It's an award based on lifetime achievement, and it's done by a public vote on a list of nominees selected by a jury of organization people.
And out of a thirty-name long list, twelve have bailed.
So far, the list of comic people to pull out includes:
Brian Michael Bendis, Christophe Blain, François Bourgeon, Charles Burns, Pierre Christin, Daniel Clowes, Etienne Davodeau, Milo Manara, Riad Sattouf, Joann Sfar, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Chris Ware.
Bendis:
Clowes, whose work includes Ghost World and Wilson, said in a statement released by his publisher Fantagraphics that the Grand Prix
In response, the Grand Prix has decided to revise things and include two women nominees from previous years ... while also complaining that including women would be 'positive discrimination'.
When you throw an award and over 1/3rd of your list immediately quits....
The thing is, this is a world-wide comic award. Last years winner was Otomo, creator of the Akira manga. The year before, Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes.
So... you know Shoujo manga? The woman who pioneered the style, Riyoko Ikeda, who wrote La Rose de Versailles (which is *huge* in France and a big part of why you see a lot of anime-inspired style stuff in France). That's the type of people the award is for.
And, well, there's a lot of award-winning and award-deserving women creators out there nowadays. Hence most calling BS.
Even Bendis noted this. "You can't find any women creators more deserving than me? Really?"- paraphrasing.
This is just the shortline for who-to-vote-for and not the actual award mind you, but Bendis still notes he doesn't exactly fit.
People who like to cry about treating women creators shitting complain regardless. And of course, they could've avoided the problem to begin with if they hadn't been idiots.
Though I will note what they ended up doing- First they added more women.... and then they changed their mind and said, 'no shortlist, open vote!' so they wouldn't actually have to make any decisions.
It is one of the biggest comic conventions in the world and the award has been going on for 43 years.
Wait so because one manga artist won last year as the first manga artist ever to win one (and was only nominated twice), it instantly raises the bar to allow any? Not to mention it was adapted to comic format anyway.
You can't just expect them to start accepting any sort of manga work right away. Might as well throw any male manga creator in there while we're at it. Things getting drowned out immediately after something new happened shouldn't be the outlook.
Though you raise a fair point with the whole "French Manga" thing, which seems to pander to this type of thing, so we might see her down the line. However Akira was loopholed into a comic, so it can bypass the purely manga label. Can "Rose"?
And the world wide thing is kind of a misnomer as well. They're heavily biased towards french people and only 5 non europeans have even won one. Again, exception to the rule, not the norm.
The simple fact remains that there are not many female comic creators that are actually worthy of it. There are good writers don't get me wrong, but are they better than any man who hasn't been nominated as well? Does their work standout on its own? Do they have enough accolades to be in contention for a "lifetime" award? For example, should we be applauding Gail Simone getting nominated if say Grant Morrison has never been? I don't want to look up if either have been nominated, it's just a point of who deserves it more. If deserving creators are getting shafted over shitty choices, then by all means it's a shitty situation. But when the deserving creator's name is "Women", then it raises an eyebrow as to how legitimate the complaint is.
If people are upset that women aren't getting their just dues, then more women should write great comics. It's that simple. An award shouldn't handed over, it should be earned. A nomination isn't supposed to just throw anyone into a barrel of angry gorillas, it's supposed to mean they could win on their own merits. I'd ask you to without Googling find me a woman that deserves this honor, and not only the honor, but the win, that is purely a comic creator, but I know I can't trust you to do that without the Googz.
Among other things. Though Bendis getting a nomination makes a huge joke out of the whole ordeal, especially when they broke their "rules" to nominate him. I'd rather see the whole list filled with any new comic writing female in the last 3 years than see Bendis on that list. That's like rubbing roadsalt in an open heart surgery. It's like it was planned out to just piss people off. I hope though that there's a Bri-Anne Michelle Bendis and someone accidentally nominated the man
... yes, manga is explicitly allowed, as is graphic work of *any* country. Bill Watterson ain't exactly French, you know? Nor is Bendis, Alan Moore, etc..
And we're just talking the shortlist of nominees, not even getting to the winner.
And that's just who came to mind for me.
There's also, say-
Jill Thomson, artist on Sandman, Swamp Thing, The Invisibles, etc.. Oh, and I will note, the award's traditionally favored artists. Writers are the minority.
