1999 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards
Winners and nominees

Kurt Busiek gets his Eisner. Incidentally, it's a reversal of the year before, where Astro City won Best Continuing Series and Ennis won Best Writer. This time, Preacher wins best series and Busiek is best writer. I've never read Ennis' Hitman, or his run on The Demon for that matter. I've been a bit disappointed in Ennis' work outside of Hellblazer and Preacher, but one thing that's struck me while exploring the Eisners is how busy some of these writers were with other books. I'm curious if Ennis' writing style was the same on Hitman, or if he altered it to suit a different genre.

Fantastic to see Usagi won the Eisner for Grasscutter. That was by far the most ambitious storyline Stan had done to that point. I do not remember 300 being as good as its Eisner would suggest. In fact, I remember 300 being a jumping off point for Frank Miller and myself in terms of buying everything he produced. It won the Harvey too, so clearly the industry didn't agree with me. I wasn't a big fan of the Inhumans, either. It's kind of a surprise to see a Marvel book win an Eisner, though. I'm imagining that changes over the course of the 00s. It felt like most of the awards went to DC and Darkhorse this year. Maybe it's the snob in me, but there must be some independent stuff that was deserving of a few awards. Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows did well at the Ignatz. Age of Bronze and Whiteout catch my eye. The Harveys actually had stronger nominees for this year. I suppose that boils down to the different nomination processes. 

Paul Dini is another Eisner favorite. He seems to win multiple awards every year. It's kind of funny to see Bendis win the Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition award. 

It's worth noting that  A Jew in Communist Prague won the Harvey. 

2000 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards
Winners and nominees

We've reached the end of the 90s, and you could be mistaken for thinking it was the 80s the way Alan Moore cleans up. By my count, Moore received 13 nominations and won 6 awards. That's quite phenomenal. Somehow, Dan Clowes and Chris Ware manage to sneak awards too. Kyle Baker seems to be doing well of late as the new humorist of choice, and a guy named Tony Millionaire is voted as the talent deserving of greater recognition. That's a great pen name. 

There are plenty of nominations for ABC and DC/Wildstorm for the 2000 awards, which is a shift away from the publishers that dominated most of the 90s. I've barely read any of the titles nominated. I like Planetary a lot, but The Authority to me is just a glorified superhero comic. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is okay, but not my favorite work by either Moore or O'Neill. Tom Strong seems like a must-read. 

Taking a quick look over the list, I quite like Richard Sala, so I'll have to check out that Evil Eye story. Greg Rucka's Whiteout won an Eisner, so I definitely need to read that. Bryan Talbot is another guy I mean to keep an eye on. I've never read Blade of the Immortal, but it seems to have done well in Japan. The Star Wars manga won the Harvey in 2000, so voters seem to have been quite taken with manga in '00. 

Weasel by Dave Cooper seems to be the big alternative book from this year. Can't say I've head of it, I'm sorry to say, but it's on my radar now. 

2001 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards
Winners and nominees

Now we come to the 2000s. This is uncharted territory for me. I've read several of these runs since I returned to comics, but I don't have a firm grasp of the comic landscape from 2000 onward. I'm excited about the discoveries that lay ahead. 

Lucifer is the last major Vertigo series I have yet to read. I've read the mini-series that proceeded it, but I've yet to begin the ongoing title. I read 100 Bullets a couple of years ago. It was an entertaining read but didn't really have the same substance as the great Vertigo books. I can see why it was popular among Eisner voters, however, as it has a similar feel to Frank Miller's work. I don't know anything about Bendis' Powers other than the name. It's interesting to see Bendis' rise from a talent deserving of wider recognition to a period of being regarded as the best writer in the business. Tony Millionaire continues to be popular with voters, so I ought to check out his work. P. Craig Russell wins more Eisners. I've always that Russell was highly regarded in the industry, but not to this extent. I really need to check out Age of Bronze. That appears to be one of the early critically acclaimed books published through Image. 

It's worth noting Darkhorse's release of Lone Wolf and Cub. The original First series was meant to run for 110 issues but ended less than halfway through. Kudos to Darkhorse for finishing the series. 

