SDCC 2026 Diary

Day One: Wednesday, July 22, 2026 “Preview Night”

11:00 A.M.

I forgot the con starts at 12:00 instead of 11:00 today so I’m sitting on the floor taking my meds reading my Agatha Christie novel (Hallowe’en Party) and people watching. Currently there’s a horny nerd couple in front of me. The boyfriend, in cargo shorts and slides with socks, is feeling his girlfriend up, right there on on the sidewalk. His hand is fully on her tits as the security guard asks if they have any questions about the con. 

So far, I’m shocked by how chill and calm the energy here is. I imagined hoards of frantic nerds trampling each other like some kind of costumed Black Friday but it seems a lot of people forget Wednesday is a thing for the Con. 

Best comics shirt so far:Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Steel Ball Runshirt worn by a kind of out-of-it looking guy wandering between the various convention hall doors waiting for things to open. 

Security seems to be bouncing people between the different hall entrances. They say “If you ask at Hall H they’re going to send you right back here,” but when you ask where you should be upon your return they send you right back to Hall H. I think it’s some kind of psychological crowd control tactic to keep everyone moving around and tired. 

A woman is walking around the convention sidewalk with a big banner attached to her backpack like a Japanese feudal banner-bearer. The banner has Spider-Man on it and says “Spidey says ‘Donate Blood!”, I wonder if she takes it herself right there on the sidewalk. 

Another contender for best T-Shirt: A nine year old girl with a hot pink backpack and a Hatsune Miku shirt on. 

11:50 A.M. 

I’ve finally been given definitive information about where to wait in line to get in and I’m standing in an interminable line at Hall A waiting to start moving. It seems there’s quite a lot of waiting involved in conventions, especially this one.

2:42 P.M.

I’m at a coffee shop in downtown San Diego after being let in to get my press badge. I didn’t realize it at first but the 12:00 P.M. start time is in fact just for people getting badges, and not actually for any of the rest of the con to start. In fact the Con itself starts at 5:00 P.M.. So I’m sitting here drinking an iced matcha and reading my Agatha Christie, which is pretty excellent and unusually dark, which suits my mood. I was given a truly horrendous Hulu-sponsored backpack thing that’s way larger than any bag ever should be. It’s grocery bag shaped but doesn’t have tote bag handles, just backpack straps. I presume it’s massive so that I can shove the mountains of things I’m going to buy into it. 

I went to Now or Never comics,  a downtown SD comic shop that was my second favorite when I lived in the city after Comic-Kaze comics. I crate-dug around there for almost three hours, rubbing shoulders with a bunch of other early-comer nerds. Mostly I was searching for the 1995DC New Godsrun written by Tom Peyer and Rachel Pollack and drawn by Luke Ross. After writing about Pollack’sDoom PatrolI’m trying to read herNew Gods, which is really weird and super nineties. It isn’t collected anywhere so it’s become the new focus of my crate-digging endeavors. I couldn’t find any which is starting to become a pattern, but I came away with a Jack KirbyEternal’s Annual #1and an Alan MooreSaga of the Swamp Thing #45that has a really good Western-inspired cover. 

I also ended up buying the complete bundle of Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’sElektra Saga. I was inspired to do so partially because I loveDaredevil, but more so because I love my partner, who just finished her thesis on bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, whose physique was used by Janson as the original reference for Elektra. If you realize Lyon is in there, suddenly she’s all you can see in the original Janson stuff. The covers are great draftsmanship examples, although the rest of the art isn’t quite as interesting as the Sienkiewicz run, but whose art can really live up to Sienkiewicz?

I overheard an interesting and impassioned conversation between some kind of Youtuber and a Now-Or-Never retailer about the speculator market and the talk that comics is entering a new speculator bubble that’s going to pop soon and send us tumbling into a second dark age.Absolute Batman, which is in many ways the talk of the Con, is what prompted it. The two guys were both pretty confident that the speculator market was really just “A bunch of the same guys trading issues and money back and forth with one another,” and that that meant the speculator bubble couldn’t really burst, since they are an insular micro-economy. I’m not sure I share such an optimistic view of the market, especially since it ignores the fact that these men are still the ones who are going into several comic shops a week every Wednesday to buyAbsolute Batmanet al. in bulk from retailers. It seems blindsided to me to consider it insulated, since they’re still having a real effect on publishing and retail by providing a short-sighted and manufactured sense of demand. 

I’m sitting next to two women who are apparently working at some kind of Nickelodeon children’s slime booth.Iwant to get slimed. I hope future cons will see fit to create more adult-focused sliming activities. 

In other news I’m getting sleepy—It’s so warm and I’m getting so sleepy. 

4:10 P.M. 

While reading my Aggie outside of the cafe, someone walked out and said “Hey, you! Reading the Agatha Christie, I just bought that one, do you like it?” I told him I’m enjoying it.Hallowe’en Storyis a 1969 Poirot novel—late in Poirot and Aggie’s career, and laden with all sorts of late ‘60s cultural references from LSD to child-snatching van-drivers to computers and I’m enjoying it although it’s also a somewhat melancholy book for Aggie. He asked if I was a mystery fan, I said yes and he recommended a press I don’t know about—Pushkin Press—who are publishing a lot of translated fairplay mysteries, including a genre I haven’t yet encountered called Shin-Honkaku from Japan. 

This is my first fan interaction of the Con and it dispelled some of the cynicism that I was trying to deal with going into SDCC. The guy was so genuinely excited about the material we were talking about, which is the energy I was hoping to encounter at the Con. I recommended that he visit Dog Eared Books in San Francisco for vintage copies of Agatha Christie, since he was bemoaning not being able to easily find old-school covers for his Aggies, which is what I was reading. 

5:50 P.M.

