131 thoughts on “2015 Eisner Award Winners”

1. @Cat

   Time..sinking…

2. before he can get back to even average levels of internet credibility.

   Or any kind of credibility, anywhere.

3. Re: Ross

   He’s very good when he’s in film buff mode, and not so good in chat show host mode. Loncon could have primed people to be calmer about the release by linking to some clips of Film Buff Ross, perhaps with some veiled reassurance that that’s who they got to host. As it is, I’m not surprised some people were worried about getting Chat Show Ross.

   I’m also pretty sure that there were plenty of Fans who were either indifferent or happy about the idea of getting either version, so why try and spin it so that the people who objected represent All Of Worldcon? Is the assumption that the people who booked him aren’t Fans? I think there’s some flawed logic there.

   @Nigel

   I’ve got my fingers crossed that Nimona is eligible next year!

   —

   Brad R. Torgersen 1:

   A few of us still think the field’s so-called Most Prestigious Award, should actually go to works which have at least a modicum of recognizable SF/F about them.

   Brad R. Torgersen 2, in defence of Wisdom From My Internet:

   Clearly, not everything SF/F has to actually be SF/F to earn an award nomination, or even a win.

   Huh.

   @Cat

   Its also sort of fascinating to watch someone ignore most people on the thread entirely and only reply to the person swearing at them.

   @Brian Z

   Okay, that was kind of funny. 🙂

4. @ Cassy B

   I haven’t really made up my mind about OTS, just noticing. I’ll probably read a bit farther and see what the proportions are. A lot of comics take a while to find their feet.

5. @Meredith – Nimona does so many amazing things with character while being funny and horrifying and utterly gripping. It would be a VERY worthy nominee.

6. @Nigel

   Its going to be on my nomination ballot (along with The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage) – I’m just hoping that both of them are eligible!

7. I prefer Little Ego to Little Nemo.

8. El Deafo and Sisters come highly recommended by the 10-11 year-olds in my son’s group of friends, mostly boys. It gives the lie to the idea that boys will not voluntarily read books where girls are the protagonists.

   Emily Carroll’s Into the Woods has eerie stories and amazing artwork. Worth checking out.

9. Sandman.
   Give Me Liberty.
   Mercenario.
   Watchmen.
   Flash Gordon.

   All good SF comics. It is amongst these greats that Zombie Nation finds its peers. The best comic the world could produce last year. Top of the pops. A vomic to be remembered, to be spoken about for years to come. To be placed in the Halls of the Great.

   Zombie Nation.

   Remember this name and thank the hero who made its name known to the world. Brad Torgersen, uncoverer of hidden gems.

10. All good SF comics.

    I think you’ll find that Zombie Nation is literally the only SF/F comic ever made.

11. A vomic to be remembered

    Typo or brilliant portmanteau of “comic” and “vomit?” I am going to assume the latter.

12. Hey, Brad: If you befriend a second cartoonist and co-write stories with them like you did with Carter Reid, do you think you’ll put them on a Hugo slate too?

    Also, to the room: occasionally pride forces me to note that it was I, I! who first formulated “Brad Torgersen has high standards for other people’s conduct.” But I don’t charge for it, because Scaaaalzi!!!

13. @Jim Henley

    You started a very useful meme. 🙂

14. @Meredith: Thank you! 🙂

    It’s worth noting – where “note” means point and laugh – that Brad could come up with all of one comic property he purports to enjoy, Pearls Before Swine, and it happens to be one that functions as ideological comfort food for conservatives. Demonstrating the adage that it’s always projection when right-wing culture warriors complain about “political correctness.”

15. @Jim – “… I, I! who first formulated “Brad Torgersen has high standards for other people’s conduct.””

    Good on you for that – I think it perfectly encapsulates Brad’s outlook.

    @Meredith – “Its also sort of fascinating to watch someone ignore most people on the thread entirely and only reply to the person swearing at them.”

    Well, it makes it easy to continue his “Woe is me, look at all this persecution going on” whambulance ride.

    @Cat – OotS definitely gets a lot better as it goes on. There’s been a host of Wham moments that will just blow your mind.

