Burgos, Jansson Chosen for 2016 Will Eisner Hall of Fame

Carl Burgos, Golden Age creator of The Human Torch, and Tove Jansson, cartoonist of the internationally popular Moomins, have been selected by the Eisner Award judges to  be automatically inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame for 2016.

The judges have also chosen 14 nominees from which voters will select four to be inducted in the Hall of Fame this summer. These nominees are Lynda Barry, Kim Deitch, Rube Goldberg, Edward Gorey, Bill Griffith, Matt Groening, Jack Kamen, Francoise Mouly, George Pérez, Antonio Prohias, P. Craig Russell, Rumiko Takahashi, Jacques Tardi, and Herb Trimpe.

Eligible voters are professionals working in the comics or related industries as a creator (writer, artist, cartoonist, colorist, letterer), publishers or editors, retailers (a comics store owner or manager), graphic novels librarians, or a comics historians/educators. Visit www.eisnervote.com to register or to sign in and vote online. The deadline for voting is April 1.

The 2016 Eisner Awards judging panel consists of journalist/reviewer Brian Doherty, comics writer/editor Danny Fingeroth, retailer Jason Grazulis (BSI Comics, Metairie, LA), librarian Jason M. Poole (Webster Public Library, Webster, NY), Comic-Con International board member Natalie Powell, and academic/scholar Carol Tilley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

The Eisner Awards will be presented July 22 in San Diego.

6 thoughts on “Burgos, Jansson Chosen for 2016 Will Eisner Hall of Fame

  1. Happy to hear of the Hall of Fame honor for Tove Jansson, whose Moomin books I loved as a child, and whose Moomin comics I am only just discovering. The Moomin books came after the comics, and her approach matured and darkened as the years went by, resembling something Ingmar Bergman might have written for children. However, I think Jansson’s basic conception of the Moomins stayed consistent.

  2. The comics are very good, as good as the novels. Strongly recommended. But it is not true that the books came after the comics. The first moomin book was from 1945, even if most of us missed that one and only remember the one from 1946. The first comic was from 1948, but that one was also missed by almost everyone. Instead it is the comics from 1954 and onwards that are remembered.

    Also, most comics were made by her brother Lars.

  3. I had never heard of Moomin until a few months ago when I rediscovered a copy of a Japanese movie I had downloaded years ago but had never watched because it had no English subs. On rediscovery, I searched for and found an English .srt file and watched it. The details were weird enough that I was sure it must have been based off of some long-running work and wasn’t all created out of whole cloth, so I did a bit of googling and wikipedia reading and discovered that it was a major culture that had somehow slipped my notice. Oddly enough, I’ve seen several other references to Moomin in random places (like this entry) sense then.

  4. Oh, wow, Lynda Barry, Edward Gorey, George Pérez, P. Craig Russell . . . amazing, all four. That’s who I’d vote for.

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