I just bought my first ever capital ‘T’ Toy—a pink Godzilla from Super 7 for my friend. The strangest booth I encountered today was the Alex Ross booth. Yes, he has a whole booth, and no it’s likely not what you’re imagining. It’s a huge booth for one person, definitely the largest single artist booth at the Con. It’s all white and incredibly well-lighted like a high class art gallery. His art is all tastefully and minimally framed. It has a kind of intimidating aura that keeps the booth kind of peaceful compared to the rest of the con. There’s a salesman who has mafia levels of goop in his hair and an amazing smokey jazz club-suit on who’s shmoozing a couple in formal wear. It’s a whole other world in Ross-ville. It’s the only booth I felt like was calling me poor for walking in wearing work pants. 

6:00 P.M. 

I hunted down the Drawn and Quarterly booth. Peggy Burns gave me a big hug and we talked Tillie Walden andCharity & Sylvia.She just got married to Tom Devlin and invited me to dinner on Saturday. I’m totally going. She seems exhausted and exasperated by the online discourse aboutCharity & Sylviaand I have to say I understand. I feel kind of terrible for theD&Qcrew. They’re also terribly busy—unusually so, it seems like—because of their newMoominlicense, which I think they got about two years ago. This humble indie published from Canada is being absolutely swarmed byMoominfans looking for hats, water bottles, stickers, etc. I’m sure they’re grateful for the crowd, but it’s funny seeing them be swarmed by the SDCC merch crowd for what seems like maybe only the first or second time ever. 

Day Two: Thursday, July 23, 2026 

10:30 A.M.

I had a bit of a hard time waking up today. I’m sleeping on a friend’s floor in Sorrento Valley, which is far afield from the convention center, in a dusty suburban maze of cul-de-sacs. I’m going to go to a few panels and then scope out what artists’ alley is like. I’m supposed to hunt down a Mothra figurine from the Mondo booth, which is(I think) part of the Funko family, or at least part of the giant Funko booth? The Mothra figure is pretty cool, it’s huge and sort of Aztec inspired, but the toy booths scare me. Everyone’s so intense about it. I’m hoping to make it to the Hard Rock Hotel bar, which I’ve been told is where weary comics professionals go to drown their cartoon troubles in happy hour margaritas, which sounds oh-so-fun. 

I took a gamble on the trolley over this morning. I hopped off the Blue Line which is what I rode on over yesterday and got on an events line that people were speculating about. None of us were sure the Red Line was real  but it proved true and we got off right in front of the convention center! Huzzah! The Red Line trolley stop PA system was voiced over to be a sultry english woman’s voice who said seductively “Welcome to the Magic the Gathering SDCC event line. All faresmustbe paid.” Before cutting back to the normal mechanical ‘male’ voice saying “Please hold onto the handrails at all times.”

Best shirts I’ve seen so far: A couple wearing two different Jamie HewlettGorillazshirts. I almost showed them my Hewlett tattoo but figured flashing my tits on the trolley line at 10:30 in the morning could go over poorly. 

11:15 A.M.

I’m going to check out Artists’ Alley today. There aren’t many folks here signing for Thursday since it’s early in the con but I got to see Mark Texeira screaming at an assistant at his table for selling a piece of sample art instead of telling him to draw a new one from the sample. He said “See how they say ‘sample?’ I know you can’t see, but they say ‘sample’ right there.’” The woman wore glasses. 

I attempted to go see Deniz Camp, who was placed next to Frank Miller, which has to be one of the weirdest table arrangements I can think of. They’re both wildly popular, but choosing to seat a wildly leftist, abolitionist comics writer like camp next to a weaboo turned islamophobe by 9/11 is like seating your trans friend next to your uncle who thinks fluoride is turning kids into drag queens at your wedding. I really wanted to see the two of them in action, I was curious what the demographics of each line would be, and whether I could incite a riot, but neither of them were there. They’re both understandably and unsurprisingly very busy at Comicon.

12:20 P.M. 

After my failed attempt to see what was left of theDark Knightcreator with my own eyes, I headed over to the Mondo booth to buy my friend her Mothra. What nobody told me, because I’m not a toy person, and I was also clearly woefully under-researched in the methods of consumerism of SDCC was that certain booths provide customers with wristbands at the beginning of the day so that you can leave the booth and wander, then get back in line if you so wish, in order to buy your toy or toys. I showed up and was told this, unfortunately too late to achieve a wristband. Myself and one other guy politely told the toy bouncer that we understood and that we would try again later in the con. At that point something strange occurred. The bouncer seemed to have a change of heart. Perhaps in some Grinch-ian moment of coronary growth, our slight act of polite understanding made his heart grow three sizes that day and he said, looking around apprehensively, ‘I’ll let you guys in,’ before moving the ribbon aside. 

12:50 P.M. 

Came into the last ten minutes of a panel on the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund(CBLDF). They’re discussing new ways to think about the comics code, and how we can repurpose the concept of a comics code to workforcreators rather than against. Jeff Trexler leading this discussion proposes that such a thing could protect artists’ rights to royalties, creator ownership, reprints, etc. It’s an interesting rework, brings to mind the Creator’s Bill of Rights from the late ‘80s that said:

“For the survival and health of comics, we recognize that no single system of commerce and no single type of agreement between creator and publisher can or should be instituted. However, the rights and dignity of creators everywhere are equally vital. Our rights, as we perceive them to be and intend to preserve them, are:

1. The right to full ownership of what we fully create.
2. The right to full control over the creative execution of that which we fully own.
3. The right of approval over the reproduction and format of our creative property.
4. The right of approval over the methods by which our creative property is distributed.
5. The right to free movement of ourselves and our creative property to and from publishers.
6. The right to employ legal counsel in any and all business transactions.
7. The right to offer a proposal to more than one publisher at a time.
8. The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work.
9. The right to full and accurate accounting of any and all income and disbursements relative to our work.
10. The right to prompt and complete return of our artwork in its original condition.
11. The right to full control over the licensing of our creative property.
12. The right to promote and the right of approval over any and all promotion of ourselves and our creative property.”

