Back in a Week

As you may recall, it was announced back in January that I am one of this year's judges for the Eisner Awards. Since then -- well, even before it was announced actually -- I've been up to my eyeballs in reading. As judges, we don't have to read literally everything that was published in 2022 but we have read a huge amount. I honestly had no idea so much was even published in the comic industry. Not just titles that had flown under my radar, but there are whole publishers out there I'd never heard of! Even just trying to cover everything from everyone's "Best of 2022" lists* is a challenge.

In any event, later this week, I'll be flying out to San Diego to meet with the other judges in person and discuss everything we've read. They're all comics experts but come from varied backgrounds so I think they'll be some interesting discussions. I'm particularly curious, from some of our emails, about where our differences come from. A lot of the best material has been praised by everyone, but there have been a handful of books that some judges have really liked that I thought were awful. I expect that some of what I really enjoyed was not well-received by others as well. So it'll be good to hash through all that in person.

But because of that, I will be tied up for the better part of a week and I will have to have to put blogging on hold for a bit. I should be able to return to regular blogging mid-next week, and we'll see how much I can publicly reflect on what we discussed in San Diego.

* As an interesting aside, before Eisner submissions was even open, we all started reading things back in December based off published "Best of" lists. We took stock of every one we could get a hold of from aggregated list -- how many times did each title show up and what was the general consensus on some of the best comics that were published. We're still using our criteria for judging them, of course, but we were able to start reading some books in advance of their being submitted because we assumed that, if a lot of people were already praising the book, there's a good bet it would get submitted for an award anyway. Weirdly, a lot of titles I picked out from those lists as sounding really cool or interesting, and I made a point of reading before submissions were even open, never got submitted to begin with!

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