Posts tagged as “Dr. Sheena C. Howard”

More than 100,000 people attended the International Comic Convention (aka Comic Con) in San Diego this year, but only a few walked away winners of an Eisner Award, one of the most prestigious honors in the comics industry – an Eisner is equivalent to an Oscar. I was honored to be one of those winners, along with co-editor Ronald Jackson for the book, “Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation.”

In 2009 I embarked on writing my dissertation at Howard University on Aaron McGruder’s “The Boondocks” comic strip. Much to my dismay there were no published works that provided a historical account of the contributions of African-American cartoonists on the funny pages.Most books that dealt with the history of American comics, failed to even mention Black artists – this was the impetus for the book, “Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation.”

Admittedly, I had not been an avid comic book or graphic novel reader as a child, but even so, as a critical media scholar I knew I needed to do whatever I could to fill this void within academic literature.When I first heard about the Eisner nomination for Best Academic/ Scholarly Work during the winter of 2014, I was amazed. Rarely, does an academic have the opportunity to cross over to the popular culture realm for an academic book. Since this was my first book, I was just happy to be nominated but did not expect to win.
On Friday July 25th, the Eisner award ceremony was held at the San Diego Hilton Bayfront hotel, with doors opening at 7:00 p.m. The ceremony consisted of fans seated in the back and Eisner nominees seated closest to the stage. Upon entering I immediately noticed the attendance of Jack Mendelsohn (writer for “Ninja Turtles”), Reginald Hudlin (Producer of “Django Unchained”) and Orlando Jones (actor).