16. and it happens to be one that functions as ideological comfort food for conservatives

    Could have been worse. Could have been Day By Day. (If Day By Day is even still a thing.)

17. Day by Day. Man, this Puppy thing has caused more acid flashbacks to the Warblogging Era than anything else I can name.

18. Right on, I got my puppy fix. And, boy, was that some righteous shit. Thanks, Brad.

19. Sorry, Jim. And that’s an… unqualified offering….

20. An Evan Dorkin/Jill Thompson collaboration?

    There’s been a whole series of them, and most of them have been collected in book form. Must-have stuff.

    This year’s Eisners were a terrific set of works — a very rich ballot and wonderful winners. Great stuff all around.

21. Meredith: I’m not surprised some people were worried about getting Chat Show Ross.

    I felt exactly the same way. I watch a lot of British TV and knew who Ross was before this whole thing blew up (despite the FFA types insisting that no one who lived in the United States could ever possibly know who Ross was, because we all live under rocks without access to international entertainment, you know) and my first reaction to the announcement was to cringe.

    Ross has carefully cultivated his offensive and outrageous image, so why wouldn’t people be wary of his performance? In just the prior year or two before the Loncon 3 debacle, he’d been involved in controversies such as his hosting of the British Comedy Awards a couple months prior, as well as making quite a few sexist, racist and transphobic jokes.

    I never did understand why so many people acted as though it was just “common sense” that Ross would behave himself at Loncon. I wish Ross or his publicist or someone had said that he would be Film Buff Ross, as you put it, but that never seemed to occur to anyone.

    ObComics: I’ve looked up a few panels of Lovelace and Babbage and I think I’m already hooked. Wish list, ahoy!

22. Beginning to think these comments are alporithmicly generated.

23. I need to defend Pearls Before Swine–it’s actually a very funny, clever strip, and certainly not trash like Day by Day. Not surprising that most would assume at this point that if Brad likes it, it must be bad…the Hugo ballot is enough to put me off his recommendations for life. (And of course, he links to one of the weaker PBS strips.)

    PBS’ most famous running gag is Pastis setting up these terrible puns and then having the characters go after the cartoonist himself in the last panel:
    http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/04/06

    Entertaining enough that the creator of one of the greatest comic strips of all time showed up to guest artist (it’s a weeklong series, guest artist starts drawing on day 3):

    http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/02#.U5OWe5SwI2F

    June 3,4, 5 and June 6 links deleted to avoid moderation.

    Something surprising: since it clearly features the characters interacting with the author multiple times, Pearls Before Swine is indeed SF&F and significantly better than Zombie Nation, so would have made an out-of-the-box, but way more entertaining Hugo pick. Something less so: Brad Torgersen has no knowledge of Berkeley Breathed’s politics.

24. I need to defend Pearls Before Swine–it’s actually a very funny, clever strip, and certainly not trash like Day by Day.

    Actually, I usually think Pearls Before Swine is perfectly all right whenever I come across it, though that guest artist visit was fantastic. It is a million miles from the sheer awfulness of Day By Day, to be fair.

25. Brad Torgerson,

    “small f” = small $

    “LARGE F” = LARGE $$$$

    Here’s wishing you and yours a long long future of very small effs.

    😉

26. To be clear, I’ve got nothing against Pearls Before Swine taken as a whole. It’s not a bad comic. It’s striking, though, that the thing Brad found most praiseworthy about it was a strip lampooning certain (stereo)types among progressives. His shriveled little soul really does only respond to resentment and hate. It’s hard to say whether that or his lack of honor is the greater sin.

27. Brad appears to have overlooked the vital fact about ‘Your Hatemail Will Be Graded”, viz that it’s funny.

    He also appears to have overlooked the fact that falsely accusing the membership of Loncon of fraudulently conspiring to award the Hugo to ‘Ancilliary Justice’ has ensured that he and his gutter scrapings will undoubtedly have their place in Hugo history; it’s just not the place in history any rational person would want.

