Award winning

No, not me. I'm still talking to a vacuum although one or two footsteps have been left to say otherwise. One of those footsteps mentioned I was poo-pooing an award winning series. An Eisner Award winner, in fact, which does seem to be considered the most prestigious one around for comics. Okay, he actually mentioned Hall-of-Fame, but I'm about to go on about awards.

I don't actually put much stock in being "award winning" in that I don't look at it as much higher than just being nominated for the award. The usual lip service is, "It's an honor just to be nominated!" Well, here's why that may actually be true.

Those few times I've taken the time to look at the pool of nominations (and this event has not happened a statistically significant number of times), I have found that about half of them were genuinely interesting to me. The rest I could take or leave. A few I'd even prefer to leave. When the actual award comes around, as often as not it comes from the part of the pool I don't care so much about.

Let's face it, if you're giving an award to a comic (book, movie, pinwheel) and you're looking at a pool of six of which three are fairly evenly matched and universally appealing, those three will get a large number of votes that are split fairly evenly over them. If one of the others is very appealing to some small group, it may well have more votes and win the award.

Winning isn't everything but getting the nomination shows it may be worth looking at. However, tastes differ and it may be worth putting down after looking at it.