Awards Ceremonies

As a British cartoonist I've always Admired the NCS of America's Reubens Awards Ceremony. It's a real black tie affair, which I appreciate, and then there's parties and dancing (because ladies go to the thing) and Kareoke, and even lolling around in and around a pool afterwards. I tend to contrast it with my dim-memories of the British event. Which I remember as being almost entirely male-affairs, and always in London, during the rain. Of course my memory might be coloured, yellow, because the last time I was there I returned with Jaundice.

Here's the Hogan's Alley photo collection from the Reubens 2004 weekend, and the Reubens 2005.

Anyway, this year I know a few of the people up for the US awards, and I'd like to wish PAT BYRNES, GLENN McCOY, DAN COLLINS, GARY McCOY, TOM RICHMOND, and MARK PARISI well for achieving the great success of being nominated for these awards. Whoever wins, it will be well deserved.

My chum, Dan Collins, who of course is always introduced as 'Hustler Cartoonist Dan Collins' is one of the cartoonists up for the Greetings Cards awards. I try not to refer to him as 'Hustler Cartoonist Dan Collins' because although he is one of Hustler's best, and sharpest cartoonist, that moniker plays down the other facets of his cartooning personality. In addition to working for Hustler, Dan is also an editorial cartoonist, an illustrator, and has a new book coming out soon through Fantagraphics. Dan is also one of America's leading Greetings Card artists. I've likened him to Britain's great Greetings Card artist, Donald McGill, I genuinely think he is that good.


There is, of course, another massive cartooning awards ceremony in the US, The Eisners (I was a huge Will Eisner fan and I still collect The Spirit comics and books), which I'm pleased to say has a Web Comic category. Here's a list of last year's Eisner winners. I think that the excellent Copper, is just about my favourite web comic these days. For a while it was Bee Comix, which I still really, really, like. But the standard is so high these days that we really are spoiled for choice. Here's a selection of some of, in my opinion, the best web comics out there:

The superlative Copper
The groundbreaking Supernatural Law
Ssh, Secret Friends
The massively talented Hope Larson
Dicebox, brilliant
Love Bee
Girl Genius, well, genius
Huge talent, Roger Langridge's Hotel Fred

The excellent Little Dee by Chris Baldwin
Adam Reed's superb Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life
The Perry Bible Fellowship Archive.
Fantastic comics from Raina Telgemeier.

Jason Thomson's marvelous, The Stiff
Just super, Templar, Arizona, by Spike
Astronaut Elementary and other wonderful comics, by Dave Roman
Scott Kurtz's phenomenally popular, PVP