There is always some shock when the Eisner Award nominees for the year are announced. This thing got included, that thing was left off. It’s natural. In recent years the judges have seemingly gone the way of recognizing more things in more categories and spreading around the wealth then singling out a few books/creators for TITANIC-level encomiums. Even the PR for this year’s nominees praised the list’s diversity—and 26 different publishers were mentioned, 15 with one nomination each.

But as always, there was one omission that seemed to stun a lot of people, us included.