Marie Severin, already in the Eisner Hall of Fame for her work on EC horror comics.
Colleen Doran, four-time Eisner award winning illustrator, Sandman and a whole ton of others.
Alison Bechdel, famous for the multi-decade long running 'Dykes to Watch Out For,' (the award's not just for comic *book* types, counterculture strips like that certainly count) and Fun Home which got adapted into an award-winning musical, as well as being highly praised itself.
Raid Sattouf, one of the declining nominees, mentions 5, including Rumiko Takashi- a name I'm sure pretty much everyone's heard, if another manga one- who he feel deserves his spot more.
Plus the others mentioned in the article....
The question's not really about manga to begin with, just saying that some of the great mangaka would fit in the shortlist.
Well, any that made a major contribution to the medium would fit on the list, yes.
I don't quite get the 'you just had a manga creator win, you can't have another on the shortlist' thing... I mean, manga is explicitly open ground.
Sure, but we're talking about the shortlist that had Brian Bendis, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Stan Lee, and a number of other people from America and other non-French countries. The shortlist is less French than the results.
And it's not like it had any French women creators on the list, not even ones that'd been on the list before.
Marjane Satrapi tends to got brought up because she had such a world-wide splash in Persepholis.
Claire Bretécher is a famous and influential French political cartoonist.
There are major options.
There's less because the industry's historically been sexist, but there's still more than enough to include on such an open list.
There are some who've contributions are up there with just about everyone- remember my first example was of someone who helped forge a huge genre and specifically made a great impact on the French comic market.
Yes. Easily. Definitely.
Grow up, comics is not a boys-only club, and even when the industry acted like it was much more than now, it still was not nearly as much as a boys only club as many pretend.
BENDIS: just off the top of my head i have fifteen female creator names i can think of that deserve the honor. not the nomination. the full honor.
And he doesn't think he should've been on the list. All in all, he's been pretty cool on this.
I believe the point would be more, both would reasonably deserve placement, so we should applaud either, but when someone picks to exclude all women creators, and then re-writes comic history a bit to cover it up when called on it, it raises an eyebrow.
It's not that any individual women isn't on it- tastes vary, after all, and there's only 30 slots, not being on the list is not particularly a snub to an individual. It's that when chosen to compile a list of 30, they managed to pick precisely 0, and then when people pointed it out, they tried to downplay the number and impact of women in the industry.
And note when actually pushed on it, they didn't actually have much trouble rustling up a half-dozen more names themselves.
Women are writing and creating many comics, have been since the beginning (there were women political cartoonist before they had the vote), and defending people pointedly excluding women because 'they should just make more comics,' is not exactly going to help anything.
I mean, multiple women mentioned have decades-long careers with world famous influential works.
Lesse, Wendy Pini, Elfquest, for another.
That's not rules-breaking btw, he just doesn't really fit in, since it's mostly people with much longer careers and accomplishments.
They don't even know what to do with manga is what I was getting at. They can't just open the floodgates when they don't even know what to do in the first place. Toriyama won 2 years ago, but they instead gave him a birthday award, and gave it to ****ing Willem instead (including Alan Moore, Otama, etc). It's already a mess, and just allowing anything a short time afterwards isn't going to make things better. Things need to be eased into, not thrown to the forefront. Especially in something like this where they've already mishandled it.
But yes, I agree manga work should be included, but you can't expect them to throw influential women in the industry right away when they're a complete mess with even bigger works by men (and they still deal with barely any men creators of manga), when you yourself think there's a huge issue with sexism. You really think that if they kept manga wide open for anyone in a fair way, that they wouldn't include the big men names first?
The whole "Open world" thing again is a misnomer. I'm not saying they're not allowing everyone. I'm saying they're allowing them in short supply, and it really seems odd when they blatantly screw with the results. There's only been like 10 non French winners. You don't find it odd that Alan Moore gets repeatedly nominated and has never won? That many of the winners are complete nobodies and have never really accomplished much, except be French?
You're acting like it's some established contest where everyone is allowed and all the problems are sorted out, but the only thing they did wrong is not include women. No, it's a complete shit fest with numerous issues. I think for example (not sure), that this is Stan Lee's first nomination for example. If the Grandfather of Funk is only just getting nominated, then there's obviously a large issue with how it works. Hell, Stan Lee is probably still going to lose to a Frenchman anyway.
