Awards for art, as a concept, are ridiculous.  How can you judge two different images or stories against each other?  It all boils down to subjective response which makes an award for Best of ridiculous.  All it means is that group of people had a stronger response to it...or, as you say, an agenda to promote one thing over another.  Awards, quite often, are little more than marketing tools.

Liking or disliking is personal taste, but I think we can be a little objective about the skill and talent of artists. Would anyone really say that Beaton is as good or better an artist than last years winner, Barry Smith?

And we are talking just about the art, not her skill as a story teller.

We can say that Rob Leifeld is not as good an artist as John Buscema or Neal Adams. We can say that Walt Kelly was a better artist that Cathy Guisewite.

It's not just personal taste, and proper criticism can delineate why something is better art.

She wasn't up against Barry Smith, so I don't see how that's relevant. She was up against Sarah Anderson, whose art you'd find even worse than Beaton, French artist, Espé, whose style I'm unfamiliar with, famed Japanese mangaka, Junji Ito, and Zoe Thorogood, who is a cartoonist along the same lines as Beaton. It's important to remember that the Eisners have a different nominating panel each year and that often creates trends in the nominations. Looking at the nominations, it appears that graphic novels by cartoonists caught the attention of the judges and that there was a conscious, or unconscious, push for female representation amongst the nominees. It's also worth noting that the Eisners have separate categories for art, including a best Penciller/Inker section that tends to focus on more traditional comic book penciling. When the Writer/Artist category first began, it was often focused on co-creators such as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but they scrapped the award in '97 and when they brought it back in 2009 it was largely centered around graphic novelists such as Chris Ware. There have been past winners with similar styles to Beaton such as Raina Telgemeier and even David Mazzucchelli.

I began reading Ducks last night, and so far I'm enjoying it. I don't have a problem with the art in the larger context of the novel. The page you originally showed is from a training sequence at the mine and works better with the setup and payoff included. I don't personally have a problem Beaton winning based on what I've read so far, and  I don't think the art is bad in the context of the work Beaton does. It would be odd to have it done in a different style from the author. The tone wouldn't feel right if it were done in a more realistic fashion despite the fact that it deals with some serious matters. Therefore, it's hard to argue that the art and story aren't working hand-in-hand to create the piece. 

I am stepping out of this discussion now. I already said that the other pages showed me her work was better than what was on those first pages. But we have gone into tangential debates and things I said about one thing are being referred to in another context. I think this is common on the intrawebs, but I just don't want to get into a whole "No, I said that about this, not that" series of posts.
See you in the funny papers.

Sarah's Scribbles are funny but no way would I put her on any kind of best artist list.

If a later writer or story comes along and fixes an earlier bad story or uses that bad story as a springboard to a good story, that does not excuse the original bad story.

It's bizarre how people defend certain stories by citing other stories written decades later. If I say 'making Madelyn Prior into the Goblin Queen in 1988 was a case of victim blaming in order to get Cyclops off the hook for becoming a deadbeat husband and father,' I'll get the response that 'Maddie was always evil, look at what she did to Cyclops in this book that came out in 2008' as if that later story has any bearing on the decision to make her a villain to salvage Cyclops' character 20 years earlier. And if I complain about the effects of bringing Jen Grey back in the 80s, I'll get some nonsensical response about how it's part of some grand arc to explore exactly how she and the Phoenix are connected and 1 and the same as if retcons from 20 years later have any bearing on the original decision or as if writers in the 80s had the same plan as the writers of the last 20 years despite all the interviews they've given about what they actually intended and wanted. And it's not like those later stories are good either.

War Games is a horrible story that character assassinates many characters, most notably Stephanie Brown and Leslie Thompkins. The retcons fixing Steph's death being Leslie's fault to Leslie faking her death to protect her and Brian Miller's use of the story as a springboard for a great series and redemption arc when he wrote Batgirl doesn't excuse anything about War Games.

I hate the New Mutants parts of Inferno for what a terrible ending it was for my favorite character and how it cheated her out of a proper conclusion to her arc. The failures of Inferno allowed for her resurrection and subsequent character development to be so well handled. If her character arc had been wrapped up with the neat bow the way it should have been in Inferno, there would have been no point to bringing her back and, modern comics being modern comics, she probably would have been brought back at some point despite there being no point. And then there would have been nowhere to go since her story was completed, just like how there's been nowhere for her brother Colossus to go in the 20 years since his resurrection. There was story left to tell since the story was left incomplete to begin with. So in the long run, Inferno's failures led to the character's current successes and if Inferno had been the story it should have been if Simonson and her editors had done their jobs then the character would be in a worse place nowadays. And even that doesn't excuse how bad Inferno was or the 2 decades it took for its problems to start to be fixed.

Good writing can come from bad writing, but that does not excuse the original bad writing. 'There. I said it.'

The way you were responding, I thought someone said that Jack Kirby sucked.