The bill didn’t necessarily go anywhere tangible beyond probably being an early and very small seed in the collective comics consciousness that would grow into the indie revolution we saw in the ‘90s. Unfortunately, the Bill, whose signatories included such names as Steve Bisette, Peter Laird, Scott McCloud, Rick Veitch, and(ugh) Dave Sim, would be overshadowed by the movement spawned(pardon the expression) by the rise of Image Comics a few years later. Likely the failure of the Bill had less to do with its contents, which would go on to become industry practice in many if not all independent or small press comics publishers about a decade later, but more with the way that creators were unable to readily accept its feasibility. Denis Kitchen, a co-founder of the CBLDF, called it “pie-in-the-sky,” a sentiment that at the time would have been completely understandable although still regrettably defeatist. Kitchen was also on the panel and was enthusiastic about the idea of a creator-driven comics code which would likely look quite a bit like the bill he sadly derided almost forty years ago. 

2:00 P.M.

Some fun facts about Katie Skelly from her spotlight hosted by Briana Loewinsohn:

1. Katie lovesHarvey Comics.
2. Her first published comic was about a girl named Fuss who took steroids in Syracuse University’sDaily Orangenewspaper.
3. Katie Skelly hasexcellentred nail polish on. 
4. Films, shows, and film genres Katie loves:
   1. French vampire films.
   2. Suspiriadir. Dario Argento, even though it makes her sleepy because lots of it takes place in bed. 
   3. Battle of the Planetsfrom Cartoon Network.
5. Bit of Skelly Wisdom on creating sexy comics: She had to learn how to hold back because “[She has] to be able to look [herself] in the mirror.”

At this point in the panel a mysterious and rather apocalyptic rumbling emitted from the floor below us. Was it the vengeful ghost of Jim Shooter trying to claw its way back into relevance being held back by SDCC exorcists? We’ll never know.  

1. Katie’s Top Five Favorite Cartoonists:
   1. Kyoko Okazaki
   2. Guido Crepax
   3. Bruce Timm
   4. Guy Peellaert
   5. Ai Yazawa

3:30 P.M. 

The con hall feels infinite. I wander it endlessly, expecting what I see to change, yet it never does. How this lasts five days I haven’t the foggiest. 

I wandered my way to the Drawn and Quarterly booth after saying hi to Katie Skelly and Jaime Hernandez at Fantagraphics. Mimi Pond (Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters) and Marc Torices (Cornerlius) were doing a signing so I introduced myself to them. Marc was likely the artist most excited to be at SDCC that I’ve met. His excitement is infectious and incredibly charming. He made me feel very cool about being a lowly comics journalist. 

He had just travelled to San Diego from Spain by way of an extended trip in Mexico visiting his girlfriend there. We discussed Mexican comics together and the nature of comics history and the comics archive there. Marc thought there didn’t seem to be a great deal of archival protection being put in place in Mexican comics yet, maybe it’s akin to the way that comics were viewed in the United States in the early 20th century. There have to be great comics scholars in Mexico working to preserve this work, if only it were easier to find them. 

Mimi called me a showoff for speaking Spanish with Marc, which was hilarious, I think she wanted to be part of the conversation, so I talked to her about having dyed hair and the weird need people always feel to comment on it, even when you’re clearly going somewhere or trying to do something. I will say, her hair is a magnificent color that moves from ice to royal to baby blue smoothly. It matches Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters, which is drawn and painted in gorgeous blues. 

The Eisner award winners list was leaked today, and the news has spread like wildfire. I learned about it from Owen Burr at the Fantagraphics booth. Some poor SDCC marketing assistant or website coder accidentally posted the winners list to the comic con website about thirty-six hours before the awards were supposed to start on Friday night. The list was then of course, promptly copied and reposted to the r/comicbooks subreddit captioned “2026 Eisner Award Winners List” with a spoiler heading and an UNVERIFIED LEAK label. 

None of usreallyseemed to know whether the list was real, although the rumors that the list had first been posted to the SDCC official website before making its way to Reddit gave the leak credence. Even then though, who was to say whether the reddit post was true to the original leak or not, since no one I talked to had seen the original SDCC post. 

I skimmed the list briefly, but decided it would be more interesting to go into the Eisners not knowing the outcome, figuring it would have no outsize effect on my ability to act as a good and honorable journalist. I did, however, screenshot the leaked list, in the salacious, and eventually vain, hope either that the Eisner committee would panic and recast the winners, or that the leak turned out to be a grand hoax orchestrated by a hilariously bored reddit user. 

4:30 P.M.

Among the strangest of the manymanypromotional emails I received as a registered member of the press for SDCC was an email from eBay about something called ‘eBay Live’. The email advertised a service in which speculators(they were tastefully called “collectors” in eBay’s email), could look at live eBay search and sales data from their vast surveillance network, in order to know what books, toys, and collectibles will eventually pay their mortgage. I found this to be perhaps the most cynical thing I encountered at the con. Nothing screams ‘the end is nigh’ like global data surveillance being directed at the collectibles market to spark and manipulate speculator fervor from afar. eBay’s headquarters is  (unsurprisingly) in San Jose, CA, which gives the eBay live thing a kind of techno-psychic beat to it, with eBay sticking its silicone fingers into the pleasure centers of every would-be gold speculator on the market. 