    Meanwhile Brad’s buddy VD continues to follow his example, this time libelling the English population by claiming that we dislike our Jewish communities. Curiously enough, VD made this claim at a time when a group of Neo-Nazis attempted to organise a march through a London suburb where some 40% of the population are Jewish, in an attempt to intimidate people in their homes. Our police force ensured that the Neo-Nazis’ democratic right to protest was defended by scheduling an hour long static demonstration in Whitehall, the heart of government.

    They also provided a large number of police officers to ensure that all 20* Neo-Nazis could go ahead with their demonstration, notwithstanding the counter demonstration of many, many more individuals who wanted to make it clear that Jewish communities are part and parcel of our national identity, and that anyone trying to threaten and intimidate them is trying to threaten and intimidate us. We stand or we fall together; when we say ‘Never Again’ we mean it.

    *And yes, that is 20; the population of England is around 54 million. VD isn’t very good at mathematics…

28. I just wanted to post a ‘Yay!’ for Lumberjanes and discover there has been a secret party going on.

    Brian Z on Brad Torgersen: A new troll! Finally I can take a break!

    That was genuinely funny and made coffee exit my nose.

    Various on OOTS
    Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag: Actually, I like Order of the Stick a lot better than Rat Queens…
    Peace Is My Middle Name :“Order of the Stick” is a hoot. Rich Burlew has not only done a magnificent job satirizing D&D tropes, by using humorous stick figures he has also been able to touch on deeply horrific and disturbing plotlines that would be unbearable if they had been drawn in a realistic style.
    Cat: some of its early jokes have a certain anti gay and anti transgender edge that is making it perhaps not really my thing

    It is still fresh and funny IMHO and that Burlew has managed to build some rich characters and strong plot lines with a joke-of-the-day format is deeply impressive. I didn’t start reading OOTS until 2012 – at a point when I left one job and had a week with nothing to do before starting another and binge read the whole thing up to the point it was at.
    @Cat – True, but it got better

    @Brad Torgersen. The arguing on the internet thing? Seriously this is not something you are good at. I’ve read many of your posts at your blog and often you display a degree of thoughtfulness and empathy that is very creditable – but you are easily one of your own worst enemies when it comes to defending Sad Puppy 3. The campaign had a mountain of screw ups and Zombie Nation and Wisdom from My Internet where obvious ones and you simply aren’t going to come up with a brilliant argument for why they should have been on the ballot. Yes, we get that you thought those people deserved awards for something but the Hugo Awards aren’t intended to be a corporate pat on the back for the Brad appointed Stakhanovites.

29. Stevie: Meanwhile Brad’s buddy VD continues to follow his example, this time libelling the English population by claiming that we dislike our Jewish communities.

    arrrrhhhh…you made me go and read what he wrote and now my brain is upset.
    I dislike the term “passive-aggressive” but I’m lost for a better term to describe the style of anti-semitism he deploys while claiming to be doing the opposite.

30. Camestros

    By this point Brad has made it very obvious that once he’s offscript he’s in trouble; he seems to have a mental PowerPoint presentation which looks really good to him, but then somebody says something and it’s deer in the headlights time.

    He’s tried it on Eric Flint, and on George RR Martin, which says a lot about his judgement, none of it good, but he’s still optimistic that people will not have noticed. Of course, we’ve read Eric and George and we do notice but hope springs eternal…

31. Camestros

    I suspect that VD really should hire a lawyer because his blog is registered in the UK, and our incitement to racial hatred laws are robust; on the other hand I think he may be too conceited to do so. I find his attempts at plausible deniability unconvincing…

32. Re: Pearls Before Swine. I thought the strip that Brad mentioned was hilarious. Sure, it pokes fun at a stereotype, but this stereotype is true enough to merit a bit of pokage.

    My real reason for coming here was to thank whoever recommended Up Against It, by M. J. Locke (Laura J. Mixon). I’m really enjoying it. Great science/engineering; you can tell she’s a chemical engineer. I like the organizational/political background (you can also tell that she’s worked in that kind of world) although it’s very contemporary. It does have some anachronisms (like someone blogging. In 200 years? Really?) but that’s a small issue. Recommended.

33. Stevie: I don’t know about VD hiring a lawyer but I think Brad T should hire somebody to do internet-talking for him.

