Columbus comics community cleans up at the Eisner Awards

Columbus cleaned up at the prestigious Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, with winners announced during a ceremony held this year at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday, July 25.

The winners with local ties included comics artist Jeff Smith, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum curator of comics and cartoon art Caitlin McGurk, and Ohio State University professor of French Margaret Flinn. In addition, Lucy Shelton Caswell, founder of the Billy Ireland, was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame, and Columbus-based illustrator Rafael Rosado was named the recipient of the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics for his work on the graphic novel Call Me Iggy.

McGurk won in the category of Best Comics-Related Book for Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund (Fantagraphics), her exhaustively researched biography of the late, long-overlooked comics artist.

McGurk’s task was made even more challenging by Shermund’s inherently private nature, which left more limited physical materials upon which she could draw and sent her on a years-long, coast-to-coast scavenger hunt, of sorts, stretching from Shermund’s childhood home in San Francisco to the coastal town of New Monmouth, New Jersey, where Shermund died alone, her ashes interred for 35 years at the John F. Pfleger Funeral Home following her 1978 death. (McGurk helped to spearhead a successful 2019 crowdfunding campaign to have Shermund’s ashes relocated and buried alongside her mother in a plot outside of San Francisco.)

In the category of Best Archival Collection/Project—Strips, Smith took top honors with Thorn: The Complete Proto-BONE Strips 1982–1986, and Other Early Drawings (Cartoon Books). 

The cartoonist created Thorn while enrolled at Ohio State, with the strip running five days a week in student newspaper The Lantern. As he neared graduation, Smith said he made repeated efforts to sell the comic into syndication but was met with rejection at each turn. “They would string me along for years, making me do tons of work. I would do months’ worth of comics for [the syndicate] over and over and over, and in different versions,” said Smith, who resisted calls from executives to shave the fantasy elements from the comic, which he described as essential to its overall tone. “And because of that, I had begun to accept that the strip wasn’t any good, and in fact I had this idea that it was terrible, and so I hadn’t read it in 40 years.”

When Smith finally returned to the comic strip a few years back, he was struck with how well it held up, and how wrong the notions he long held of it had been. Part of Thorn’s charm, Smith said, comes from the sense of discovery contained within its panels, with the cartoonist describing the strip as a space in which he was allowed to experiment, gradually homing in on the artistic voice that would eventually flower more fully in Bone.

Flinn, in turn, won in the category of Best Academic/Scholarly Work for Drawing (in) the Feminine: Bande Dessinée and Women (Ohio State University Press), for which she served as editor. According to the publisher, the book “celebrates and examines the richness of contemporary women’s production in French and Francophone comics art and considers the history of representations made by both dominant and marginalized creators.”

A full list of Eisner Award winners can be viewed here.