Day Three: Friday, July 24, 2026 “Eisners Night”

I’ve skipped ahead a bit here to the Eisners. 

7:45 P.M.

I was very kindly invited to the Eisner Awards by First Second publishing, and thus I found myself sitting at a table awaiting several strangers whose names I didn’t even know, eating a rapidly cooling plate of lasagna. I arrived rather early. In other words, right on time. I’m seated with Heidi Macdonald ofComicsBeatand two nominees, Gavin Aung Tan, author ofCreature Clinic, which is up for a Best Publication for Kids award, and Wroten, who is up for Best Publication for Teens forEveryone Sux But You. I haven’t brought up the leak, because it seems sort of gauche. Neither Gavin nor Kenny seem particularly affected by the leak. I saw Kenny show their hand to Gavin. It was trembling with nerves. I don’t know whether Kenny is going to win or not, as I stayed away from reading the leak too closely, but their nerves and care about the awards are admirable. Maybe they haven’t read them.

The Eisners are hosted this year by Phil LaMarr and Tom Lennon. Tom came out dressed as Supergirl and pretended to stumble around drunkenly through the audience, saying “this is the year that Supergirl got very dirty, andverydrunk—and that’s when I started to relate to her.”  Once onstage Lennon said “Some of my jokes got leaked online,” which everyone chuckled at. Heidi and I weren’t sure how people would deal with the leak debacle but this seems to have been the right choice. The leak was unprecedented, and also so deadpan and nonchalant, that dealing with it in a humorous off-hand manner makes more sense than doing something formal and grandiose. 

Gary Groth, co-founder and publisher of Fantagraphics, accepted the award for Best Short Storyin absentiafor Shintaro Kago’s “Blood Harvest” as translated by Zack Davisson. Groth, who’s known as a bit of a wit, although perhaps not verbose enough to be called a raconteur, simply leaned into the mic while holding Kago’s trophy and said with a slight smile “well what a surprise,” before giving a subdued thank you and leaving the stage. 

Daniel Warren Johnson accepted the award for Best One Shot/Single Issue forAbsolute Batman 2025 Annual#1. Johnson’s work on theAbsolute Batman Annualwas superb, and with the exception ofAbsolute Martian Manhunter, likely the most outrageous thing DC put out in the last five years. Johnson’s issue saw a massive Batman beating the crap out of a bunch of white supremecist neo-Nazis. Johnson, who is from Chicago, was writing the issue in the wake of ICE’s invasion of his hometown. He thanked editor Kate Kubert for fighting for his uncompromising, radical vision. Johnson certainly wins SDCC’s Best Manbun in my book. 

Absolute Batman Annualwas up against some of the greatest single issues to hit comics stands in this decade by some of the industry’s greatest creators ever, includingAssorted Crisis Events #4 byDeniz Camp, Eric Zawadzki,Absolute Martian Manhunterby Deniz Camp, Javier Rodriguez, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou,Ice Cream Man #43by W. Maxwell Prince, Martin Morazzo, et al., andSomething is Killing the Children: A Monster Walks into a Bar #1by James Tynion IV and Wether Dell’Edera. The lineup was stacked with talent this year, with the notable exception of any Marvel titles. Image, a studio which has been remarkably consistent at putting out middling, uninteresting series with a very few notable exceptions, for the last five years dominated alongside DC.Absolute Batman Annualis undoubtedly the best installment of the series, which has received the most hype of any contemporary comics project by far. My kneejerk reaction to seeing Camp on any list of nominees for any award is to root for Camp, but given his, and his collaborators’ performance in following categories, I can forgive their defeat in this category, given Johnson’s outstanding performance. It’s wonderful to see superheroes punching Nazis again!

The Best Anthology Award was given to Andrea Shea and Jillian Grant for editingDC Pride 2025.Shea and Grant thanked the massive team involved in the issue, which comprised six writers, fifteen line artists, five colorists, and six editors. Shea thanked several people, most notably, and surprisingly, given her relative erasure from the collective comics consciousness, Rachel Pollack, for her work in furthering queer narratives in DC comics. 

Marc Evanier and Athena Finger presented the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing to Jenny Blake Isabella, who came out as trans last year, having her name appear for the first time ever in print in theDC Pride 2025issue which won Best Anthology just a few minutes earlier. In her speech, Isabella said “Marc says I have two minutes to give this speech but who’s gonna listen to him? I am a simple cave woman writer—your comic book industry scares me…I very much like who I am today. I want to thank my caregivers at the Metrohealth Gender Clinic.” before tearfully accepting the award, and celebrating the world of comics and the many people who allowed and encouraged her to accept herself for who she is. Isabella is the first trans winner of a Bill Finger award. She finished her speech saying “I want to die over my desk after writing the end of a good story…and then my cats will eat me.” Blake proves to be one of the funniest people I have seen at SDCC. 

Isabella is likely best known as the creator of Black Lightning for DC, but what I think is likely the most fascinating little story known to the public is her conflict with Jim Shooter about her run ofGhost Rider.Isabella wanted to include a Christ-like figure in her run, and wrote several issues including him one of which was set to go to print. Of the incident, Isabella would write inComics Buyer’s Guide #2628in her column Tony’s Tips“I’d written a story wherein, couched in mildly subtle terms, Blaze accepted Jesus as his savior and freed himself from Satan’s power forever. Had I remained on Ghost Rider, which was my intent at the time, the title’s religious elements would have faded into the background. Blaze would be a Christian, but he’d express this in the way he led his life. … Unfortunately, an assistant editor took offense at my story. The issue was ready to go to the printer when he pulled it back and ripped it to pieces. He had some of the art redrawn and a lot of the copy rewritten to change the ending of a story two years in the making. ‘The Friend’ was revealed to be, not Jesus, but a demon in disguise. To this day, I consider what he did to my story one of the three most arrogant and wrongheaded actions I’ve ever seen from an editor.”

