No, no, not the Olympics but something just as awesome. Mome Vet Eleanor Davis recently recieved a GOLD Medal from the Society of Illustrators. The Society of Illustrators site gives more informatoin on the art show and medals. "The first of the two-part annual exhibition Illustrators 55 will be held at the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators January 4 to January 26, 2013. The exhibit features works by leading contemporary illustrators worldwide, juried by a prestigious jury of professionals.  Sequential/Series work includes multi-image projects for which a sequence of images is necessary to fully convey an idea or story. Examples include work produced for comic books, art journalism or graphic novels. This year's Gold Medal winners include Eleanor Davis for her work titled In Our Eden."

Heidi MacDonald at The Beat states," And in case you haven’t noticed she’s been on a real tear lately." Here, here!

Recently, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections announced the winners of the 2012 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research. Kevin Avery was awarded a Certificate of Merit due to the exceptionally high quality work he accomplished researching and writing the book Everything is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson. Everything is an Afterthought follows the father of contemporary rock criticism, Paul Nelson, on his journey from Rolling Stone and beyond.

'Since 1991, the awards are presented to authors and publishers of books, articles, liner notes, and monographs, to recognize outstanding published research in the field of recorded sound. In giving these awards, ARSC recognizes outstanding contributions, encourages high standards, and promotes awareness of superior works. Two awards may presented annually in each category—one for best history and one for best discography. Certificates of Merit are presented to runners-up of exceptionally high quality. The 2012 Awards for Excellence honor works published in 2011.'

Cheers to Kevin and his thorough work which you can find here.

"Reviewers will compare [Everything Is an Afterthought] to Lester Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, but Avery’s palpable esteem for his subject elevates the book above anthology to research-rooted valentine; indeed, the book is partly a biography of a Minnesota-grown rock journalist whose lean style recalls the film noir he adored." – Heather McCormack, Library Journal

"Paul Nelson's writing meant a lot to me emotionally at the time, enough to just flick that switch so that when you went on onstage that night you remembered: Hey, you're working on a promise to keep, not to just yourself but to him. He put his ass on the line for you in that last story, so you better be good." – Bruce Springsteen

Congratulations to Ellen Forney for her prestigious Stranger Genius Award in literature announced last Saturday evening at the Moore Theater in Seattle. She joins 2010 genius Jim Woodring as Fantagraphics affiliates so honored. Don't miss Ellen's presentation of her courageous new graphic memior Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me on Saturday, November 10 at 7:00 PM in the Microsoft Auditorium at the Seattle Public Library central branch, sponsored by Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery. 

"Like" Fantagraphics Bookstore on Facebook to keep up with all the latest signings, events, specials, new arrivals, and more.

We have lots of post-SPX catching-up to do but first and foremost congratulations are in order to Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez who swept their Ignatz Award categories and came away from the ceremony lugging 3 brick trophies: Outstanding Series for Love and Rockets: New Stories, Outstanding Artist for Jaime, and Outstanding Story for Jaime's "Return for Me" from Love and Rockets: New Stories #4! Outstanding indeed, and a perfect way to usher in the new issue by capping off a year of universal and thunderous acclaim for the previous issue. We'll hopefully have a first-hand report and photos from the scene once our away team gets settled back in here.

This just in! PEN Center USA announced the winners of the 2012 Literary Awards and Joe Sacco takes home the Graphic Literature award for Outstanding Body of Work. A "distinguished panel of writers, editors, critics, and journalists judge the Literary Awards" which will be given out on October 22nd, 2012 at the 22nd Annual Literary Awards Festival in California. Joe Sacco is best known for his gripping comics journalism by telling the stories from inside war zones; observing, witnessing and documenting all that he sees. From his strip Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy in The Comics Journal of yore to his newest book, Journalism published by Metropolitan Books, Sacco is a comics force of nature.

 (photo by Jacob Covey)

The list of nominees for the 2012 Ignatz Awards was announced today and we are pleased to report that our artists and publications received a total of 6 nominations in 4 categories:

Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 by the Hernandez Brothers:
• Outstanding Artist — Jaime Hernandez
• Outstanding Story — "Return for Me" by Jaime Hernandez
• Outstanding Series

Ganges #4 by Kevin Huizenga:
• Outstanding Series

The Man Who Grew His Beard by Olivier Schrauwen:
• Outstanding Anthology or Collection

"Keith or Steve," Mome Vol. 22, by Nick Drnaso:
• Outstanding Story

In addition to these nominees with our logo on them, Leslie Stein's self-published Eye of the Majestic Creature was nominated for Outstanding Series (Vol. 1 collection, with our logo on it, out now; Vol. 2 out next year) and Noah Van Sciver's The Death of Elijah Lovejoy, which ties in to his debut graphic novel The Hypo, was nominated for Outstanding Mini-Comic! Additional congrats to Kevin Huizenga for sharing another nom with Dan Zettwoch and to Gabrielle Bell & Anders Nilsen for their respective noms. Winners will be announced on Saturday, September 14 at SPX.

