The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards is a celebration of achievements in comics. A panel of judges chooses nominees from over 30 categories, then professionals from within the comics field choose the winners. They are then awarded with trophies during a ceremony held on the Friday night of San Diego Comic-Con.
The Hall of Fame portion of the event includes nominees who are voted on by the industry as well as inductees chosen by the judges. In recent years, the number of inductees has grown with a total of 12 honored in 2022, and 19 chosen in 2023.
Also in 2023, the Hall of Fame ceremony was held separately on the Friday morning of Comic-Con. This gave the honorees more time and attention and streamlined the rest of the Eisner Awards ceremony on Friday evening.
The 2024 Eisner Awards will follow last year’s set up with the Hall of Fame portion held at a separate time. Additionally, a separate judging panel composed of past Eisner Awards Judges will choose the Hall of Fame inductees. The judges include Dr. William Foster, Michael T. Gilbert, Karen Green, Alonso Nuñez (co-chair), Jim Thompson (co-chair), and Maggie Thompson.
Foster is a retired English professor, and a longtime comic collector and researcher. He has been a commentator on CNN News and National Public Radio, and a consultant on how Black people are portrayed in comics for the Words and Pictures Museum of Fine Sequential Art. He is also the author of Looking for a Face Like Mine and Dreaming of a Face Like Ours.
Gilbert has spent 50 years writing and illustrating comics featuring Superman, Batman, Dr. Strange, and his signature character, Mr. Monster. For 25 years he has written a column on comic history in Alter Ego magazine, and he edited a book that collects Fiction House’s The Secret Files of Dr. Drew. He edited Tops, a reprinting of the Golden Age series, and received the Inkpot award in 2014.
Green is Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University. Since 2005, she has built a collection and archives that includes original art by Chris Claremont, Al Jaffee, Jerry Robinson, and others. She is active in comics conferences and conventions, and co-produced the documentary, She Makes Comics. In 2017 she was the subject of Nick Sousanis’ online comic, A Life in Comics: The Graphic Adventures of Karen Green.
Nuñez founded Little Fish Comic Book Studio, a comics arts-based educational nonprofit organization. He taught and advocated for comics for a decade and is now the president of San Diego Comic Fest.
Jim Thompson is a comics scholar, contributor to the Comic Arts Conference and other similar events, and contributor to Alter Ego. He was the faculty director for Duke University’s program at USC, where he taught genre theory through comics and film, and co-founded Duke’s Genre Matters conference and the Comic Book Historian’s podcast. In 2022 he formed A People’s History of Comics Facebook group for historians, scholars, and professionals.
Maggie Thompson began collecting comics when she was 4 years old and started co-editing the Comic Art fanzine with husband Don Thompson when she was 18. She has written for Comics Buyer’s Guide and other comics-related projects for 30 years, including indexing Fantagraphics’ Pogo reprints and her weekly “Turning Points” column in Gemstone Publishing’s Scoop e-newsletter. She was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2020.