Shooter was later revealed to be the destructive editor, which should surprise no readers who are familiar with Shooter’s infamous run as a Marvel editor which, in Henry Kissinger-esque fashion, seemed to last far longer than it had any right to. 

This story was oddly paralleled in the hallowed halls of DC editorial a decade and a half later in 1989 between the pages of Rick Veitch’sSwamp Thing.The final four issues of Veitch’s run, which followed Moore’s legendary one, saw Swamp Thing meeting Jesus, among other things. DC promptly and quietly cancelled the series before the issues could hit the stands. Now, however, for the first time ever, DC is publishing the four censored issues, the fourth of which came out a few days ago under the titleSwamp Thing ‘89. 

From the kids and youth categories, Best Publication for Early Readers was won by Dan Santat forAll the Hulk Feels,which I’m sure is great, but I would have loved to see an indie creator and imprint win for kids books. Best Publication for Kids went to Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud’sCartoonists Club ,beating my tablemate. I felt bad for him, but he was a good sport. Frankly, how anyone is supposed to compete against two of the best established people in the business, is frankly beyond me. Similarly Wroten lost toThis Place Kills Me,from Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux. It was a good reminder what an honor it is simply to be nominated, especially against some of the titans of the artform. 

Best Lettering was one of the categories I was most invested in, because of the nomination of a person whom I consider to be one of the greatest practitioners to ever practice the magnificent and underappreciated craft of comics lettering: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. One of the marketing folks at the First Second table asked my if Otsmane-Elhaou was “good” after I let out a somewhat tipsy set of whoops and cheers into the crowd upon the calling of his name. I told her seriously that he was one of the best to ever do it, before cheering even more loudly when Deniz Camp accepted the Otsmane-Elhaous award for him. 

Under Otsmane-Elhaou’s name in my journal I wroteNO FUCKING CONTEST. 

Otsmane-Elhaou lettered several of the best comics of the last few years, including the Deniz Camp-written seriesAbsolute Martian Manhunter and Bleeding Hearts.Otsmane-Elhaou’s work does what I feel far too few letterers are allowed by editors to do, which is allow readers to realize a human lettered their comic. His work is the most virtuosic work of lettering since, perhaps Will Eisner himself. His lettering goes above and beyond the baseline legibility and precision which has become the industry standard under DC, Marvel, and Image, and instead rises to the aesthetic challenge of his collaborators. 

Best Digital Comic was won byPractical Defense Against Piracyby Tony Cliff. Best Webcomic went toTiger, Tiger,by Petra Erika Nordlund. Both works were essentially unknown to me, highlighting a massive blindspot in the world of comics. I’m trying to decide whether I have the time and inclination to delve into the world of webcomics, but quite frankly I’m scared to dedicate more of my life than I already am to comics, as ridiculous as that sounds. BothTiger, Tiger,andPractical Defense Against Piracyare hosted on their creators’ own websites which feels like a throwback to a more youthful time of the internet, where artists, creators, bloggers, etc. could make their way with a real following by hosting their own work independently of massive conglomerates. 

The Russ Manning Newcomer Award was won by Stipan Morian, another Camp co-conspirator, who is currently drawingBleeding Heartsunder DC’s new Vertigo reboot. I cheered for Morian as well, as my marketing neighbors chuckled quietly. Morian’s speech was my favorite of the night: “Thank you.” 

Morian is new to comics, with his only sizable contributions as of yet being drawing Camp’s20th Century Menin addition toBleeding Hearts. Before comics, however, Morian spent his artistic life before comics working as an animator, as well as a renaissance stone masonry restorer in Europe. Morian’sBleeding Heartsis the only series in DC’s new Vertigo imprint, with the exception of Tynion IV’sNice House by the Seathat retains the spirit of the original Karen Berger-founded Vertigo of the ‘90s. 

The newGeorge Harriman Library: Krazy & Ignatz 1928-1930collection edited by Eric Reynolds and Philip Nel won the award for Best Archival Collection/Project – Strips. 

The collection itself is one of my favorite archival projects, since Fantagraphics printed it in large format, preserving the incredible sense of scale and horizon that Harriman pioneered. 

Best Archival Collection/Project – Comic Books went, rather boringly, to theAkira Hardcover Collectionby Katsuhiro Otomo. 

In retrospect, Diane DiMassa’sHothead Paisancollection as collected by Anika Banister from New York Review Comics should have won out. Considerations of what it actually means to do archival work seem to have gone out the window in the case of theAkiracollection. Calling the hardcover collection an ‘archival’ project interprets the work of the archivist so liberally as to be essentially obsolete.Akirahas been available to readers via retailers from Amazon to Barnes & Noble to any local comic shop in the world, for years since its original translation. While I’m sure that work went into publishingAkirain hardcover format, there is are very few quantitative or qualitative things, aside from the material of their covers, which differentiate the paperback editions from the hardcover ones. 

The work of Banister, as well as the other four archivists nominated is far more representative of the value that archivists and historians provide the comics world in their often thankless work restoring, collecting, and editing comics that might otherwise never again see the light of day.Hothead Paisan,of all the collections nominated iis probably the work most likely to have been forgotten by the community in the next few decades given the cumulative erasures that queer and feminist stories, as well as comics stories are subjected to systemically as every year goes by. 

Best Graphic Album-Reprint was awarded to Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber for their hilarious and nerdySuperman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen: Deluxe Edition. Fraction was joined by Mariko Tamaki(accepting for Steve Lieber), and gave a hilarious acceptance speech thanking probably one hundred different names all at once in quick succession, while Fraction heckled Tamaki for going too slow. Among the names, the one that stood out to me, as I work at a comic shop right next to his house, isKavalier and Claywriter Michael Chabon.