The nominees for the 2012 Harvey Awards were announced yesterday and we're pleased to share that we've received 3 nominations:

Ganges #4 by Kevin Huizenga — Best Single Issue or Story

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse by Floyd Gottfredson — Best Domestic Reprint Project

The Comics Journal — Best Biographical, Historical, or Journalistic Presentation

Winners will be announced at a ceremony on September 8, 2012 at the Baltimore Comic-Con, as per tradition. Browse and order all of our 2012 nominated titles here, and see here for links to past years' award honorees. Congratulations to all the nominees!

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Awards: Congratulations to Lorenzo Mattotti for the much-deserved Max and Moritz Prize Lifetime Achievement Award and to Joe Sacco for being awarded Best International Comic Book, as announced over the weekend at the Internationaler Comic Salon at Erlanger and reported by Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter, Torsten Adair at The Beat and Joe Gordon at Forbidden Planet International

• Review: At Boing Boing, as part of their "Mind Blowing Movies" series of guest posts, Amy Crehore examines the Ghost World film: "I knew it was going to be good, but I had no idea that the movie Ghost World (2001) would bathe me in such an uncanny sense of deja vu from start to finish. The characters are so real and familiar that they could have been based on my friends and me."

• Commentary: Ashok Karra has a short but thought-provoking analysis of elements of the Ghost World graphic novel: "A ghost world could be three things. Two of them are types of haunting: either by the past (nostalgia for childhood) or the present (the glow of the television). The third possibility is that you pass through as a ghost."

• Plug: At Flavorwire, Emily Temple includes Ghost World on the list of "30 Books Everyone Should Read Before Turning 30," saying "Clowes writes some of the most essentially realistic teenagers we’ve ever come across, which is important when you are (or have ever been) a realistic teenager yourself."

• Plug/Preview: At The Beat, Jessica Lee posts a 5-page sneak peek of New York Mon Amour by Jacques Tardi et al., saying "This newest Tardi release... is slated for a July release, just in time for Independence Day, where we can all revel in the patriotic depictions of New York that Tardi has provided — oh wait. True to his new realism style, 'Manhattan' retains the same kind of gritty aesthetic as his illustrations of WWI trench warfare as well as Parisian life."

• Review: "The 11 horror stories in [The Furry Trap] showcase Simmons’s possession of a dark and capable imagination, one that has discomfort down to an exact science.... Simmons is at his best in stories like 'Mutant' and 'Demonwood,' where rash decisions and chance encounters lead to nightmarish consequences ... Simmons’s brand of deep unease permeates all of [these stories], even in the opening story, 'In a Land of Magic,' which features a scene of sexual and physical violence that could lead to sleepless nights. The book is also filled with illustrations and short comics that just add to the pile of evidence that Simmons has a wide-ranging talent, with an artistic sense that brings to life his most ghoulish creations. These stories are, hopefully, harbingers of even stronger and more sinister work in the future..." – Publishers Weekly

• Review: "The action [in God and Science] ebbs and flows, but the story remains engaging and exciting. I had to read it all in one afternoon because I just couldn't put it down. I was enjoying it too much to stop reading.... [There]'s another great thing about this comic — there's some subtle philosophical questions nudged in that the characters (and reader) have to answer themselves.... I can't recommend this title enough. I can easily say that I want more Ti-Girls, or at least comic characters like them." – Sheena McNeil, Sequential Tart

• Review: "Prince Valiant Vol. 5 — As the war years draw to a close, the strip finds Valiant settling down — at least a little bit — by finally winning his true heart’s love, Aleta. There’s still enough brigands and evildoers to keep Val busy, but a lot of Vol. 5 is spent with the couple developing their relationship, and Harold Foster deepening and developing Aleta’s character in the process. ...[I]t remains a thrilling, boisterous work." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6

