Hiiii, it’s me! Kell! Returned from a brief stint in hibernation to deliver your fortnightly update. I know it’s too late to ask about new years and the general festive period but I do hope yours was as peaceful and stress free as possible. It’s important that you’re rested before we get into it.
Starting off the year on a high note, The Beat has announced its 2023 Comics Industry Person of the Year is Sloane Leong. Leong is responsible for co-founding the Cartoonist Cooperative, an organisation working to improve and protect the labour rights of comic industry workers worldwide alongside Zach Hazard Vaupen, Nero Villagallos O’Reilly, Reimena Yee, Joan Zahra Dark, and Aaron Losty, and is often named as its driving force. Leong also released the second volume of her acclaimed comic Prism Stalker. To read more about who else The Beat recognised for their various contributions to and impact upon the comics scene in 2023 click here.
Submissions for the 2024 Eisner awards opened this week with one noticeable difference – the category for ‘Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism’ was missing. As 3-time winners of the award, this came as a bit of a shock to us, as you can imagine. Of all the categories, why would you want to remove that one? Comics journalism is, after all, packed with insightful voices and even on its worst days serves to oil the wheels of discourse and provide a cheeky bit of free marketing. Now I’m sure that this decision has nothing to do with the breadth of reportage that followed last year’s Thomas Woodruff incident and that no one is trying to punish comics journalism as a whole because even suggesting such a thing would be tin foil hat behaviour and I for one am a serious academic. Moreover, speaking to our buds at Popverse, Jackie Estrada, the Eisner Awards Administrator has pointed out that the ‘Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism’ category isn’t actually gone, it’s just merged with the category for ‘Comics-related books’ so nothing to worry about then? Everything is fine and normal. Of course, you, being a reasonable person, might be thinking, well, comics-related periodicals and journalism, especially the kind you find online is not by any measure a book so why would someone even think to nominate them under that category but Jackie assures us that ‘Online journalism sites are welcome to submit in that overall category,’ so no worries, I suppose. Just make sure you know where you need to look when you go to nominate all your faves.
After reading of the difficulty faced by Nadia Shammas and Sara Alfageeh, particularly regarding the inclusion of Arabic, a language they were told was an ‘inherently political language,’ as they tried to secure a publishing deal for their now award winning graphic novel Squire, it’s great to hear that the Arabic translation of their work will debut at the 2024 Cairo International Book Fair.
Amazon Prime is set to release a live action adaptation of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ ongoing comic Criminal. Brubaker is set to co-showrun the series with Jordan Harper, best known for the gritty crime novel She Rides Shotgun. There is no information as of yet as to when Criminal is due to air but the show has been in development since early 2023.
That’s all for now. Louis will be back with you in a fortnight to update you on all the happenings and goings on so until then be good and stay hydrated.
