The nominees for the 2006 Quills Awards are up, and the nominees in the graphic novel category are:
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel/Houghton Mifflin Company
Maximum Fantastic Four: A Visual Exegesis of Fantastic Four #1
Stan Lee/Marvel Enterprises, Incorporated
Mom’s Cancer
Brian Fies/Harry N. Abrams , Incorporated
Naruto
Masashi Kishimoto/Viz Media
Hellsing
Kohta Hirano / Dark Horse Comics
Hm, developing.
THe Quills website has now been corrected and HELLSING is listed as the fifth GN nominee.
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes was also nominated in the Humor category.
Voting for the winners is open to the publis and can be done here. The winners will bepresented in a star-studded televised ceremony in October.
So a novelization is now a “graphic novel”? How are the criteria determined for this category?
MAXIMUM F4 is a, er, nicely designed book, I suppose. It’s a classic case of what happens when you give a book designer free reign with a comic book — he produces something that looks nice on a coffee table, but is otherwise completely worthless and overblown at the same time. Waste of money.
Maximum F4 was a poor concept. Never would have ever thought that it would be nominated for anything.
Looks like the was a contest via straws.
I’m biased about Maximum FF. I wrote a feature story for PW about Walter Mosley’s efforts to produce the book. I still think its a wonderul book and an imaginative project. It’s an innovative tribute to Jack Kirby and you can’t have to many tributes to Jack Kirby, if you ask me. Thats one of the nice things about the potential of the Quills (which are sponsored by RBI, parent company of PW–full disclosre). Since the nominations come from the votes of 6,000 librarians and Booksellers, these books are chosen with a view beyond just hard core fan interest. In this instance they’re giving an inventive and unusual comics works a chance to be seen, appreciated and bought by readers beyond the comics community. Like most art books, this one does just what it should–offer a new way to see and appreciate the genius of Jack Kirby.
Max F4 was a gpood idea, but horrible execution. It’s original solicitation made it seem like there was going to be panel by panel commentary on the art, but instead, all we got were a few decent editorials, and a poorly designed art book, with way too much blank space, and a hard to read narrative.
It’s an ok art book, but a terrible graphic novel.
-Steve!
Maximum FF is an art book, not a graphic novel. That’s the problem.
FUN HOME is the obvious choice here. Dang, it’s good.
Actually I think Steve hit on part of the problem with Max FF. It may be an artbook, but its also an unusual artbook, because it’s also a relatively complete fictional narrative. It’s the full first issue of FF#1. It’s not a “graphic novel”, I guess, but it is a work of graphically rendered fiction. In fact it’s not so much that Max FF is a terrible graphic novel as much as graphic novel is a really terrible term in general and a really terrible term for an entire category that includes nonfiction.
Indeed Max FF is an “artbook” only in the sense that it’s actually an art project in the form of a book. It’s a conceptual art project by Walter Mosley to visually highlight the power of Jack Kirby’s art. It is in fact, a quite remarkable art project. So whatever Max FF may be, I won’t blame it for being bad at a term that no one much likes or understands anyway.
With the voting open to the public, Naruto will win, hands-down.
As for the ceremony, if I recall correctly, last year the graphic novel category wasn’t televised. (I think the winning book was shown, but the fun reading-the-nominees-“And-The-Envelope-Please” stuff wasn’t.) Here’s hoping we make the cut this time ’round!
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