I don’t think the letter meant to suggest that writers get a vacation whenever there’s a sequence of wordless narrative (no matter what the style is, the script should be describing what’s going on, wordless or not) although I could see how it might be interpreted that way. I think they were just trying to emphasize the image component in a situation where that component got ignored in terms of recognition.

Neil Gaiman summed it up pretty well on his blog:

“About seventeen years ago the phone rang. “You’re nominated for a World Fantasy Award for best short story,” I was told.

“You should make sure that Charles Vess is nominated too,” I said. “He drew it. And as a comic, it’s not just the writer. It’s both of us.”

There were a couple of phone calls, and when the nominations were announced, Charles had been added to the list.

Which was something I found myself remembering when I read,

The Canada Council for the Arts won’t add Canadian illustrator Jillian Tamaki’s name to the official list of nominees in the text category for this year’s Governor-General’s Award for children’s literature.

“We’re a little bit late in the game” to either discuss the issue or make the addition, Melanie Rutledge, head of writing and publishing for the Canada Council, said Wednesday evening. But “we’ll take it under consideration going forward. … We’re always wanting feedback like this.”

It’s for Skim, a graphic novel [Jillian] created with her cousin, author Mariko Tamaki. The book, published by Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, is one of five titles short-listed for the $25,000 G-G prize in children’s literature (text), with Mariko Tamaki cited as the sole creator. If you give a writing award to a comic and ignore the art, you’re being foolish, short-sighted and fundamentally failing to understand what comics are or what comics writing means.

And it’s never too late to fix things.

Now, before I head off on some barking mad Jeremiad against short-sighted Canadians, I shall drink some chicken soup and go to sleep.”

They should simply credit the artist as “co-author” (unless they don’t even have provisions to cover co-authored traditional prose novels) and then move to create an appropriate category next year for graphic novels/comics/sequential art/funnybooks/whatever with more specific guidelines governing collaborations as well as sole creators who have written and drawn their projects.

It seems like a bit of a flu-like trend lately. James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer got snubbed out of consideration for their Dark Knight score because of similar bureaucratic silliness.

If so, for said award, when the illustrator gets nominated, should the writer get nominated as well? After all, the illustrator would not have had anything to draw if not for the text from the writer, correct?

I think this can be a stickier issue than it seems. Some comic writers are so specific that they include very precise panel descriptions, detailing just how many panels on a page, their size, what angle the view of the contents of the panel are, if they’re inset, and so on. Some writers even do thumbnails. Does someone who writes their comics like that write MORE of the comic than a writer who just writes prose and dialog and lets the artist choose how to translate that into panels and angles and page compositions?

In the original letter it states “there are often sequences (sometimes whole graphic novels) where the images alone convey the narrative.” This almost seems to imply that it is the artist who is solely responsible for those sequences. Does the writer only count as the writer of the parts that have balloons and captions?

In a collaborative medium there’s never a clear cut line between who did X and who did Y. As I often work in writer/artist scenarios, I know there’s usually a dialog between each party. If I choose to draw something different than what they wrote, they might like it, or they might want it the way it was in their script, or it might give them an idea for something different. But for all the ideas they give me for what to draw, and all the ideas I might give them regarding the writing, they are still credited as writer and I’m credited as artist.

I’m sort of playing Devil’s Advocate with myself here. But I’m left wondering what the jury for this award was thinking. If they’re only nominating the book for its text, does that mean they’d still have nominated it if the art was just drawings of stick figures?

(and please no one think I’m dissing Matt Feazell’s work.)

In so many ways, they don’t matter.

We recognize your intrinsic contribution, Jillian.

Well done!