I haven't put one of these up for a while but I have all these neat graphics I made…and don't be surprised if you see another one or two this week. Gonna be a busy week. (For those of you who don't know, the can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup signals that Mark may not be posting very often for a day or two, and also that I'll be lousier than usual about answering e-mail.) But before I go off to be busy…
If you're an active member of the Writers Guild of America, you have less than three hours to vote for the Strike Authorization. Please vote for the Strike Authorization. It is not a vote to strike. It's more like a show of unity…a polling of the members to verify that they're behind our current leadership and unwilling to accept a crappy deal. Now, you don't want a crappy offer, do you? Crappy offers are why we sometimes have to strike.
Meanwhile, the nominations are closed for this year's Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing and the recipients will be announced shortly. We received a lot of names this year but — and I mention this as something that makes me curious — a surprising number of them were of people who are ineligible for the award because they've already won it. I wrote…
To date, this award has gone to Arnold Drake, Alvin Schwartz, George Gladir, Larry Lieber, Frank Jacobs, Gary Friedrich, Del Connell, Steve Skeates, Don Rosa, Jerry Siegel, Harvey Kurtzman, Gardner Fox, Archie Goodwin, John Broome, Otto Binder, Bob Haney, Frank Doyle, Steve Gerber, Robert Kanigher, Bill Mantlo, Jack Mendelsohn, John Stanley, Don McGregor, Richard E. Hughes and Elliott S! Maggin. Those folks, having already won, cannot win again.
I thought that was clear but I guess I have to be clearer. There were at least thirty nominations for folks listed in that paragraph, including five for Steve Gerber and the one from the fellow who said it was an outrage that the judges were so "unaware of John Broome's contributions to comics" that we hadn't presented the award to him. This kind of thing puzzles me more than it probably should.
I go now to do things. See you in a day or so.