Summary
- The Eisner Awards have been recognizing and celebrating the best in the comics industry since 1988, showcasing the impact of comics on pop culture.
- The Eisners value indie releases as much as big name titles, highlighting lesser-known works that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.
- The awards recognize the work of influential comic book creators like Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, Brian K. Vaughan, and Peach Momoko, cementing their place in comic book history.
Since 1988, the Eisner Awards have set the standard for widespread, critical recognition in the comics industry. In the 35 years since then, the Eisners have spotlighted dozens of artists, writers, and titles that stand on their own as testaments to the kind of stories the comic book medium can convey and the impact those tales have had on the wider world of pop culture, and the latest awards celebration was no different.
Held during San Diego Comic Con, the 2023 Eisner Awards saw DC Comics titles such as Nightwing take home Best Continuing Series, while The Human Target and “Finding Batman” collected wins of their own in the categories of Best Limited Series and Best Short Story, respectively. Of course, the Eisners didn’t ignore indie releases despite these big name contenders, as Chip Zdarsky’s Public Image and Daniel Warren Johnson’s Do a Powerbomb! garnered awards for Best New Series and Best Publication for Teens, continuing the Eisner’s long tradition of highlighting titles that might have otherwise flown under the radar. This itself stands as a sign of how deep the Eisners dig when it comes to selecting nominees regardless of popularity, as do several of the most important award winners of all time.
Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and their seminal work Watchmen all made major waves at the first Eisner Awards in 1988. While the title has been held up as one of the pinnacles of the medium since its release, the first Eisners went a long way toward cementing that legacy.
Not only did Alan Moore take home the award for Best Writer that year for his work on Watchmen, he and Gibbons were awarded Best Writer/Artist collectively, while Watchmen garnered both Best Graphic Album and Best Finite Series/Limited Series. To top all that off, in 2006 Absolute Watchmen won the Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection/Project in the Comic Books category, further solidifying the title and its creators’ place in the pantheon of comic book history.
Concrete – Paul Chadwick
Writer and artist Paul Chadwick’s Concrete from Dark Horse might not be all that well known today, but its 1988 wins for Best New Series, Best Black-and-White Series, and Best Continuing Series precipitated further recognition as one of the medium’s most important works for years to come. Following the life of Ron Lithgow, a man whose mind was implanted within a towering form most closely resembling the series’ eponymous substance, Concrete explored themes of loss, sexuality, and environmental concerns, all without ever subjecting its cast of characters to any otherworldly proceedings beyond its protagonist’s stony body.
In 1989, Chadwick was awarded Best Writer/Artist, while his work repeated the previous year’s wins for Best Black-and-White and Best Continuing Series. Concrete continued to collect Eisners as recently as 2005 with Paul Chadwick being awarded Best Writer/Artist: Drama that year for Concrete: The Human Dilemma, over a decade after the title’s 1991 and 1992 wins in the categories of Best Single Issue/One-Shot and Best Finite Series/Limited Series for Concrete Celebrates Earth Day and Concrete: Fragile Creature, respectively.
Animal Man – Brian Bolland
Brian Bolland’s 1989 Eisner Award for Best Artist on Batman: The Killing Joke may have been the first he received, but it was his 1992 win for Best Cover Artist for his work on DC’s Animal Man that shined a light on how much his covers impacted the wider industry. Rather than relying on melodramatic or battle heavy imagery, Bolland’s run on Animal Man saw the titular hero thrust into a variety of dynamic, frequently fourth wall pushing scenarios, almost entirely without the use of word bubbles to convey any extra information in favor of allowing the audience to fill in those gaps for themselves.
Apart from lending the series an air of intensity it might have otherwise never had, Bolland’s covers drew back-to-back-to-back Eisners in 1992, 1993, and 1994, and also received awards in 1999 and 2001, while Joe Pruett’s The Art of Brian Bolland won the Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book in 2007, adding yet another layer to the artist’s acclaimed legacy.
Bone
Jeff Smith’s Bone made major waves upon its release as a fanciful, humorous journey through landscapes that captivated its audience, and its wins in 1993, 1994, and 1995 for Best Humor Publication proved as much. The fact that it also took home Eisners in 1994 for Best Continuing Series (which it repeated the next year), Best Writer/Artist Jeff Smith, and Best Serialized Story for “The Great Cow Race” arc which ran from issues 7 through 11 served to highlight how beloved the series was beyond its comedic elements.