34. @Stevie

    Terribly off-topic but did you ever have much to do with Touche Ross or Deloitte? My cousin worked there for a long time and I’m curious if you might have met him. If its Too Much Information feel free to ignore!

    @Source Decay

    I’m glad you liked what you saw! Its a brilliant comic.

35. @Rick K

    M. J. Locke’s and Heather Rose Jones’ books are proving a bit challenging to get for a reasonable price (or, sometimes, at all) in the UK. The recommendations for them always look so intriguing. 🙁

36. I think Camestros was right; I think Brad thought the Hugo Awards was an essentially meaningless circular back-patting session of the sort that Chambers of Commerce engage in to raise the visibility of small businesses in the community (small businesses who coincidentally happen to be members of the Chamber of Commerce, of course.)

    If I model his thought processes on this assumption, a lot of his behavior makes better sense. When people get angry about gaming the ballot he assumes they must be representatives of the “small (and large) businesses” that were in charge of the “Chamber of Commerce” before his “hostile takeover;” he refers to these as CHORFs.

    When people mention the low quality of his nominees he assumes they’re an astroturf operation rather than honest grassroots response. After all they’re all widgets, right? Customers don’t really prefer the old brand of widgets to his. When challenged himself to explain why he chose them he can’t; he chose them because they were written or recommended by his old boy network, but he can’t actually *say* that. For a “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” fan exchange program, quality wasn’t important, and it didn’t occur to him that anyone would notice.

    I wonder if Hoyt will double down. She hasn’t had her turn on the ballot yet.

37. Meredith, I did reply but it seems to have disappeared into the cybervoid, from whence no missive ever returns…

38. @Stevie

    Oh, its annoying when that happens.

39. I’m in agreement with what Meredith said. Chatshow Ross is a bore, Roast Ross, where he made the one fat joke I can find (ignoring the ones made about his frequently impressive girth) is a nasty piece of work, his Comedy Award host work was both vile and amazing at the same time.

    He is, however, a huge comics and genre fan.

40. @Daveon

    His style when making television about things he loves is usually good, which makes his deliberately cultivated Chat Show Ross image rather disappointing. He can do better, he just chooses not to.

41. I think the issue is that Chat Show Ross is what makes him the money. I personally also prefer Film Buff Ross, and Ross-when-he’s-genuinely-excited-about-someone/something and was crushed when he left the film review show and they got freakin’ Claudia Winkleman of all people to replace him.

    I totally get why people only familiar with the chat show persona would be against him hosting the awards, but at the same time he’s hugely into SFF and would be an awesome host to have (as he has proven to be at the Eisners, apparently)

42. @Oneiros

    Similarly to Cat, I’m reserving judgement about his Eisner performance until I’ve heard from more than one person and preferably some women.

43. @Meredith: totally fair enough. He hasn’t exactly done loads recently to reassure people that he’d be on good behaviour for an event like this I suppose.

44. @Oneiros

    I would, given a time machine, make one of my pitstops the London administators before they announced it and give them some very clear instructions on How To Announce In A Way That Makes Ross Look Good – as well as making sure they knew to ask him to be Film Buff Ross (who I think is closer to the actual person) rather than using the Chat Show Ross persona. It was handled really poorly, which is a shame because if we’d actually gotten the good version then he would’ve been a great fit. I can’t blame anyone for being worried and upset about getting CSR (and if that had happened I would’ve been angry about it), but I do feel a little wistful about missing out on FBR presenting.

45. *makes Scream face* Noooo I said ‘gotten’! D: Bloody sneaky American English turning up when you least expect it.

46. Meredith: Muhahahaha. Soon we’ll come for your extra “u”s and you’ll be defenseless! Today the gotten, tomorrow the color!

47. @Cally

    NEVER!! *cuddles u’s*

48. (While Meredith is distracted by protecting the “u”s, quietly exchanges the terminal “re” in theatre for an “er”.)

49. @Cally

    !!! Evil. 🙁

50. Oh, did I forget to mention muahahaha?
    (Running off to help Cub Scouts launch rockets now; the takeover of the Queen’s English will have to wait.)

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