There's a Will

The nominees for the 2005 Eisner Awards have been announced, and I couldn't possibly care less.

Here's the thing. I like comics, perhaps obviously. I like the Eisner Awards, feel that they're probably the best opportunity to honor the medium as a legitimate forum for creativity, rather than a child's indulgence or a field for potential Hollywood development. I'm even fond of a number of the individual nominees, creators and creations both. Still, though, I find it very hard to get at all excited about this, now.

Here's the long way around: In the second year of James Robinson and Tony Harris's Starman, the book featured a storyline entitled "Sand and Stars" (the storyline, by the by, itself won an Eisner, along with nominations for writer, book, and pencil and cover artist). In the storyline, hero Jack Knight travels to New York to consult with Wesley Dodds, a caped colleague of his father's. What captures Knight's attention, though, is the opportunity to meet Dodds's wife, Dian Belmont, Knight's favorite novelist. "When they awarded you the Nobel six years ago, it seemed so overdue, and so deserved, I went out and got drunk," he admits. "Good and happy drunk, like it was me that had gotten the award. I was so pleased for you."

I remember that moment as one of favorites in the series, itself one of my favorite superhero titles. I remember it when I watch the Academy Awards, or see year-end best-of lists from my favorite music rags, or read about Eisner nominees, and eventually, winners. I remember it when I have the chance to watch someone honored, someone who's made my life a little happier, briefly or not-so-briefly, by way of their art. And I look for the chance to commiserate, remotely with everybody else whose life's been made howevermuch better by a film, or a song, or a comic.

I remember it now, but I don't experience it.

Now look, the Eisner, with all due respect to both its history and its namesake, is hardly the Nobel Prize. But it's arguably as close as we get. It's the best chance we get to look at everybody else who loved whatever they loved and say "Yeah, I get it, too."

But I don't get it.

I suspect this has more than a little to do with the particular nominees in this year's batch. There's nothing wrong with them, exactly. All of those that I've read--and it's a fair amount, so I'm not speaking entirely out of ignorance here--were good stories. But they weren't great. Look at, for example, the nominees for Best Short Story. Among them is "God" from the dust cover of the comics-oriented McSweeney's edited by Chris Ware, who also created the story. Let me say that again: this story is from the dust cover. To point this out is, in no way, to slight the quality of the story itself. I, for one, liked it well enough. But as far as metaphors go, the fact that one of the nominees for a category that awards stories appeared on a book's cover isn't exactly a subtle one.

Or: Kyle Baker received three nominations in one category, Best Humor Publication. The Eisner Awards celebrate achievements in comic books. The Best Humor Publication sees 60% of its nominations go to one man. Again, I don't begrudge Kyle Baker, whom, again, I like. And I only point out the etymological happenstance here for purposes of metaphor; I understand that there's nothing fundamentally funny about a comic book story. But it doesn't change the fact that the committee only thought there were only three men worth honoring for their comedic creations in the entire comic community.

And that's another thing (is that a rant I smell...?): Where my girls at? From amongst all of the individual categories, there are only two nominations for females: Laura Martin for her Color and Raina Telgemeier as Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition. I suppose we'll have to wait until Persepolis 3 comes out before we see another woman added to the list.

My problem with the Eisners, overall, is in fact not a problem with the Eisners at all. Rather, it's a problem that the announcements of the nominees brings into light, a problem of homogeneity. These nominees bore me. Not because they're boring, in themselves, but rather because, up against one another like this, one realizes how little quality gets injected into mainstream comics; specifically, as little as they can get away with, and not a drop more. These are the same books we saw last year--even the Best New Series category, somehow, seems to be contemptuously familiar--and the same that we'll see next year. I am, occasionally, pleased (it's nice to see some love for Demo, a series I've long enjoyed) and disappointed (I thought Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark's "Unresolved" in issues 19-22 or Gotham Central, was far and away the best serialized story I read last year, Eisner nod or no), but I find it almost impossible to get excited about these books. They failed to change my life, overall, for better or for worse.

Is it me?