I don’t believe that
Liberty Meadows has won a
Harvey or an
Eisner award, but it did win an
Ignatz Award in
1999 for the year’s best comic book for collections of the strip. The
Ignatz awards are given out at the leading alternative comics show, the
Small Press Expo (
SPX).
Frank Cho won because he served on the awards jury and
he nominated himself for the award.
The ethical implications aside, that year’s awards were controversial in many respects. The Cho nomination was only part of a growing trend of more mainstream nominations in an award that was designed to distinguish alternative and
small press work. How can the Ignatz claim to be alternative when mainstream crap like
Gen13 and
Heartthrobs get nods?
Others objected to a relative newcomer like Cho serving on the awards jury at all.
Dylan Horrocks (
Hicksville): "Shouldn’t it be people (on the jury) who’ve already got an established, unshakable reputation and status in the field? Hopefully, that way, we wouldn't get such absolute travesties as
Liberty Meadows beating
Jew of New York for best comic. That's kind of like - I dunno –
Terry Pratchett beating
James Joyce for a
Nobel Prize for Literature or something. Unbelievable."
When confronted with the torrent of criticism, Cho brushed aside questions of
ethics by claiming the lack of quality comics released that year. Then he attacked and slandered his critics:
"It was hard to find four or five quality books to nominate in some of the categories. It seems like anyone who can do thick brush lines is a hip, alternative creator. There are a lot of artists out there who can't draw worth a damn."
"(I am) a little bit offended by the
mini-comics. All of these other publishers spend a ton of money to put out decent product. Then you have these college kids who do a poorly drawn mini, completed at
Kinko's. You should weed out the crap like that. There are a lot of talented people. Having this amateur stuff out there makes it difficult to find the really, really nice quality of selection."
Never mind that the Ignatz was designed to recognize this kind of "amateur" work in the first place.
Putting Cho, who is clearly an idiot, aside, the strip is pretty nicely drawn. But it's not so much his skill as the lack of quality drawing on the comics page that leads to this kind of praise. It’s been a long time since the days of
Hal Foster and
Windsor McKay, and people go orgasmic over anyone who can draw better than
Mort Walker.
Despite his skill, the strip fails to impress.
Oh look, breasts. And I liked it much better when it was called
Bloom County.
Quotes from The Comics Journal.