David Small’s Stitches has been nominated for a 2010 Will Eisner Award, for best reality-based work.
You can see the list of nominees here, on the Graphic Novel Reporter site. My post on Small’s presentation in Michigan last autumn can be read here.
Other 2010 Eisner Award nominees on whom I’ve written recent posts include:
• The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, in the best publication for children category and in the best archival collection/project-comic books category
• Bill Willingham’s Fables in the best-continuing series category and Willingham himself for best writer
• Incognito, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, in the best limited series or story arc category.
I like Bill Willingham’s writing. But I like it more when he’s also illustrating his own stories.
That’s what’s missing from his Fables books. The tales are clever and surprising — Willingham is a great storyteller — and the dozen or so artists I’ve seen drawing the comic books and graphic novels convincingly convey a fairy tale feel.
But I miss Willingham’s own wise-guy touch. I adored his Elementals comic book series from Comico in the late 1980s, and was sorely grieved when someone else took the reins (and before we ever got a resolution to the Oblivion War storyline). And I felt like a victim of a bait-and-switch scheme when he drew fewer than a handful of his Shadowpact series a few years back.
Willingham’s characters can be by turns sexy, self-conscious, ornery and goofy.
In his new autobiography (which I plan to write about in a couple days), Backing Into Forward, Jules Feiffer says of the cartoonists who took over the Superman comic strip after co-creator Joe Shuster was forced out that they “drew better but felt less.” That sentiment can be applied here, too, I think: Bill Willingham might not be the most crafted illustrator to draw Bill Willingham stories, but he “feels more” than they do.