This is frankly a really odd category for the Eisners. I’m not even really sure what it means. All the nominees are from recent memory, which I suppose excludes them from being ‘archival’, but all of them are contemporary enough that nominating them again just feels stunted and weird. 

Best Comics Related Book went toCrumb: A Cartoonist’s Lifeby Dan Nadel. No surprise there, it’s quite good, and it was the only book on the list to break containment at all and actually become a wildly popular nonfiction title. 

Best Adaptation from Other Medium went, bafflingly toLord of the Flies – The Graphic Novelby Aimee de Johng, and accepted, even more bafflingly, by Mark Buckingham. 

Best Comics Related Periodical/Journalism was rewarded to the amazing work of David Harper for his work as editor, journalist, founder, and podcaster atSKTCHD.

Best Academic/Scholarly Work was awarded to Andrea Horbinski forManga’s First Century.

Best Publication Design went to Chip Kidd and Shawn Dahl forThe Essential Peanuts, which is a beautiful book. 

Kidd is one of the most celebrated classic book designers of all time, and when I ran into nominee for Publication Design Dan Goldman, who did the design work for his bookRed Light Properties: Unfinished Business, he said how much of an honor it was just to duke it out with Kidd for an Eisner at all. If you’re wondering what another example of Kidd’s work is, look no further than the covers of Michael Crichton’sJurassic ParkandJurassic Park: The Lost World, which haven’t changed a bit since their original publication. That’s longevity, baby. 

Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance,by Ben Passmore won Best Reality Based Work.Black Arms to Hold You Upis one of my favorite comics from last year, and Passmore is undoubtedly the best political cartoonist of the decade. 

If you ever want some unwaveringly interesting and entertaining political commentary, follow him on Instagram and watch his stories, in which he answers political questions, monologues, and cracks wise about all things politics while cooling down from his daily runs. 

George Takei took the stage in a wheelchair to give a heartfelt speech about how much it meant to win Best Graphic Memoir forIt Rhymes With Takei. 

I’m non-plussed about this, especially given that he won over a number of cartoonists who don’t even have close to the fame Takei has, and did equally excellent work, including The Ephemerata by Carol Tyler, and Precious Rubbish by Kayla E. 

Dromeby Jesse Lonergan won Best Graphic Album-New. Every nominee for the category absolutely deserves to win. They’re all excellent, although my favorite to win would have beenCannonby Lee Lai, which is the best graphic novel I read in 2025. 

Best U.S. Edition of International Material went toNocturnosby Laura Perez, translated by Andrewa Rosenberg. Gary Groth was announced as the acceptor of the award, but once again he did not appear. Instead, Conrad Groth, his son, accepted the award. 

Best U.S. Edition of International Material – Asia went toPurgatory Funeral Cakesby Sanho, translated by Danny Lim. 

Javier Rodriguez won Best Penciller/Inker forAbsolute Martian Manhunter, an award which he deserves several times over. 

Absolute Martian Manhunteris the culmination of Rodriguez’s work to date. What Rodriguez managed to do between the covers ofMartianis some of the most formally experimental cartooning I have ever seen from any genre or era, full stop. Rodriguez’s sense of play is beyond anything I’ve ever read without compromising the seriousness and emotional complexity of Camp’s writing. Rodriguez is slated to drawShadow of the Batwith Camp in the coming roster of new DC titles, an amount of work and recognition which has been a long tim coming to Rodriguez, who, liked Peach Momoko, has been squandered by the big two, relegated to a miniseries every few years. If you want to delve into the avant-garde of comics language, Rodriguez’s work onAbsolute Martianfor DC comics is the thick of it. 

Best Coloring was granted to the venerable and very deserving Jordie Bellaire, who has been coloring the best series of any given year for years. This year she won for his work onAbsolute Wonder Woman, Nice House by the Sea, Assorted Crisis Events, WORLDTR33,andDepartment of Truth,just to name a few. Bellaire is another example of the complete dominance of DC comics over Marvel this year. Her win also cements Tynion IV and Camp as the two best writers to push formal boundaries with. 

Martin Simmonds, the celebrated penciller, inker, and painter of Tynion IV’sDepartment of Truthtook the trophy for Best Painter/Multimedia Artist, which should surprise no one. Simmonds has been excellent sinceDepartment of Truth#1, taking up the mantle for king of  experimental painterly work from Bill Sinkiewicz and absolutely running with it. 

Deniz Camp is the Eisner winner for Best Writer this year. Camp, whose collaborators pretty much swept every major award this year, won forAbsolute Martian Manhunter, Assorted Crisis Events,andThe Ultimates.HUGErespect to Camp for being one of the only people to accept an award with openly pro-Palestine sentiments(he was wearing a keffiyeh). 

Camp is, without doubt, the best comic book writer writing monthly comics of this century. It is a testament to the strength of his work, perhaps even his genius, that Marvel, Image, and DC, have all allowed him to create series which have unapologetically abolitionist, anticolonial, leftist titles. If Camp stopped writing today, he would be the best comics writer of the 2020s, but he shows no sign of stopping. 

Best Writer/Artist was awarded to Jamal Campbell for his work onZatanna, the second time that Campbell has written the character, although now with a great deal more experimentation.

Best Cover Artist was won by Javier Rodriguez, for his work onAbsolute Martian Manhunter, Batman & Robin Year One,andNew Gods.Absolute MartianandNew Godsare the two best series put out by DC in the 2024-2025 season, and it’s nice to see Ram V’sNew Godsget some recognition this season as well as last. 