And your "grow up" point was excluding the context of the paragraph. I'm directly contrasting women to men that whole paragraph. I'm asking if it will stand out in a direct comparison. Also lol at grow up, and "boys club". I'm not saying it's a boys club, or should be a boys club, I'm saying that it's been so heavily dominated by men for the first century that it's going to be hard to find that "lifetime" award. It is now currently not a boys club, but it was (I don't know how you can say it wasn't just because you read a blog adding any sort of help from a woman), and that's when some of the biggest things happened in comics. There hasn't been enough women working over a long period of time on great comics to fit that bill. Yes, women have always been around, but they haven't had the freedom, or the numbers they have now. It's very rare that they'd have long running work on one series or something like that before the 90s. Posting a link of a bunch of dead women and select few living ones doesn't mean that there weren't hundred to thousands of men during that time as well working on comics.
Which is what my point is. They haven't had enough of a foothold to make a large dent in there yet. And good writers haven't yet had their chance to make a "lifetime" body of work. There's again a select few women that have a long body of work. Meanwhile, there's shitty contributors who are men who have decades upon decades of work who would fit that bill.
A comparison that makes sense is Hickman. He has not worked long enough to be on a legitimate contest like this, but he will earn it. Which is what I feel the state of women in the industry is. They simply haven't been around long enough, and the few that have created a large body of work are like it or not, few and far between. Even now at probably the height of women in comics, they are outnumbered by a fair degree in every sort of thing that could be including in this contest (writing, drawing, manga, comic strips, I think editing and color). So what needs to happen, is that more women need to work, write, or draw more good comics. Which is what my point is. Which would make this more controversial when you're more worried about individual names in numbers, than simply worrying about the gender in probably 5-10 years down the line.
It will change, but it hasn't changed yet. Time will create better writers, and more writers.
Also, Jill Thomson only worked on 10 issues of Sandman, and 8 of the Invisibles. The creators of both however, have never been nominated to what I can find. Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison.
Marie Severin is a good one though. I forgot she existed. She deserves a nominee for sure.
And on the others, I want to point something out here that I touched upon a little. Here's a notorious slow artist who's only been working since the late 90's. http://www.comicvine.com/esad-ribic/4040-7196/
Comicvine inflates issues, but the point is that a slow artist who has been working less than 2 decades has at least a comparable number of works to everyone of your nominees. I'm not saying that issues means better work or whatever, but the fact that a guy can catch up to almost any of the worthy nominees in such a short time and still himself not be worthy of a nomination shows that there's still work to go.
Also, the more I read about this thing, the more I realize my posts were about what I figured the contest should be (great creators with a shitload of work), and not just French people changing the rules as they see fit. Even on the surface you can see it's skewed towards the French, but once you read more into it, it really sounds corrupt. I was looking at the winners and lol.
So yes, going by what it is now, your nominations make sense. Though what it should, I wouldn't include many of them in a "lifetime" sort of thing. Hell, even Bendis makes sense after reading the previous winners, and that's just sad.
Yes, european or american awards whether literature, art, film tend to be heavily biased towards european or american works as opposed to say african, chinese, indian, japanese etc. I guess that is understandable given cultural differences and people liking what they are more familiar with - it's the same everywhere. I doubt there is any truly non-biased "worldwide" award of anything where a subjective judgement involved.
Yeah, I could agree with most of this. Not including manga (only because I am not that familiar with it), an all-time one-off award for lifetime achievement in comics limited to just 30 nominees really wouldn't contain any women at all, and would also miss a lot of deserving men - there are too many people to choose from in the history of comics, and comics was a medium largely created and developed by men.
On the other hand it sounds like this some ongoing thing and probably limited to living people, so as time goes by and there are more places every year you would expect at least some women to start getting nominated by now. But you're right - I doubt most people could think of a deserving female winner without googling. Certainly a lack of female nominees can hardly be considered a major incident in this case.
Bendis being nominated for anything pretty much destroys credibility and has to be a joke unless it's a lifetime achievement for helping to destroy comics. And Gail Simone? OK, she's no Bendis but I hardly think a lifetime achievement award is in order any time soon either.
