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Cats of the Louvre, Witch Hat Atelier, Way of the Househusband Win Eisner Awards
posted on by Crystalyn Hodgkins
The 2020 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards revealed its winners at the San Diego Comic Con @ Home digital event on Friday, and both Taiyo Matsumoto's Cats of the Louvre manga (translated by Michael Arias) and Kamome Shirahama's Witch Hat Atelier manga (translated by Stephen Kohler) won this year's Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia award. The award was a tie.
The two manga competed against Paru Itagaki's BEASTARS (translated by Tomo Kimura), CLAMP's Magic Knight Rayearth 25th Anniversary Edition (translated by Melissa Tanaka), and Moto Hagio's The Poe Clan (translated by Rachel Thorn) manga, and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim's Grass (translated by Janet Hong) comic.
Additionally, Kousuke Oono's The Way of the Househusband manga (translated by Sheldon Drzka) won the Best Humor Publication category.
Stan Sakai won Best Lettering for Usagi Yojimbo, and his Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo: The Complete Grasscutter Artist Select comic won the Best Archival Collection/Project—Comic Books award. Shin'ichi Abe's That Miyoko Asagaya Feeling (translated by Ryan Holmberg, edited by Mitsuhiro Asakawa) was also nominated for the award.
Sakai was also accepted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame, alongside Nell Brinkley, E. Simms Campbell, Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse, Louise Simonson, Don and Maggie Thompson, and Bill Watterson. Manga creators Moto Hagio and Keiji Nakazawa were among the 14 nominees for the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame, but were not accepted. The previous Japanese inductees of the Eisner Hall of Fame were Osamu Tezuka (2002), Kazuo Koike (2004), Goseki Kojima (2004), Katsuhiro Ōtomo (2012), and Rumiko Takahashi (2018).
Kabi Nagata's My Solo Exchange Diary (volume 2 - translated by Jocelyne Allen) was nominated in the Best Reality-Based Work category, but George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker's They Called Us Enemy comic won the award.
Gou Tanabe's H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains Of Madness (volumes 1 and 2 - translated by Zack Davisson) manga was nominated alongside Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo: The Complete Grasscutter Artist Select comic for Best Adaptation from Another Medium, but Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran's Snow, Glass, Apples comic won the award.
The Women's Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities book edited by Fusami Ogi, Rebecca Suter, Kazumi Nagaike, and John A. Lent was nominated in the Best Academic/Scholarly Work category, but Qiana Whitted's EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest book won the award.
The selection process for this year's awards took two months longer than normal as the judges stayed in their homes during "lockdown" instead of interacting in person. The results in all categories are normally announced in a gala awards ceremony at San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC). Comic-Con International had to throw out the existing ballots for the awards after "an anomaly with the site hosting the Eisner's voting," and a new voting process started again in late June and ran until June 30.
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