The American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services Association has announced their final Great Graphic Novels for Teens 2012 list and Wandering Son Vol. 1 by Shimura Takako (translated and edited by Matt Thorn) is in the Top Ten! Additionally, Wilfred Santiago's 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente has been named to the overall list. Congratulations all!

We love Danish comics (so much so that we co-published an anthology of them, From Wonderland with Love, with Danish publisher Aben Maler, and our Scandinavian comics anthology Kolor Klimax: Nordic Comics Now is coming soon), so we're especially pleased to learn that the Danish Comics Council and comics website Nummer 9 have announced the nominees for the 2012 Ping Prisen (Prisen = Prize) and that they include:

"Nostalgia" by Johan F. Krarup, from Kolor Klimax: Nordic Comics Now: Best Danish Comic

Mellem dyrene (Congress of the Animals) by Jim Woodring: Best International Comic in Danish

Speedy Ortiz dør (The Death of Speedy) by Jaime Hernandez: Best International Comic in Danish

We're also pleased to see Eisner-nominated From Wonderland with Love contributor Nikoline Werdelin nominated for Best Danish Comic for "Homo Metropolis."

UPDATE: For English-speakers, Matthias Wivel provides some background on the awards at The Metabunker.

Congratulations to Jim Woodring and the artist/writer team of Jason & Fabien Vehlmann, whose respective works Congress of the Animals and Isle of 100,000 Graves (in their French editions from L'Association and Glénat respectively) have been named Official Selections of the 2012 Festival International de la Bande Desinée (a.k.a. the Angoulême Festival)!

In addition, the French-language edition of The Complete Peanuts 1973-1974 (Dargaud) has been named to the Sélection Patrimoine list of classic reprints, and Ô Dingos, Ô Chateaux! by Jacques Tardi & Jean-Patrick Manchette (Futuropolis), which we plan to publish in English some time in the unannounced but not-too-distant future, is on the Sélection Polar list of crime comics.

The big show goes on January 26-29 in Angoulême, France naturellement, with our fellow American Art Spiegelman as this year's Président du jury.

Wilfred Santiago's graphic biography 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente has received a big ol' brand of approval from the Texas Library Association, having been named to the 2012 Texas Maverick Graphic Novels Reading List, a recommended reading list developed by public and school librarians from the TLA's Young Adult Round Table. They recommend the book for grades 6-12, so pick it up for your favorite teen or tween today!

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Awards: Esperanza by Jaime Hernandez has been named by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association to the long list of nominations for the Over the Rainbow recommended reading list, one of only two (as far as I can tell from my quick skim) comics to be so included

• Plug: Pamela Paul of The New York Times asks "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" creator Jeff Kinney about his favorite books from childhood: "...[T]he works that stood head and shoulders above the rest were Carl Barks’s ‘Donald Duck’ and ‘Uncle Scrooge’ comics from the 1940s through the 1960s. Mr. Barks wrote tales of high adventure generously peppered with moments of high comedy.... Classics such as ‘Lost in the Andes,’ ‘Only a Poor Man’ and ‘A Christmas for Shacktown’ left a deep impression on me. Mr. Barks taught me that comics could be high art, and I consider his work to be the best storytelling I’ve experienced in any form. ...Fantagraphics has announced that it is publishing the Barks collection in beautiful hardcover books that do great honor to the cartoonist and his stories, and I can’t wait to buy them for my kids. Proof that great storytelling endures from generation to generation."

• Review: "This volume [Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes] reprints tales from December 1948 through August 1949, when Barks was in high feather as a creator of breathless adventures and light comedies for his Ducks... Great pop culture, great analysis. Scrooge is always searching for more gold, and there’s plenty here. [Rating] 10/10" – Michael Barrett, PopMatters

• Review: "The finale of the story Jaime has been telling over the past couple of annual issues [of Love and Rockets: New Stories] is a moment of bravura comics storytelling, but the buildup to it in the opening portions of this issue is pretty great as well... Ah, but as nice as these stories are, they all seem to be prelude to the dazzlingly virtuosic end of this chapter in the Locas saga... This could signal an end to the current era of Locas stories, but these characters are less figures of Jaime's imagination than real people alive in the minds of readers everywhere at this point, and even if another story featuring them never appears, we can rest assured that they will continue to live on, somewhere, sometime." – Matthew J. Brady, Warren Peace Sings the Blues

• Plug: On his blog, Frank Santoro declares "Ganges #4 is easily the best comic book of 2011. Case. Fucking. Closed."

