Oregon Artswatch just ran an excellent piece on this year’s Eisner Awards, the Oscars of the comics industry. Seven winners in 2022 are from Oregon. TJ Acena talked with five of them. Read the entire piece here.
The winners:
Douglas Wolk took home the award for Best Comics-Related Book for All the Marvels. An attempt to make sense of the entire Marvel universe, 60 years of interconnected stories and characters, including many most casual readers never heard of. This was his second award in the category, after Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean won in 2008. He tweets at @douglaswolk
Books with Pictures, owned by Katie Pryde, won the Spirits of Comics Retailer Award, recognizing it as one of the best comics shops in the world. Opened in 2016, Books with Pictures prides itself on being a comic store for everyone, prominently featuring books by a diverse group of creators. Books with Pictures is at 1401 S.E. Division St., the former site of the Portland bookstore institution Longfellow’s.
Kelly Sue DeConnick has had a long career in comics and worked hard to raise the profile of women working in the industry. Her work on Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons won Best Single Issue/One Shot. Historia uses Wonder Woman as a springboard to explore the origins of the amazons. She is one of the founders of Creators for Creators, a nonprofit group that supports upcoming comics creators. She tweets at @kellysue
Mark Russell is well known as a satirist and took home the award for Best Humor Publication for Not All Robots, a dystopian sci-fi set in a climate-change ravaged world where humans are being made obsolete by robots. He tweets at @Manruss
You Died: An Anthology of the Afterlife, co-edited by Portlander Kel McDonald with Andrea Purcell, took the award for Best Anthology. When not working on anthologies they have two webcomics ongoing right now, The City Between and You Are the Chosen One. One of the comics in the anthology, Funeral in Foam, was written by another Portlander, Casey Gilly, with Raina Telgemeier, and won the award for Best Short Story.
In addition, veteran Portland comics writer David Walker won an Eisner for Best Continuing Series, Bitter Root, with Chuck Brown and Sanford Greene. You can read Oregonian columnist Steve Duin’s profile of Walker here.