Dork Awards After-Party

So now that the big fancy awards show is over, we can all just sit down and talk like folks about the funnybook scene of 2010. The highs, the lows, the trends and surprises, the books we missed readin’ here on the Dork Forty… In fact, let’s start there…

The Ones That Got Away

Nobody can read everything, and there were some mighty good funnybooks I missed out on this year. The biggest, to my way of thinking, has to be James Stokoe’s Orc Stain.

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A grungy epic fantasy series, this book somehow sailed under my radar til the year was almost over. And I still haven’t read it. The trade’s on order, mind you, but all I’ve gotten my hands on are some free online sneak previews and ten incomplete pages of a story Stokoe put up on his blog (http://orcstain.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/the-orc-dont-fit/). I like what I’ve seen, though, and I’m looking forward to more. The art’s cartoony-gorgeous and insanely detailed, and it just overall looks like the kind of funnybook I live for.

Dork Awards 2010: Best Funnybook

…And so we come to the end of the 2010 Dork Awards. The grand finale. The big award that everybody (all five of you) have been waiting for…

Best Funnybook

I suppose that, really, this is the award for “best on-going series” or some such, since single issues, OGNs, and mini-series have already been honored. And on-going series are different, an art unto themselves with different problems and strengths, and different writing tricks to play. But “Best Funnybook” just sounds better, so let’s go with that.

One of the great advantages of the on-going series is the open-ended storytelling format, which allows a writer to develop his characters slowly over time, and in greater depth than even a novel allows. The flip-side of that, of course, is serial characters that run on for too long, as is the case with the vast majority of the big corporate super heroes. Writing those properties is a neat trick, requiring constant slight reinvention to keep things fresh, but always keeping an eye on the status quo to ensure that things don’t wander too far off from the original concept.

So that’s what I look for in on-going series. And with that in mind, let’s take a look at the nominees, the first of which tosses all that right out the window…

Axe Cop

by Malachai and Ethan Nicolle

The only web comic to make the 2010 Dork Awards. Axe Cop is a humor comic written by 5-year-old Malachai Nicolle and illustrated by his 29-year-old big brother Ethan. I cannot begin to express how howlingly funny this strip is. The stories and characters are pretty much the sort of thing you’d expect a 5-year-old to come up with, but Ethan gives his brother’s ideas the sort of narrative flow and polished appearance a little kid just isn’t capable of. That combination of professionalism with unbridled childhood creativity is what makes the strip work. It puts me in mind of The Tick, and that is high praise indeed.

Dork Awards 2010: Best Writer

So we're getting close to the end of the Dork Awards for this year. After tonight, there'll be only one more Dorky handed out, with perhaps a few year-in-review highlights (and low-lights) to come over the New Year's holiday weekend. But for now, we move on from Best Artist to the other side of the funnybook equation...

Best Writer

As I said in my introduction to the award for Best Artist, true funnybook classics have great art and a great script. But for me, it always comes back to the writing. I can endure kinda crappy artwork (and have!), but without a worthwhile story, a comic just isn't worth my time. That's why this category is nearest and dearest to my heart, and why you get no pretty pictures to accompany the nominees. This one's all about the text! But speaking of the nominees, let's see them now...

Matt Fraction

Author of the most complex character studies in the world of corporate spandex, Matt Fraction produces books that I don’t mind spending four bucks on. This year, he continued his on-going portrait of Tony Stark’s addictive personality in Iron Man, and turned his sights onto Thor, giving that character the softest of reboots by putting some serious thought into both his aspect as a god, and as a Viking. His work on Casanova was stellar as well, but since it was 99.9% reprint… It doesn’t really count toward this year’s awards.

Dork Awards 2010: Best Artist

Arguments abound over whether writing or art is more important to the creative success of a funnybook, and, much like politics, the industry tends to swing back and forth on a pendulum between the two extremes. We’ve been very much experiencing a decade of the writer in the last ten years, a sharp response to the decade of the artist we went through in the 90s. It’s always going to come back to the writing for me in the end, but honestly… I think it really takes good writing and good art to make a true funnybook classic. And tonight, we honor the artistic side of that equation with the Dork Award for…

Best Artist

Frazer Irving

Irving has a truly unique style, one that combines rock-solid cartoon realism with a love of inventive camera angles and a lush coloring sensibility that gives his line-art the feel of something painted. His primary work this year came on Grant Morrison’s Batman, with both the “Pilgrim Batman” issue of Return of Bruce Wayne and the closing story arc of Batman and Robin under his belt.

