This week, the National Cartoonist Society announced the creation of a new division award: For best online comic strip.
NCS President Tom Richmond along with input from the rest of the NCS board have been working on this for a few months. And they have enlisted the advice of several sources, including myself in the process.
Eligibility for the award is tight. Your entry must be a comic strip (no single panels or long form comics), it must be at least weekly in update schedule, must have shown a consistent publication over the course of the calendar year, and…most importantly:
“Creator must earn the greater part of their living directly from cartooning* in order to adhere to the NCS criteria that creators under consideration must be either full members or eligible for full membership”
Compare this to the Harvey Awards, which have open voting and where an online comic can submit itself for any category in which the format is appropriate. Thus, Blind Ferret’s new comic “The Gutters” was able to be nominated for several categories including “best new series” and “special award for humor in comics.” The fact that The Gutters is distributed online and not in a comic book didn’t matter. The work was what was most important.
It’s unfortunate. The NCS is easily ten years behind the curve on this, possibly being the last entity on the planet who doesn’t grok webcomics. It’s 2012. Most of the more prominent webcomic creators have grown into micro-media companies, expanding into animation, feature length films and graphic novels and have stopped using the term webcomic completely. More and more content is moving from url based distribution to handheld distribution. And the NCS has just formed their first six-man committee to determine what a webcomic IS. And they’re making press-releases about it.
One of our more astute Webcomic.com members made a very salient point on this subject when he said “The NCS exists to support its membership, not cartooning as an industry.” And I couldn’t agree more. The NCS is placing prestige over prominence here.
Guigar and I have been discussing this subject at length over the phone. We both feel that this move is insult to injury. Brad and I each create a daily feature identical to the features created by syndicated comic strip artists. We do so to a point of being criticized by webcomic pundits who feel we’re too beholden to traditional formats. Yet we are not eligible for the division award for comic strip. Because there is no division award for comic strip. There are only awards for syndicated comic strip and, now, online comic strip.
Brad and I see this division award as kind of a kids table set up near the adult table. A pat on the head. Separate but equal is insulting to US. But that’s our personal hang up and other’s are free to disagree with us.
If Paul McSpadden, one guy, can figure out how to make the Harvey Awards successful and inclusive without compromising the integrity of the name Harvey Kurtzman, how can the entirety of the NCS not?
We certainly live in interesting times. And I wonder if an organization that takes 5-10 years to change the course of it’s heading is even compatible with a group of people who re-invent themselves every 6-12 months. And if not, what does that mean for the NCS?
Time will tell I guess.
In case anyone was worried Dad’s stroke had effected his sense of humor…
We’re sitting in his den, and I’m showing him how Siri works on my iPhone. To demonstrate I composed a text to my wife, pronouncing the punctuation.
Me: Send Angela a text.
Siri: Okay, what would you like to say to Angela Kurtz?
Me: Love you. Period. Miss you a lot. Period. Can’t wait to see you tonight. Period.
Dad: I hope you’re not on your period. Period.
My latest story-line has been generating a lot of reader mail. Some really amazing reader mail. And I wanted to let everyone know that my dad is alive and well. Some people were worried that something was up. That this story was an indication that something terrible had happened. Yes and no.
Most of what is happening to Rip Sienna happened to my father back in 1996. October of 1996 to be exact. I was eight months into a new marriage when we got a phone call that dad bent over at work to pick up a dropped pen and almost passed out. So he went to the ER and they had him start a stress test and immediately admitted him to the ICU. Dad ended up having bypass surgery after his angioplasty and stent failed to do the job (scar tissue built up on the stent and re-closed the artery).
Two months later, dad’s at home and my mother dies unexpectedly. It was a real sucker-punch to the whole family. It devastated us. This was all before I ever drew the first PvP comic strip.
So this experience has been with me for sixteen years now. And while I has occurred to me to work through it via the strip, I never have until now really. I got through it, and I got comfortable not worrying bout the possibility of losing another parent. Until recently.
Five months ago, shortly after his visit here to Seattle (when we filmed his episode of the Kris and Scott Show), dad had a stroke. We got very lucky in that he was with someone when it happened and paramedics arrived within 10 minutes of being called. So his recovery has been swift and promising. Doctors expected a full recovery and everything indicates they’re right.
I’m in Dallas right now, visiting. Spending time with him at home. Yesterday Dad wanted to see Mission Impossible and he walked from the car to his seat and back afterwards…impressing us with his ability to forgo the cane he was using a month earlier. This is a man who in July could not use his left side at all and needed a nurse to move him from his bed into a wheelchair. Now he’s upset because “He doesn’t have his dance moves back yet.”
My father is the bravest man I know. Faced with this he has never lost his faith, humor or determination. He asked me recently if I had blogged about his stroke and I told him no. That I wanted to protect him and that I didn’t have his permission to talk about it nor was I planning to ask for it. He told me “You can talk about it. Tell them what happened and that I’m doing great.” Papa says hello.
Thank you to everyone who has written me this last week to express how this story has touched you personally. An artist can hope for no greater achievement than to connect with his audience. This story, these fears, are universal and innately human. We all experience them and struggle through them. Thank you for your stories and for your strength. Drawing these strips has been cathartic and has helped me work through a lot of self doubt and guilt.
I’m actually doing a horrible job. There’s so much I’m just not getting into these strips. Like the guilt I’m harboring over having moved away from my father. Or my brother. My poor sweet brother who wants to move to Seattle as well but remains behind to deal with the responsibility of being “Brent” in this situation. Or how I’m absolutely terrified to let go and breathe again, no matter how strong my dad gets. I’m just not good enough of a writer yet. I really should have waited another five years to tell this story.
But I needed to vent some pressure. I needed to express it artistically as best I could. So I’m shitting these out as they come to me.
I don’t know how to end this post, so I’ll do it messy and imperfectly. Like life.
