Unlike Comic-Con International's Eisner Awards , where publishers submit entries that are judged by a panel of judges ranging from retailers to librarians to cartoonists to distributors, the Harvey Awards are “selected exclusively by creators - those who write, draw, ink, letter, color, design, edit or are otherwise involved in a creative capacity in the comics field.” In other words, they're comics for comickers.
This year, manga appeared only in its usual category, “Best American Edition of Foreign Material,” and of the five nominees, three were manga. First is Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy , a 1970s era manga about two young animators, published by Drawn & Quarterly. Next up is VIZ 's Solanin , Asano Inio's slice-of-life tale of a college grad working as an office lady and struggling with her life not being what she wants it to be.
Finally, and somewhat surprising to me, is Witchblade Takeru , listed as being published by Top Cow, although Bandai Entertainment handles the localization. I've never read the manga; I confess that due to my lack of interest in most American comics combined with the anime looking like little more than a violent boob-fest from the outside (not that anything's wrong with that, it just doesn't inspire me to go to great lengths to check it out), the manga based loosely on said manga which is based on the comic never really appealed to me.
But maybe I should give it a shot. Have any of you read it? Did you like what you saw?
From some of the comics blogs I've been following recently, like CWR and PWBeat, a number of folks are crying "WTF!" over some of the results; for example, the "Best New Series" category being dominated by a single publisher. However, this seems part and parcel for the Harvey nominations every year.
Basically, if only a handful of professionals submit open ballots, then that limits the pool of nominees and leads to bizarre selections like the eleventh and twelfth volumes of Witchblade being nominated.
Of course, those two volumes of Witchblademay in fact be worthy of a nomination; I don't know. But seeing them alongside Elegy and solanin just raises some red flags. I mean, after looking at the rest of the nominees, I can see how this may have happened. Did folks at Del Ray, Yen Press, DMP and Tokyopop just not bother to submit? Seems like it. They may just see the Harveys as a lost cause and don't even bother sending in anything.
It almost seems to boil down to:
Eisner = Oscar
Harvey = People's Choice/MTV Movie Award