I think you misunderstand the problem with 'token'. 'Token' is a problem when people toss in only one as a token of a large group, and think that's all they need to do, not the presence of people of that group at all. If there's just one, it's often 'and here is who we chose to represent from that group,' if it's many, it's 'here are individuals who happen to be of that group.'
Like has been listed, there is a lot of women who qualify as much as many on the list or past winners.
But the thing is, we *are* still talking the nomination phase, not the win phase, and I'm talking a mangaka who's got a lot of influence in France-specifically.
Having one Japanese creator in the nominations the year after one won isn't a bad thing, even if I expert her to be in the same 'mentioned but not won' category as Moore.
Like has been pointed out, there's been women on the art side for quite some time, and there's plenty of women listed.
Bendis can think of 15 off the top of his head, I don't have a problem listing all the ones above and I'm no industry historian, so the 'it's hard to find them' doesn't hold water when, while not as plentiful, they still are not hard to find.
Like Smurph said, "Pretty dumb. In the broader scope of 'comics', there are plenty of incredibly influential female artists. Overall less than men, but not by 1:30."
It doesn't represent the comic industry's history or current reality.
As mentioned, it started as an art award, it'd actually make more sense for Thomson to win than Morrison or Gaiman.
In pages done, Rumiko flattens him, and, most everyone else on Earth, a lot of times over.
n 'number of issues,' he has... well, actually about half hers via comicvine, cut *some* down for repeated copies, sure, but each volume is about eight to ten 20-page chapters, originally put out monthly. So, multiply any full volume by 10.
Toss in that some of her major series were never completely translated- Urusei Yatsura there is listed for 8 issues. In Japan, it ran 34 volumes over 9 years. She has a series left off comicvine that has tens of thousands of pages work in it.
Mm, influence plays a huge role too.
Someone who did highly influential art 30 years ago should factor in a lot more than someone who's done a lot recently.
It's a vote-by-the-artists award, who the creators at the convention think should win. Or, until recently, a 'vote by the prior winners' specifically.
Well, this will be my last post on the subject since it's a combination of not caring, and well, it's run its course.
But what you're doing is ignoring the issues with the contest and just going "Well, they should have slipped a woman in the regardless".
See, the issue again is that they don't know what to do with manga. Like I said before, the first manga creator that won via votes only received a birthday award because they didn't want him to win. You really think they got all the kinks out in two years?
Plus, if they opened the floodgates to manga, like what you want, then why does she deserve the nod over many men manga creators? Why could they not simply fill the whole 30 nominations (even you yourself admit it's limited space) with manga creators?
Yes they could open the floodgates to manga, but they're taking it slow since it's obvious they're leery of it. Hell, even if they did open it wide open and had 30 manga creators, they could very well fill all the slots with men again.
Then what? Would we want the rules shifted to slip a couple women in to go against it again? There's a lot of issues with this thing. Stop pretending that it's all about women. Some things need time to adjust.
"It's a world wide thing, slip some women in."
"It allows manga, slip some women in."
"It prefers art and French stuff over writers, Grant Morrison deserves it less than someone who drew 10 of his issues, slip some women in."
What this thing needs to do is ease things in until it becomes normal. It's pretty obvious this already can't handle different things, so why throw a whole pot of spaghetti at the wall and expect it all to stick? Better yet, why expect that and pretend there's no issues?
Yes there has been women on art for some time. "Plenty" is pretty meaningless though since it doesn't talk about quality. Nor does "plenty" include over a dozen in the entire comics industry that's living, that's listed. You'd have a hard time limiting a men's list to the amount of women listed. Yet you have to scrounge for the women. What does that tell you?
I should hope Bendis can think of 15 women more deserving than him. Because that's wide open right there, and not to mention he should work with all of them in Marvel. But you know what the issue with championing this statement is? He didn't name them. He did not name a single woman. He made an empty claim with nothing to back that up.
And even taken literally, he could only think of 15 women? Really? Is that supposed to be a good thing? How many men do you think he could have listed off the top of his head? 100?
And you could find them because you Googled them. Which isn't hard because any woman in the industry is championed no matter how much or how little they did. You think people are going to blog about the Secret History of Men in comics, or how much Men kick ass in comics? No. They write about individuals. It's not the same. Anytime you hear about a woman in comics, people don't think one stands on its own so they include a whole bunch which usually include the same names. As good as Marie is, she's a colorist. How many male colorists get championed? How many do you hear a lot about? How many get articles about them?