Deniz Camp once again took Best New Series for his Image title,Assorted Crisis Events, along with his artist and collaborator Eric Zawadzki.Assorted Crisis Eventsis the last great series to be

Best Limited Series went toAbsolute Martian Manhunter, which I have said quite enough about already, and which I hope one day to review for this publication. 

Best Continuing Series was perhaps the greatest failure of this year’s Eisner’s was won by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta’sAbsolute Batman, which has been the talk of the Con, and the comics industry. 

Despite its wild popularity,Absolute Batmanis probably the greatest narrative failure of the money-printing machine DC has dubbed the Absolute Universe. A vapid, and poorly structured hype machine designed to appeal to the ape-brained minds of speculators everywhere. Whether the story’s immense failures are the fault of DC editorial’s greed, or Snyder’s failures as a writer is unclear, but my money is on editorial greed. Every two issues are designed for maximum speculation and hype, introducing new, uninteresting re-imaginings of hallowed classic Batman characters and dragging their names through the dirt, marketed with rampant variant covers. What’s depressing is these tactics have clearly worked, withAbsolute Batmanbeing one of the highest selling series of the decade. The victory of the series over its competition, which included more independent titles likeThe Department of Truth andFMLby Kelly Sue Deconnick and David Lopez,as well as a far superior Absolute title, Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman’sAbsolute Wonder Woman,dispels any illusion of critical meritocracy in the comics industry, and highlights the power that the speculator industry. 

There were a bunch of hall of fame inductees that I was super excited about, including Go Nagai, Mike Royer, Rick Veitch, Jeff Smith, and Akira Toriyama. 

Most embarrassing of the inductees was Dave Sim, whose dedication to comics was matched only by his dedication to misogyny. 

Day Four: Saturday, July 25, 2026

1:00 P.M. 

Spent today mostly crate-digging. I was talking to Gary Groth at the Fantagraphics booth earlier today and he was recalling early years of SDCC when it was almost exclusively comics dealers as far as the eye could see. I haven’t really shopped at all with the exception of killing time at Now or Never before Preview Night started, so I figured I might see what the comics bin people have going on. 

I continued to hunt for PollackNew Godsto no avail. I also couldn’t find any PollackDoom Patrol Issues, but I did manage to find some beautiful issues of Nancy Collins’sSwamp Thing, which is probably the greatest run of the comic after Moore’s. I also came away with a sole issue ofSwamp Thingfrom Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala’s run with a Steve Bissette cover in which Swamp Thing sits on an asteroid, comforting the imprisoned god Prometheus. 

I have also been hunting down one of my ‘90s capes favorites, which is Chuck Dixon’s game-changing run onNightwing. Dixon’s time on the series is responsible for the crazy layouts that the character would become known for for the next few decades, and cemented Nightwing as a character with his own interiority. The series is also hilariously nineties, with lots of snarls and dynamic actions and more muscles than the human body has ever had, although, thankfully, very few pouches. 

Apart from that, I stumbled upon a booth with a massive collection ofBatman AdventuresandBatman Beyondcomics. As a huge Bruce Timm fan, I was more than happy to snap a few issues up, including aBatman Beyondissue with the wonderful villain Ink on the cover, and a great Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, and Dick Grayson/Robin cover. I have been trying to find oldShadow of the Batback-issues from the same era, since I’ve been readingBatman: No Man’s Land,and those are some of my favorite iterations of the series which Deniz Camp and Javier Rodriguez are taking over, but found no luck. 

The back issue booths are packed full of customers browsing, but they’re also strange microcosms of calm in the sea of consumerist chaos that is the rest of the convention hall. I wish I had been visiting the booths since day one, since they’re a great place to rest, and get lost in comics, instead of people. But I was under the ridiculous notion that I was going to go through SDCC without spending any money. For anyone who goes in thinking this, I wish to warn you that that is a near impossibility. 

The selection at SDCC is an odd one. If you go to a real comics show rather than a comics convention, you’ll likely find mostly tables with large selections of silver age comics from both Marvel and DC, as well as a smattering of more specialized golden age tables selling everything from Gold Keys to Disneys to old Tarzans and early DC books. Therearethe occasional modern/current tables selling your speculator books, yourAbsolute Batmans, your(barf)D’Orcs,but they’re not really what people are going for. Comicon backissue booths seemed to be selling a lot more stuff from late bronze age to ‘90s comics, with the occasional silver age comics scattered in throughout the more modern stuff in the bins. There seems to be more of a fan bent to a lot of these booths, where both the sellers and the buyers are looking for the stuff they loved to read or have some sort of emotional interest in. I found the bins kind of sweet. 

2:30 P.M.

I’m at the Matt Fraction spotlight panel hosted by Kelly Sue DeConnick. The two are sort of the first couple of big three comics to my mind, and Fraction is one of my favorite Marvel/DC/Image writers. I am currently obsessed with his run onBatman, which is the best the title has been in a decade(I’m telling you, DC is weirdly good right now, they must have sacrificed a bunch of goats to Bacchus or something). HisHawkeyeproved what Marvelcouldbe if they would learn to hire good writers and then, and I know this sounds crazy but bear with me, hire good artists to work with them. 

The thing they don’t tell you(and, seemingly the panelists) about Comicon panels, is that fifty minutes might as well be ten when you have anything interesting to say. DeConnick and Fraction sat down and DeConnick explained her concept for the panel, which was a full overview of Fraction’s lengthy bibliography, going over each title and discussing it. Immediately this struck me as a regrettably impossible concept, the kind that’s too good to be true. 

Fraction’s words about his first couple books were all about the abject terror of eventhinkingyou might be worthy of a book being published, and how paralyzing that fear is. He encouraged folks to rush headlong through the experience, not thinking about whether they deserve something, but instead grasping at the joy of making something you’re excited about and accepting whatever comes once it’s out in the world. 

