The Harvey Awards were held this past weekend at Baltimore Comic Con with a slew of creator-owned books winning major awards, including Saga, Rachel Rising, and Southern Bastards. Though Chip Zdarsky won the Special Award for Humor thanks to his work on Sex Criminals, he refused the award because it ignored Matt Fraction’s contribution to the book. When initially nominated back in the summer, Zdarsky raised this issue with the Harvey Award organizers, who said it wasn’t their judgment call to make. Now, this might be because the Harvey Awards is unique in that both nominations and awards are voted on by industry professionals (a.k.a. no panel of judges like the Eisners have), and maybe the Harvey Awards folks didn’t want to interfere with that democratic process. But James Asmus and Fred van Lente were co-nominated for the same award, so…it’s all a little bit strange. Perhaps there’s a silent industry majority who just think Matt Fraction isn’t funny? In any case, I think it’s great to see how committed the Sex Criminals creative team are that they share the credit for a truly collaborative book.
With the release of Black Magick next month, Nicola Scott talked to an Australian newspaper about why she’s leaving DC for creative-owned work and what it was like for an Australian woman breaking into the male-dominated, heavily American comics industry. It’s super interesting that more and more often that, thanks to technological advances like scanners and digital comics, creators can be doing their work all around the world. Black Magick has flown under my radar until now, but anything Greg Rucka writes and Nicola Scott pencils, I’ll be interested in. The fact that it’s yet another comic featuring witches just has me that much more pumped.
I’m super excited to be going to the first Cartoon Crosswords Columbus (CXC) arts festival this weekend, and Forbes wrote a long article looking at the development of the show and its place as comics fest in an increasingly crowded convention field. CXC aims to be much more like a festival celebrating comics as an art form instead of the more media-centric Comic Con model, which are much more likely to be superhero heavy than not. As more independent comics creators on Twitter discuss taking a pass on the bigger conventions because of high costs and low returns, it may be that CXC model might keep on expanding.
Last up, Kate Beaton talked to the Bojack Horseman Designer Lisa Hanawalt and, wow, do I want them to be my new best friends.
