light:
Something of that æsthetic range is represented by the two main pieces in the 1989 book Brought to Light. In one half of the volume, Joyce Brabner and Thomas Yeates tell of the 1984 bombing at a press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua, which killed eight people and injured twenty-eight others. The presentation is straightforward, using plain language and realistic illustrations, and drawing on the accounts of witnesses and the evidence presented in the Christic Institute’s lawsuit alleging CIA involvement in the bombing.
Flip the book over, and you find a story with similar themes told in a very different manner. The celebrated comics innovators Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz present a fable-like retelling of CIA history, narrated by a lonely, alcoholic eagle wearing an ugly checkered sports coat. Sometimes painterly, sometimes cartoonish, in places using techniques of collage, the piece outlines a record of atrocities culminating in the Iran-contra affair. The tone wavers between the confessional and the bombastic, and the imagery employs heavy symbolism, with human chess pieces, sprinting swastikas, and swimming pools full of blood.
But the facts are there, and the nightmarish surrealism seems to fit the subject matter. Indeed, the reader is forced to question the propriety of the standard journalistic conceits—the calm recitation of facts, the carefully hedged allegations, the measured tone. A drunken eagle swimming in blood may actually come closer to the point.
And yeah, I’m saying to myself, yeah: it’s stuff I know, a beat I’ve heard before, hell, I’ve played it, but the CJR slicks it up nice. Comics are an incredibly personal medium—what you’re reading was hand-drawn, handwritten, just for you by the cartoonist (or at least, they look that way) (or at least, they can look that way, they mostly look that way, it’s an effort to look any other way), and that’s a powerful jolt right there of what it was the gonzo folks brought to the table, a jolt we sadly need again. And it’s not just surrealism and naturalism: comics are capable of extremes of pointed emotion and perplexing ambiguity, sometimes in the same dam’ drawing. —But circling in on the point: we know how to read a news article any which way we want to, now. They know how to write ’em any which way they want to, too. But the moves and techniques of comics are still new to a lot of people; we’re still figuring out how they work, ourselves. We haven’t taught ourselves to ignore them, read around them, we haven’t figured out how to innocculate ourselves against them, not yet, not anywhere near to the same degree. And that’s why Joe Sacco’s sad sack rendition of himself and that shrieking, sotted eagle are able to do what they did (do!) so well.
Well, that and talent. And technique, honed over years of backbreaking, unrewarded work. —But aside from that.
And I was going to say something about blogging taking a tip and epiphanies and such but I’m not because why bother. I’m just going to
remind myself that the Eisners are checking out the webcomics. Excuse me; I have some folks I need to pester about getting their stuff ready to submit.
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