Age of Bronze is very good; and, sadly, unfinished. Shanower really did his research, as this is more than just a retelling of Homer's Iliad; he used other sources. He never presents the gods as real, but as they were perceived by the Greeks and treats the heroes as if they are historical, which most had some historical basis. Shanower is just a fantastic storyteller. If you have never seen his Oz adaptations, I would seek them out.

Powers was an interesting series, for a while. I read it for about a year, year and a half and it was a good pairing between Bendis' writing and Michael Avon Oeming's art. Like Alan Moore's (and Gene Ha and Zander Cannon) Top Ten, it is a police procedural, centered around superheroes, with a pair of cops, one of whom was once a superhero. They start out investigating the murder of a superheroine and move on to other crimes, from there. It is filled with the usual buddy cop and procedural tropes, but the mix with superheroes gives it a freshness, while the crime fiction elements bring a freshness to superheroes. Bendis is still overly in love with David Mamet's writing technique; but, his dialogue isn't as showy as in things like AKA Goldfish and Jinx. Oeming was a terrific artist and I also enjoyed his Hammer of the Gods work. He has an animation-influenced style, with nice clean lines, but excellent storytelling and dynamic action.

Russell's opera adaptations have always been gorgeous and his ability to draw beautiful male characters makes him the envy of his peers. Many can do virile he-men and some can do :handsome," but he is almost unique in doing "gorgeous" men. I read a Comics Journal interview with him and that facet was brought up and he just kind of chuckled and said, "It's probably because I'm gay." That was where I discovered he was gay, as I had never had a reason to think he was of any orientation; but, the response made sense. A gay male artist probably would develop an ability for drawing really good looking men, if they had the talent, depending on what their "type" was. You have artists who specialized in gorgeous women, from pin-up types (like Dave Stevens) to model-like features (like John Romita); so why not the same, in a gay artist? This award was for the Ring of the Nibelung, which was kind of his personal magnum opus, for his opera adaptations. He really excelled at capturing the stories and epic nature of the German operas, like this and Parsifal. I always enjoyed his work, but, this one hooked me for his opera work and I hunted down all the collections of the previous ones.

I see Judd Winick nominated for Pedro & Me, which I discussed on the previous year's nominations. It is Winick's best work and gives a much more personal account of Pedro Zamora than The Real World could. It also gave you a kind of behind the scenes look at the show. Prior to that, the only thing I ever saw touch on it, that didn't come from MTV, was a magazine article, by Dominic Griffin, the Irish member of the second season Los Angeles cast. He told of how people acted differently when the cameras weren't rolling, vs when they were filming and how the edits changed the story of things that were filmed. For instance, Jon Brennan, the aspiring country singer, was portrayed as a nice, small town Christian singer; yet, when the cameras were off, he knew every profane lyric of rap songs. Most of the cast were aspiring performers and had seen the first season and played for the cameras, apart from Aaron Behle, who was a student and wasn't around the house as much. Not surprisingly, he refused to participate in the official book and cast reunion (as did Griffin, as they portrayed him as a heavy drinker, through selective editing). Winnick's book included things like MTV told them up front that one of the cast (before they met each other) was HIV Positive, but didn't say who. Most believed it was Puck (David Rainey), because he had a very thin build and a lot of scabs. As Winick said in the book, it turned out he just fell down a lot. The art in it is Winick's, as he also did in Barry Ween, Boy Genius; but, you could see that his writing skills were better than his cartooning skills, which is why he ended up as a writer, instead of an artist or even writer/artist. He had done some commercial art for the Complete Idiot's Guide series of books (competitor to For Dummies series of how-to books) and had hoped to use the series to help put his name out there and had submitted a cartoon-based audition for the show.

In the Best Continuing series, Jason Lutes' Berlin is an excellent work. It took quite a while to complete; but it is a fantastic look at the latter days of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis and makes a nice companion to things like Cabaret, Belin Alexanderplatz and Babylon Berlin.

