From: [b--ea--y] at [po-box.mcgill.ca] (bart)
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 01:52:50 -0500
Subject: Goodies: Comments

- -Poster: [b--ea--y] at [po-box.mcgill.ca] (bart)

This post presupposes that you've already peeked and looked to see who won
the races. If you haven't done that do that now, we can wait.

While most of the world watched the Dallas Cowboys beat yet another hapless
AFC team in the Superbowl and then stuck around to see Jeniffer Aniston
smooch Jean-Claude Van Damme on _Friends_ I was busy tabulating votes in
what turned out to be in many areas a much closer event all around.

The presentation of the 1996 Good Taste Awards took place in Montreal again
this year (yes, that's still in Canada for the time being). Attendance was
disappointing but the half-time show didn't feature Diana Ross and a
helicopter so we were a generally happy lot.

On to the post-game analysis:

This year's forty-six voters is the highest turnout yet for the Goodies,
which is either a resounding vote of faith for the future of the comics
medium or an indication that too many geeks have access to computers, I'm
not quite clear on that yet. For those of you keeping score at home
twenty-eight people voted on the first day in a desperate attempt to cast
the first ballot, a distinction which fell to Wim Lockefeer.

Best Writer:

Image, yes Image, win their first ever Goodie as Alan Moore successfully
defended his writing title. It was a come from behind victory for Moore who
trailed his From Hell cohort Eddie Campbell heading into Saturday.

Number of people who specified that they were not voting for his Image
work: five. Number of people who actually deleted references to his Image
work from the ballot: six. Number of people who voted for other nominees
but said they would've voted for Moore if he didn't do any work for Image:
seven.

Best Artist:

The category that actually shocked me. Charles Vess surges from out of
nowhere to win as the leaders falter in the weekend. For the longest time
this was a three way tie between Ware, Burns and Campbell. On Friday it
looked as if Campbell would win artist and writer (and come fifth in
Cartoonist, which struck me as weird) but Vess poured it on late in the
game.

bart predicts: A book written by David Lapham and drawn by Charles Vess
would sell huge. The vast majority of Lapham's voters voted Vess as well.

For more on the artist/cartoonist split note Woodring's 3 and 10 showing in
the two categories.

Best Cartoonist:

This one was tied earlier today but the majority of Sunday voters went
Dorkin's way. This was a two man race for the entire time.

Best Publisher :

Fantagraphics dethrones the champion as last year's one/two finishers
flip-flop positions. Of note is DQ's narrow win in 1995 compared to the
wide margin of 1996. Last year's non-finalist Slave Labor also came on
strong and could be a player again next year. The boat may be sailing on
Dark Horse though, a number of voters complained that DH had cancelled
their only interesting titles....

Best Continuing Series :

Wow! You shoulda seen it from here. At one point this was a five way tie at
five. A nail-biter in the truest sense of the word has Acme topping Stray
Bullets at the buzzer.

Best New Series :

A bitter feud between the Stray Bullets supporters and the Black Hole
supporters eventually goes to Burns. These two traded the lead about a
dozen times, everything else was left in the dust. The strangest aspect was
that BH fared poorly against SB in the continuing series section.

Best Finite Series :

The return of the From Hell juggernaut made this a dozer to count as the
Moore/Campbell machine slaughtered all comers (again). Probable three-peat?
Do I even have to count the ballots again next year? Hmmm, maybe I should
read this some day.....

Best Mini:

A woman? Win a Goodie category? Heaven forbid! Next they'll be voting for
people who speak French! The Horror! The Horror!

Jessica Abel becomes the first woman to win a Goodie outright with the
wonderful Artbabe, as Chicago mini-comics people beat up on Montreal
mini-comics people and everyone else in sight.

Best Anthology:

Our third repeat winner was Drawn and Quarterly (co-edited by a woman!
They're taking over!). My fearless prediction that Zero Zero would be a
force to reckon with was, as it turned out, not so good.

Best Short Piece:

Yet another nail-biter. Dorkin won this last year with an Eltingville tale
and was narrowly nudged out this year by one of Dan Clowes' best stories.
Number of people who voted for this and said they couldn't believe that
Clowes hadn't qualified as a writer/artist/cartoonist: Damn near everyone.

