The Eisner nominations are out. Time for everyone to start arguing! Manga is pretty sparse among this year’s nominations, and weirdly, none of the titles in the Best Publications for Teens/Tweens is manga. Naoki Urasawa’s Monster gets the nod for Best Continuing Series, as well it should, and Cowa! makes the cut for Best Publication for Kids. Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the darling of the manga-sucks crowd, gets his annual nomination, for Good-Bye, in the Best Archival Collection/Project—Comic Books category. And of course there are five manga nominated for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Japan: Cat-Eyed Boy, Dororo, Monster, The Quest for the Missing Girl, and Solanin. And that’s it. That’s in sharp contrast to 2007 and 2008, when quite a few manga were nominated in a variety of categories.
Eisner nominations: Slim pickings for manga
April 7, 2009 by
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[…] Alverson, meanwhile, notes that “Manga is pretty sparse among this year’s nominations, and weirdly, none of the titles […]
Hasn’t this always been the goal? Sort of like how the Oscars decided they needed a full-length animation category after Beauty and the Beast got a best movie nod?
(And personally, I’ve no problem with that at all. Such awards should focus on recognizing domestic talent…)
I’m more or less with Simon here. We currently have an ironic situation in which manga are more “mainstream” than are domestic comics, and the various comics awards that occasionally give a nod to manga in fact represent a subculture. Pull a dozen teenagers off the street at random, and compare how many of them have heard of Naruto to how many have heard of the Eisner Awards. This is not to diminish the Eisner Awards or domestic comics in any way, and I would be as saddened to see manga dominate such awards as I would be to see manga ignored by them. I just hope for the day when comics are so much a part of Anglophone culture that ordinary people will not only know of but actually care about the Eisners, and manga and English-language comics can be more or less evenly matched both in awards and at the cash register.
FYI, there is one more manga listing you missed (though that would be easy to do, considering the source company). Under the “Best Short Story” category Nina Matsumoto/Ian Boothby/Andrew Pepoy are listed for “’Murder He Wrote,’ in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror #14 (Bongo)” You might remember Matsumoto from her DelRay book Yokaiden. “Murder He Wrote” is a manga-ized parody crossover between The Simpsons and Death Note.