• Review: "Dungeon Quest Book Three — Joe Daly’s faithful D&D fantasy by way of Harold and Kumar proceeds apace, with lots of bloody skirmishes with fierce animals and fiercer bandits and an abundance of jokes about penises, pot, hand-jobs and the like.... His incredibly detailed forest backgrounds are really quite exquisite, and the full panel sequences of his band of adventurers simply trekking along a forest path or walking through a stream were my favorite parts of the book." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6

• Commentary: It's been interesting seeing the evolution of the "hey, they should bring Love and Rockets to the screen" article in the age of the serialized cable drama. Arthur Smith at The Paley Center for Media is the latest to add his voice to the chorus

• Plug: "Got this beautiful Popeye compilation book (Fantagraphics) a couple of days ago. Haven't had a chance to even crack it open, but my son is now running around going 'Arf, arf.' It's a hit." – Ruben Bolling

• Tribute: At The New York Times, Tim Kreider remembers the great Ray Bradbury: "Prescience is not the measure of a science-fiction author’s success — we don’t value the work of H. G. Wells because he foresaw the atomic bomb or Arthur C. Clarke for inventing the communications satellite — but it is worth pausing, on the occasion of Ray Bradbury’s death, to notice how uncannily accurate was his vision of the numb, cruel future we now inhabit."

• Tribute: Monte Schulz (seen above with Bradbury and Gary Groth at Comic-Con 2009 — click the image for a larger version) has a lovely memorial to Bradbury currently on the main page of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference website

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Awards: Congratulations to the great Joost Swarte, awarded the 2012 Marten Toonder Prize and its concomitant fat cash prize by the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, as reported by Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter

• Review: "One of the first comprehensive comic strip reprint projects of the current era, and arguably the most important, has achieved completion with the publication of the thirteenth and final volume in Fantagraphics’ series collecting George Herriman’s Krazy Kat Sunday pages in their entirety.... I expect I will be reading from this library for years to come. I am as grateful for this body of work as, I expect, readers of Emily Dickinson were when her complete works were first published in full." – Bill Kartalopoulos, Print

• Review (Audio): Inkstuds host Robin McConnell is joined by Paul Gravett, Joe McCulloch and Tom Spurgeon for a roundtable discussion of Cruisin' with the Hound by Spain Rodriguez and other books

• Review: "Here are the early ejaculations from the primordial form of what was to become one of the great American writers. Here is Flannery O'Connor as she is  formulating her unique vision of America and all that it entails.... What value does Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons have inherently? I think the answer to that question is entirely subjective. ...I personally wish to thank Fantagraphics for going out on a limb and publishing this book, if for no other reason than to put Flannery O'Connor back into the pop culture discussion for however briefly it may be." – Daniel Elkin, Comics Bulletin

• Review: "Anyone can be grotesque and horrifying. To truly get under the skin of the audience is an ability not many have. Someone who does is Thomas Ott, and he uses his ability to the highest effect in Cinema Panopticum. ...[I]f you are looking for an unsettling horror story rendered beautifully by an expert craftsman there is no doubt this should be in your collection." – Taylor Pithers, The Weekly Crisis

• Interview (Audio): Spend 3 minutes with Michael Kupperman as Tom Gambino of Pronto Comics talks to Michael from the floor of last April's MoCCA Fest on the ProntoCast podcast

• Film Studies: At Boing Boing, Jim Woodring writes about the 1931 Fleischer Bros. short that expanded his young mind: "I might have come to grips with the overwhelming mystery of life in a rational, organic manner if it weren't for a cartoon I saw on my family's old black and white TV in the mid '50s when I was three or four years old. This cartoon rang a bell so loud that I can still feel its reverberations.... Whatever [the creators'] motivation and intent, 'Bimbo's Initiation' became my prime symbolic interpreter, the foundation of my life's path and endlessly exploding bomb at the core of my creative output."

• Gaming: Thanks to intrepid Fantagraphics intern Michael Fitzgerald for passing along this article at Hardcore Gaming 101 about something that I've been very curious about, the Usagi Yojimbo "Samurai Warrior" game for Commodore 64

Congrats to Ellen Forney, shortlisted for The 2012 Stranger Genius Award for Literature! Ellen's worked with us (and The Stranger) for years and even though we're not putting out her next book, the graphic memoir Marbles, we're all looking forward to it eagerly! You may recall Jim Woodring won this prize a couple of years ago — kudos to The Stranger's critics for continuing to recognize comics with their Literature award. (Photo for The Stranger by Kelly O.)