As well as the current reality still having a large number of men compared to women. But the façade is that it's relatively equal. And the current reality is irrelevant anyway in an award show centered around "lifetime".
You're going to still go with what it started as when your entire argument centers on the evolvement of what it became?
Fine. You know what it also started out as? No women, and no manga. So now your logic says it makes a case for no women to be in it, as well as manga, imagine that.
If your argument is that it's a comic award, then it should be a comic award. If writers are winning, then it makes sense for writers to win. In no ****ing world however where writers are included as well does it make sense for Thompson to win over Morrison or Gaiman, the creators of the book who worked on way more issues. That's just nonsense. The stories didn't become what they were due to the late few issues the women drew.
Comicvine counts all her translated issues twice though.
And you realize you only defended who you think is the top woman in comics over Ribic, don't you? You realize my entire point with Ribic was to show that a slow artist who's only been around a short time (comparably) has just as much if not more issues than any of your woman nominees.
It'd be like defending Alex Ross against Thompson. The guy who basically paints everything and quads her workload. He's one man. She's one woman.
And it's also my entire point as well. If a lot more women put in the effort she does, then this whole thing would never happen. But that takes time, and like it or not, it's not there yet. Yet here we are angry that the same handful of women weren't nominated in a historically French bias, against manga, and forgetful of women contest, while people like Stan Lee were just nominated, and hundreds of well known men have never been nominated.
Women in the industry aren't there yet, and the whole awards themselves aren't there yet as well. I don't see the issue.
I think so as well.
And Toriyama won by that way. The people in charge changed the rules. Hell, the people in charge were going to change the rules after this little mishap to allow for either more contestants or just to throw in a little women. Their whole solution was to change things up, yet you still defend them like the only issue is misogyny?
I don't know if you don't see an issue beyond that or what, but it's pretty clear.
So left to the open, the voters picked three good choices, one of whom's a women.
Tired that people want it, or tired of people complaining when it's left out?
Because the latter is pretty tiring ^^ And people would stop complaining if other people would put in two thoughts about not going out of their way to exclude groups.
I think that's dodging the issue. The point is there's a large number of women creators who qualify and have all the qualifications of past winners. Focusing on only the manga side, and specifically because manga only one it 'the year before,' is a tangent.
Only some stuff of hers was counted twice (the stuff that was first issues, then collected. The Japanese versions are unlisted), and she's still got waaaaaay more stuff done than Ribic, much of her stuff is volumes of chapters each the size of one of his issues. It's not even close in amount of material ^^;;
Like, I think she's probably published 10 times as many pages....
Raw quantity isn't what a lifetime achievement award is about, but still an odd matchup to try and make here.
15 that he thinks is worth the grand prize, not just appearing on the list.
I dunno, but I sure as heck couldn't think of that many that'd be worth the top spot.
There's so many hoops here you're jumping through to excuse the behavior and I'm not sure why... "Oh, you mentioned a manga person, lemme focus on why manga shouldn't be considered even though it's openly open for consideration now." "Oh, this one not-listed artist has good volume, lemme argue them above the others (including, oddly, someone who's put out reems of material more than him)." "Oh, Bendis knows 15 women he think is worthy of beating anyone else for the top spot, let me try and rephase that into a bad thing....".
Yeesh. Comics is not a boy's only club, and the lengths people go to to pretend it is is silly.
This is a good example of why there's a need to push for this stuff. Because if it's not pushed for, then women'll be shoved to the side and get a pile of excuses on why they should be underrepresented in awards out of proportion even to their presence in the traditionally mostly-male industry.
"Who cares" included over 1/3rd of the nominees, who dropped out in protest.
The thing is, with 30 slots and being a world wide thing, it really stands out as purposefully excluding them, and if something is purposefully excluding a group, it's not by chance. Definitely really stupid.
Also, when things got to a final three as voted by the actual deciding body (not the nominating committee), it ended up including a woman, so the people who chose the award obviously had different opinions on who's worthy.
And of the final three, the winner was... the one guy who didn't object to having the award.
The particular people running things this year do seem to be complete idiots.
Like, the ceremony has happened since then, and they reached new levels of idiocy.
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Jan 6th, 2016 07:03 PM