Best Single Issue:

If only one issue of Stray Bullets had made the final cut it would've come
second but as it was nothing could derail the Black Hole. This was the
fourth loss for Stray Bullets which was constantly one or two votes short.

Best Ongoing Serialized Story:

Another close race which *every* nominee lead at one moment or another.
The Sandman storylines cancelled each other out and a Frenchman almost won,
but instead Canada takes the gold. Tense stuff kids, not for the feint of
heart.

Best One Shot:

KYB took a healthy early lead and then stopped dead in its tracks and
waited for everything else to catch up, which Bacchus almost did. Comics
starting with the letter N fared poorly (publishers take note)

Best Original Graphic Novel:

A narrow victory as Stuck Rubber Baby narrowly beats out 'couldn't care
less'. Last year this was the tightest race and City of Glass couldn't get
a vote in edgewise, this year it might have won.

Best Reprint Collection:

Eddie Campbell fended off late challenges from Tomine and Lutes to earn a
Goodie of his own to go with the two he's earned for From Hell. Number of
voters who declared that they'd vote for this but never again vote for
Tomine: one, and I want to see if he'll own up to it in public...

Best Strip:

Pure annihilation as Calvin and Hobbes repeats in its final year of
eligibility. A sentimentalists choice? Perhaps but the strip earned raves
from people who commented. It's a whole new ballgame next year, but I'll
probably vote for the strip which my local paper chose to replace C&H: Word
Jumble! It's fun and exciting!

Best Guilty Pleasure:

Number of people who complained that Batman Adventures shouldn't be made to
suffer just because DC decided to change the name: six. Amount of
difference it made: zero, since Astro City beat them cleanly to give Image
it's second award. Are we open-minded or what? Next thing you know nice
things will be said about it in the Journal. What? Oh. It's official we're
through the looking glass here folks.

Best Publication About Comics:

Speaking of the Journal, another blowout brings us our fourth repeat
champion. Number of people who voted for the Journal who have had work
published there: a hell of a lot actually. Interestingly Dave Sim took
second which just goes to show that everyone has to pick sides at one point
or another. Next year's surprise finalist will be Harlan Ellison, just you
wait.

Btw, three votes for Previews? Hell-oooo! I know who you people are and can
publish your email addresses....

Best Poster:

I'm still not sure that Mark won this. I *think* he got 26 votes, but 11 of
them were actually cast for Makr Nevins (no really, I'm not kidding).

I must thank all of you who ensured that your ballots were not 'lost' by
voting for me. (It's a little like voting in Iraq isn't it?) To think that
just a few short years ago I was merely some guy with too many piles of
comics lying on my floors, but that I've been able to parlay that into the
esteem and respect of my peers, only on the Internet I tell you. When I
called my ailing mother to tell her that I had placed second in a poll
which I ran myself on an electronic mailing list devoted to comics her
heart near burst. "I knew I should have thrown those things away," she
exclaimed, "He's even more demented than we thought!"

I should also point out that twenty-six people received between one and
nine votes in this category. I won't bother to mention which of the
finalists in this category didn't vote in this poll, but I hope they're
suitably shamed :) Servidor placed in a tie for ninth btw.

That's it kids! I plan on posting the results (without the actual vote
tallies or Best Poster results) to rac.alternative and rac.info as soon as
I can figure out how my news reader works (guess who switched software
recently!). The actual winners will be contacted shortly when the
statuettes have been engraved. I'm also planning on creating a Goodies WWW
site in the near (?) future with funky links to pages celebrating the
winners and nominees so that you can surf the Goodies are whatever it is
that people do when they have too much spare time and a copy of Netscape
(bizarre digression: I'm actually being compelled to create a web site by
my department. My first choice was just a page that said "bart" with no
links to anything but I've since been told that the humour in that might be
lost on my superiors. This will have to do). The prizes will be announced
in just a few short days when I figure out what the categories and prizes
are :)

Thank you all. This is way fun work for killing time in January (even when
so many of my own choices get clobbered) and I'm glad so many of you take
the time to participate. Oh, I'm all weepy now.

bart