This stage of the Eisners also demonstrates that a lot of work was coming from outside the traditional comic book publishers, as the book industry had embraced graphic novels as a format beyond the previous works and especially for a lot of alternative comics work. Sock Monkey was a big seller for us, at Barnes & Noble, in collected form and Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For sold well in our Gay & Lesbian section. Her subsequent auto-biographical works were even bigger sellers, gaining a lot of attention from the non-comics world, as had also shined on Chris Ware and, later, Dan Clowes. Jessica Abel is nominated in at least one category and we sold quite a bit of her work, too. Jill Thompson turned Scary Godmother into a series of YA books, which did well in our Childrens Department, as did Akiko, which had several previous nominations. Bone ended up a huge seller, when Jeff Smith hooked up with Scholastic, to issue the color trade collections. Then, The Invention of Hugo Cabret won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, for illustrated childrens' books, bluring the lines between a graphic novel and traditional children's literature illustration.

The First Comics Lone Wolf was published as individual stories, rather than the phone book collections, which Dark Horse wisely decided to reprint, rather than try to make it more western, in format. It was nice to finally have the whole saga reprinted, especially as that was about the last First Comics title I had continued, up until the bankruptcy.

2002 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards
Winners and nominees

We're beginning to see more Marvel work nominated for Eisners. Traditionally, the nominating panel hadn't acknowledged a lot of Marvel work, aside from a few Epic books, Frank Miller's work, Marvels, and individual talent here and there. The nominations seem to recognize the efforts Joe Quesada had made to attract new talent and provide them a license to do good work, as well as the relative success of the Marvel imprints, creatively speaking. It always struck me as strange that Marvel didn't make more of an effort to create their own Mature Readers line at the time when DC books were being recognized outside of comics. They experimented with the black and white magazines in the late 70s-early 80s, and Archie Goodwin worked his butt off to give us Epic comics, but I guess they never saw any money in it. Quesada's imprints strike me as more of a Black Label gimmick than a true Mature Readers imprint like Vertigo, but they were a step in the right direction.

I haven't read the Eisner-winning Spider-Man story (I bailed on Spider-Man before the Clone Saga), but it's amazing to me, pun intended, that a Spider-Man story won an Eisner after years of every mainstream superhero title being in the shadow of the Bat books. Morrison's X-Men is also nominated. It's interesting to note that Morrison has never won an Eisner. I believe he was voted into their Hall of Fame this year, but his work has never won an award. Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman had a stranglehold on the Best Writer award for over a decade, but it seems Morrison's rep in the industry wasn't as strong as theirs, even though in my mind they are synonymous with one another. Bendis scores Best Writer, and as a Marvel Writer predominantly. That's a first in the history of the awards. I have read a grand total of one Bendis run. The first issue I open blew my mind with how dialogue-heavy it was, but gradually I came to appreciate his cinema-influenced writing style. I'm a cinema lover, and comics have a ton of potential as a cinematic style storytelling medium. He may have drawn too heavily from his influences at times, but at least he was trying to raise the bar. 

Incidentally, the 90s is genuinely regarded as a creatively barren time at Marvel, but I think a best of 90s Marvel list would be pretty fun and esoteric. I used to love participating in Best of 1980s Cinema polls for the same reason, and 80s music polls too. 

100 Bullets was definitely the "it" comic at this time. It did well in the Harveys as well. It's interesting to note that there were quite a few creators dabbling in the crime genre in the 90s and 00s. That's what I like to see. Branching out into different genres is good for the health of the industry. 

I find it strange that Dan Clowes is suddenly being recognized by the voters. Is this a case of a creator starting to be noticed outside of the industry and his peers looking to validate the recognition? Ice Haven is fine, but personally I prefer the body of his Eightball work more and would have recognized him sooner.

Congrats to local New Zealand artist, Dylan Horrocks! Nice guy. I was very fond of Pickle, and the work he had done in our weekly magazine, The Listener, but lost track of what he was doing when I dropped out of comics. 

I really need to check out that Jeff Smith and Charles Vess Rose book. The Golem's Mighty Swing is mighty interesting too. I wouldn't call myself a huge Dave McKean fan, but I didn't realize he produced so much work post-Sandman covers and Neil Gaiman collaborations. Evan Dorkin continues to be nominated frequently, so I should also pursue his work. 

Todd Klein was a busy man in 2001.