Bone may have come to its end in 2004, but its legacy lives on with a dedicated fan base and continued efforts to see it adapted for the silver screen.
Brian K. Vaughan
Widely considered one of the greatest comic book writers of his generation, Brian K. Vaughan has produced some of the most beloved titles of the past three decades. His first Eisner Award for Best Writer in 2005 recognized the impact of his work on Y: The Last Man, Runaways, Ex Machina, and Ultimate X-Men, which in turn proved just how prolific Vaughan’s storytelling is across a wide spectrum of genres and character studies.
This was further established with back-to-back wins in 2013 and 2014 for Best Writer for his work on Saga, which helped to see him win the same award again in 2017 alongside his work on Paper Girls and We Stand On Guard. Between these and nearly a dozen other Eisner Awards for Best Digital Comic, Best Continuing Series, and Best New Series, Vaughan can be safely counted among the most awarded comic book creators of all time.
Mom’s Cancer
In 2005, Brian Fies’ Mom’s Cancer won the very first Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic. Apart from helping to lay the foundation for digital comics as a relevant branch of the wider medium, this win also shined a spotlight on Mom’s Cancer as a testament to the kind of heartfelt, deeply moving interpersonal drama that is so often lacking in other, more action centric titles that are themselves indicative of the type of stories that have long dominated the world of comics.
With its tense portrayal of how one person’s struggle against cancer affects their entire family, and how those same tensions can threaten to break people down to their lowest points, Mom’s Cancer continues to tug on heartstrings today, and its Eisner win helped to establish the legitimacy of such stories even when not put to traditional forms of print.
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
As far as traditional print comics go, there is none more classic than newspaper comics like Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, the complete edition of which was awarded the Eisner for Best Archival Collection/Project for strip comics at least 20 years old in 2006. While Watterson and Calvin and Hobbes had already been awarded numerous Reubens, Harveys, and other industry accomplishments long before then, the 2006 Eisner Award that The Complete Calvin and Hobbes won was the first to recognize works more than two decades old.
This Eisner win helped to not only remind readers how invaluable Calvin and Hobbes was to the world of comic strips, but how many comic book readers began with their frequently more palatable cousins, and how much of those same readers’ love for the medium was owed to the likes of Watterson’s work.
Sex Criminals
Chip Zdarsky and Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals was lauded as a triumph of indie storytelling upon its release, although that doesn’t necessarily mean its 2014 Eisner Award for Best New Series was one that many people saw coming.
Pushing the boundaries of sex, fantasy, and science-fiction in ways that few (if any) books had dared to before, Sex Criminals introduced readers to an outlandish set of circumstances taking place in an otherwise ordinary world. It also helped cement Zdarsky’s place in the pantheon of great comic book artists and writers, while adding yet another Eisner Award to Fraciton’s resume which began five years earlier when he took home an award for his work on Invincible Iron Man alongside Salvador Larroca.
Peach Momoko
When Peach Momoko burst on the scene, her vibrant watercolor covers immediately drew fans in with an intensity that few artists have ever managed to achieve in such a short amount of time. Although she had already signed an exclusive deal with Marvel as one of their Stormbreaker artists the year before, 2021’s win for Best Cover Artist for various work including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Something is Killing the Children, and a number of Marvel projects gave her the credit she was most certainly due for the sheer variety of characters and concepts Momoko so deftly conveys, not to mention her technical prowess as an artist.
Like Bolland before her, Peach Momoko’s covers have inspired entire generations of artists to come, and are likely to continue bringing in awards for years to come.
Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter
Likely the least known entry on this list, “Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter” was illustrated by Kyle Baker, who co-wrote the story with Liz Glass, and was originally released in 1999’s Elseworlds 80-Page Giant #1. As one of the more humorous entries in this oversized anthology, “Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter” stood out for both its cartoonish stylings and outlandish scenes of an infant Clark Kent coming unnervingly close to great harm. This included a sequence in which the young Superman is inexplicably locked inside a microwave, which led to the issue being widely recalled and reduced to pulp.
Thankfully, the European market editions of the release escaped this fate, leaving readers the opportunity to cackle away at its contents which garnered the 2000 Eisner Award for Best Short Story, once again proving that explosive action and shadowy intrigue were not all that audiences looked for in their comics.