Dork Awards 2010: Best Single Issue

So it's time once again to return to the Dork Awards...

Best Single Issue

Crafting a great single issue of a funnybook series really is an art form, and one that’s increasingly rare in this era of multi-part stories and novelistic pacing. That’s my preferred sort of serial funnybook writing, too, which makes finding great single-issue comics that much harder. Still, I was able to pull together a list of issues that made me happy this year without too much difficulty. To whit…

 

Iron Man Annual #1
by Matt Fraction and Carmine DiGiandomenico

This story recreating the Mandarin as a villain for the 21st Century is perhaps Matt Fraction’s best Marvel work to date, and is almost certainly the best single-issue corporate spandex story of the year. It’s only competition, in fact, is…

Dork Awards 2010: Best OGN

So the Dork Awards got a little sidetracked, I’m afraid. You know how it is. Work, visits with the family, playing with your Christmas presents, deciding that an actual vacation where you just relax is probably a really good idea before you drop in exhaustion… That sort of thing. But I’ve had all that now. I feel re-energized and properly vacated. So now it’s time for the Dork Awards to resume, with the award for…

Best Original Graphic Novel

“Original Graphic Novel” (or OGN, for short) is a high-falutin’ term for a novel-length funnybook story. One that’s created to be published in book form rather than as a serial for periodical publication. It sounds pretty technical, but it’s really not. It’s comics done the same way prose novels are done. Many say that it’s the real future of comics, and I can’t disagree. Much as I love my weird adventure serials, the allure of a story with a beginning, middle, and end is undeniable. And the preferred fictional format for most readers. That being the case, if comics really are trying to make their way back into mainstream reading habits, this would seem a natural route to take. So without further ado, let’s look at what the future brought us this year…

Afrodisiac

by Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca

Ostensibly a “Best Afrodisiac Stories Ever Told” reprint collection, Jim Rugg’s tales of a pimp super hero function as both a loving send-up of the Blaxploitation genre and of funnybook publishing trends in the 1970s and 80s.

Introducing: The Dork Awards!

So the year's winding down, and that can only mean one thing: a list of the best comics of 2010! But here on the Dork Forty, a simple list of the year's best comics isn't enough. Around here, we say anything worth doing is worth over-doing! And to that end, we present to you...

The First Annual Dork Awards!

The Dork Awards, affectionately known as the Dorkies (if only to our own staff of professional nerd wranglers), are a recognition of funnybook excellence. The prizes (or, should we say, No-Prizes) are given based on completely arbitrary factors, mostly my own personal taste. This means that the nominations will mostly be drawn from the field of high-quality genre fiction, with little or no consideration given to things like neurotic drama or nihilistic comedy. If I didn't read it in 2010, it won't be getting a mention.

Rather than doing one gigantic post outlining all the Dorkies at once, though, I'll be awarding one Dorky at a time over the rest of the year, spread out between insufferable Christmas posts and the occasional Funnybooksinreview piece. Partially, this is because I hate bloated award shows, and partially because I haven't quite figured out all my categories just yet, and want more time to shape them into entertaining reading. That said, it’s time to get started with a category I do have figured out:

Best Mini-Series

Introduced in the very early 1980s, the comic book mini-series was an immediate hit with readers. It opened doors in the mainstream comics industry to tell more novelistic stories with a beginning, middle, and end, giving us both high and low classics in the form of Watchmen, Camelot 3000, and so many others. It was also a stroke of genius for corporate spandex publishers. Got a popular character that you’re not sure can support his own series? Give him a mini-series instead! And if that sells well, then you can commit to an on-going. Such now-venerable characters as Wolverine and the Punisher got their own books based on this model. The mini-series also gave us the line-wide crossover event series, in the form of Crisis on Infinite Earths and its inferior, rushed-to-production-to-make-it-look-like-they-had-the-idea-first retarded cousin, Secret Wars.