Seven Added to Harvey Awards
Hall of Fame

The Harvey Awards revealed the 2019 inductees to their Hall of Fame ahead of the annual event at New York Comic Con. The seven recipients include two active creators, and five posthumous honorees who were Harvey Kurtzman’s core 1950’s MAD Magazine collaborators.

  • Mike Mignola (Hellboy)
  • Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), and
  • Will Elder
  • Jack Davis
  • John Severin
  • Marie Severin
  • Ben Oda

Mike Mignola, began working as a comic book artist in 1982, working for both Marvel and DC Comics before creating Hellboy, published by Dark Horse Comics in 1994. Mike’s comics and graphic novels have earned numerous awards and are published in a great many countries. He said about his latest honor:

My very first comic industry award was the 1994 Harvey Award for Best Artist on Hellboy. I never expected that award, but I took it as a sign that I might actually be on to something. It is a great honor to be inducted into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame—something I certainly never could have imagined. And I’ll take it as proof that I haven’t embarrassed myself too badly over the last 25 years.

Alison Bechdel, known for her pioneering work on the strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008, is also the author of two graphic memoirs, Fun Home and Are You My Mother? The stage-musical adaptation of Fun Home opened on Broadway in 2015 and received five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. She is currently working on a graphic memoir called The Secret to Superhuman Strength. She acknowledged the award:

As someone who existed for so long on the crumbling newsprint margins, it’s surprising and a bit unsettling to receive this recognition from the corridors of comics power. Where did I go wrong? No, just kidding. If you had told me, when I was reading Kurtzman parodies in my playpen, that I would one day be inducted into the Harvey Hall of Fame, I would have plotzed. I cannot imagine a greater nor a more furshlugginer honor.

They also will recognize the historic contributions by a co-editor of one of the field’s leading publications:

Comics Industry Pioneer

  • Maggie Thompson, on behalf of her work with her late husband Don Thompson as longtime editors of the Comics Buyer’s Guide.

The inductees will be recognized at the 31st annual Harvey Awards ceremony at Friday, October 4 in New York.

4 thoughts on “Seven Added to Harvey Awards
Hall of Fame

  1. Strictly speaking, I don’t think Ben Oda worked on Mad Magazine. He was associated with it when it was still a comic book.

  2. bill: Ben Oda was so before my time that I never even heard his name before I read this press release. The others range from “heard of them” to “seen a lot of their work and admired it.”

  3. Jack Davis is the best artist in the list, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got a sketch he did for me at the Atlanta Comics and Fantasy Fair some 40 years ago.

  4. Nice to see Maggie T getting recognition. I met her and Don at my first convention, the Tricon in 1966. (I also met Tony Isabella there.) I’m currently working my way through the Jay Kay Klein photos posted a year or two ago by the Eaton Collection at University of California Riverside, adding identifications and corrections (as comments) based on Jay Kay’s own “Convention Annual #4,” which printed 433 of the over 1,000 photographs he took. Props to Andy Porter, Sandra Miesel, Astrid Bear and others who’ve posted comments before me.

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