After running through the first couple titles they recounted a sweet story about going to seeAmelieby Jean-Pierre Jeunet in the theater. It was one of their early dates and DeConnick is apparently much less of a movie buff than Fraction. Halfway through the movie, Fraction realized that, if she wasn’t able to likethismovie, he wasn’t sure what future there was for them as a couple, but when he heard a rare out loud guffaw from the usually quiet DeConnick he stood up, shook his fists in the air and cheered. 

It was around that point that the two realized they were never going to make it through all of Fraction’s forty plus titles, and DeConnick skipped toSex Criminals, at which point Fraction thanked his longtime collaborator Chip Zdarsky, who revealed himself in the crowd before dashing out for some other engagement.Sex Criminalswas a funny discussion, and Fraction revealed he thinks women are unequivocally funnier than men, which got a cheer from the crowd. He also repped the letters columnLetter Daddies, as one of his favorite parts of the series.

Letters columns are perhaps the only area in comics that Image really has their competitors soundly beat at. I think it’s really because of how much more control creators have, and creators, for the most part are big nerds who would rather spend an extra page or two on a fun letters column about zombies or aliens or kinky weird sex, than break up a perfectly good story with a damn Snickers ad or something. 

The most touching title he talked about wasHawkeye,which he wrote with artist David Aja. Fraction’sHawkeyeremains a masterpiece, and probably the only goodHawkeyecomic to ever be published(trust me, if you’re going to read a bow and arrow comic, pick up someGreen Arrowfrom 1985-1995). When it was time for questions, what folks were most touched by was how dedicated Fraction and Aja were to portraying deafness and American Sign Language in their comic, and learning to tell an excellent story with those tools and constraints. Fraction talked about howHawkeyeopened his eyes to the power of representation in storytelling, saying he didn’t go into writing the book thinking he was going to make a representational story for deaf people, but just wanted to tell a good story. But when he began receiving letter after letter telling him how much the book meant to people, he realized how powerful representation is and it shifted his perspective deeply on storytelling. 

4:00 P.M.

I just left Mimi Pond’s spotlight, hosted by Lynn Peril.Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters & Meis Pond’s newest book and perhaps her magnum opus, but she’s been in the business for decades, making some of the funniest and smartest work on womanhood, feminism, and work out there. She is the cream of the crop when it comes to nonfiction and memoir comics, andDo Admitrepresents the culmination of decades of research on her part. The panel showed off the sheer amount of knowledge and understanding of the biography’s six subjects, and a love for an era of history which is as fascinating as it is fabulous. 

The way she spoke of the Mitford sisters, it was as if she really did know them. Questions asked of Pond about the specificity of their odd and fascinating aristocratic family were answered with the surety of someone who had lived with them for years. No other nonfiction biography, with the exception of Tillie Walden’sCharity and Syl research and the level of care taken with their subjects

Pond talked about her early career writing for free weekly papers in New York as a humorist. She recalled it being wonderfully steady work for a cartoonist, before leaving for Los Angeles for a decade, and returning to find the free weeklies gone, and the work dried up. Pond is one of the great cartoonists of her generation, and easily one of the funniest and most compelling people I’ve ever heard talk. She has a wealth of knowledge about a genre of comics history that is often overlooked, perhaps because of its ephemerality.  

8:00 P.M.

BIG NEWS AT THE MARVEL HALL H PANEL: I’m sure announcements were made and you can look them up somewhere else.  

Day Five: Sunday, July 26, 2026

12:00 P.M. 

I was hanging around the Drawn and Quarterly booth with Liz Schiller, waiting for a panel to start, when Tom Devlin walked up to us and asked if we wanted his new zine. We both said yes and he handed us this wonderful little comic made up of John Stanley roughs for an issue ofLittle Lulu. It was a great piece of comics archiving, and a testament to Devlin’s dedication to the hunt. He had most of the comic’s roughs but was missing a few pages, so he reached out to Karen Green, who is the comics archivist at Columbia University, and asked if she had a bead on the missing pages. It just so happened she did and she sent him scans of the remainders, which she’d found in a random envelope from Stanley’s archive. He put them together, and made a rough zine of his own that may appear in an upcomingLittle Lulucollection. Devlin’s got a real wit about him that makes talking comics with him all the more fun, since his passion for the medium is never more than thinly veiled behind his clever smile. I bring up theLittle Luluzine because one, it is a great example of the little things the comics archivists of the world do for the the pure passion of the work. Thanks to Devlin and Green a set of comics storyboards that might have remained incomplete forever are now reunited, preserved, and shared.

12:30 P.M. 

Liz and I went to the Jeff Smith spotlight, which was the only spotlight panel I went to hosted solely by its star. Unfortunately the panel got off to a rocky start, with several technical difficulties stopping him from being able to project his slide show, and the panel started about twenty minutes late. The panel was mostly about his new bookTuki, which he is publishing via Kickstarter. Smith spoke excitedly about the future of self-publishing via campaigns on sites like Kickstarter and Patreon, harkening back to his own self-published start. Smith’s contribution to independent comics is immeasurable and it was exciting to see him continue to experiment with channels for creator-driven publication. 

Liz seems to know everyone, and she and Smith had a sweet reunion as we wandered around and loitered in the professional lounge before he was due at his signing table. We weren’t sure where his books were being sold. We thought the Scholastic booth might be the place, but they didn’t seem to have a booth this year so we unfortunately had to give up.

Liz and I were going to make a sign to put up at his table and we had to give up on our little project. Here’s the sign, with an embarrassingly smudged Jeff Smith autograph on it.

4:00 P.M.

all photos and sketches by Tate McFadden- Ed.