• Review (Audio): Introducing the latest episode of the Wait, What? podcast, co-host Jeff Lester says "we dollop more praise on Ganges #4 by Kevin Huizenga because honestly that sucker could probably use another five or six dollops."

• Plugs: "Fantagraphics’ collections featuring Charles Schulz’s comic strip masterpiece, Peanuts, are fantastic and if you’re a Peanuts fan, you need to be reading these. Floyd Gottfredson probably did as much to shape the personality of Mickey Mouse and his supporting cast as Carl Barks did for the Disney Ducks, yet his work has never received the same degree of attention as the work of Barks. Fantagraphics is correcting that with Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. The first two volumes of this series are fantastic and the strips probably look better here than they did when they were originally published. It’s a joy to watch Gottfredson develop as a storyteller as Mickey and the gang evolve along with him.... There’s also plenty of background material to place the stories into historical perspective. And the collection of Walt Kelly’s Pogo that hits stores this week is gorgeous. I have some of Fantagraphics’ previous Pogo volumes and this one blows them away. I’m also getting into Popeye for the first time with their collections of Segar’s classic strip." – Roger Ash, Westfield Comics Blog

• Interview: At The Vinyl District, Dulani Wallace talks to author Kevin Avery about Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson: "He would only really enjoy writing about things that meant something to him personally, so there are a few clues about his own life in many of his pieces. So that became the idea — the first half of the book is the biography, the second half of the book is Paul’s writing. It’s kind of like Paul telling his own story."

• Commentary: At Comic Book Resources, Laura Sneddon, who is documenting her experiences in the postgraduate Comic Studies program at the University of Dundee in Scotland, examines the work of Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb for the class topic "Comics and Gender"

Wilfred Santiago's graphic biography 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente has been named a finalist for the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book by Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine! 21 is, as near as I can tell, the first comic to be nominated in the 29-year history of the award, and the trophy is a genuine Louisville Slugger — how cool is that? Congratulations and good luck Wilfred!

You can add one more posthumous laurel to Hal Foster's already-impressive pile of achievements: New York Times Best Selling Author. Prince Valiant Vol. 4: 1943-1944 shows up at #8 on this week's Hardcover Graphic Books top 10 list. It comes as no surprise to us: we've been selling out multiple printings of the series as fans old and new have been snapping the books up. What else would you expect from one of the greatest comics of the last (or any) century?

UPDATE: Well shut my mouth, it was #1 last week!

The list of nominees continues to grow for American Library Association/Young Adult Library Services Association "2012 Great Graphic Novels for Teens" list. Joining the already-announced Wandering Son Vol. 1 among the nominees are:

21: The Story of Roberto Clemente by Wilfred Santiago

Yeah! by Peter Bagge & Gilbert Hernandez

Isle of 100,000 Graves by Jason & Fabien Vehlmann

Nominees will continue to accumulate throughout the year, and will be winnowed down to the final list to be announced by the ALA in January.

Washington State-based arts foundation Artist Trust has announced the shortlist of finalists for its 2011 Arts Innovator Award, including Queen of the Black Black and Artichoke Tales creator Megan Kelso! The award consists of a nice fat cash prize (and two other finalists get smaller cash amounts) out of the deep, deep Dale Chihuly coffers. This would certainly be a huge boon to Megan as she works on her next book. Recipients are announced next week. Good luck Megan!

Word comes over the Twitter wires that "Browntown" by Jaime Hernandez, from Love and Rockets: New Stories #3, has won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Story at tonight's ceremony at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD. Congratulations to Jaime for this richly-deserved recognition! And they better get another brick ready for Jaime next year for "The Love Bunglers Parts 3-5" in New Stories #4. Just saying.

Updated to add: Additional congratulations to new Mome contributor Joseph Lambert for picking up 2 big awards, Outstanding Cartoonist and Outstanding Anthology or Collection for I Will Bite You!