Akira Toriyama
Willem and Akira Toriyama win top Angoulême honors
Dutch cartoonist Willem was presented with the Grand Prix award over the weekend in France at the 40th annual Angoulême International Comics Festival, honoring his lifetime achievement. In addition, Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump creator Akira Toriyama was awarded a special Grand Prix recognizing his 40-year career.
As the recipient of the Grand Prix, Willem will serve as president of next year’s festival.
The other major prize winners, courtesy of The Comics Reporter, were:
Prix du meilleur album
Quai d’Orsay Volume Two: Chroniques diplomatiques, Christophe Blain and Abel Lanzac (Dargaud)
Prix spécial du jury
Le Nao de Brown, Glyn Dillon (Akileos)
Comics A.M. | Alan Moore’s Neonomicon challenged in South Carolina
Neonomicon
Comics | The Greenville County (South Carolina) Library has removed two copies of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Neonomicon from its shelves after a mother filed an official challenge to the collection’s sexual content. Carrie Gaske said that although her 14-year-old daughter found the horror book in the adult section, she thought “it looked like a children’s comic,” and would be fine for her to check out. Daughter Jennifer soon discovered Neonomicon wasn’t the “murder mystery comic book” her mother believed it to be. “It was good at first,” she said. “Then it got nasty.” How “nasty”? “The more into I got the more shocked I was, I really had no idea this type of material was allowed at a public library,” Carrie Gaske said. “I feel that has the same content of Hustler or Playboy or things like that. Maybe even worse.”
The library allows children age 13 and older to check out books from the adult section with their parents’ permission. The library system’s two copies of Neonomicon have been removed from circulation while a committee reviews the content. [WSPA.com]
Smile! Creators react to Japan disaster with optimism
One of Takehiko Inoue's Smile drawings
Even as rescue operations continue and officials scramble to avert a nuclear disaster in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on Friday, some manga artists are reaching out to their fans with a message of hope.
Takehiko Inoue, the creator of Vagabond and Slam Dunk, has been posting pictures of ordinary Japanese people smiling with the Twitter hashtags #prayforjapan and #tsunami, as a sort of prayer. Shoujo manga creator Arina Tanemura (Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne, The Gentlemen’s Alliance Cross) also drew one of her characters with a big smile. Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball) posted a lively drawing with a message of support on the Shonen Jump website. And Itou Noizi, who illustrated the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya light novels, has drawn a picture of Haruhi in prayer.
A number of well-known creators, including Naoki Urasawa (Pluto, 20th Century Boys), Natsume Ono (House of Five Leaves) and Kanata Konami (Chi’s Sweet Home) have posted drawings and messages of encouragement at the website of Kodansha’s Morning magazine. Anime News Network has a full list of contributors in English.
Japanese-Canadian artist Nina Matsumoto (Yokaiden) is doing commissioned drawings of her characters for $25 each, with the proceeds to go to the Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund.
Celebrate Banned Books Week: Read a comic!
The most shocking book in America?
This week is Banned Books Week, an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association and a host of other organizations to bring attention to books that have been challenged or removed from libraries, schools and reading lists over the past year. You can find the full list of challenged books from 2009-2010 here, and it contains plenty of good reading, from Sherman Alexie’s Diary of a Part-Time Indian (often challenged but beloved by readers) to the anthology Paint Me Like I Am: Teen Poems. The list tilts strongly toward young-adult novels and sex manuals, but there are a surprising number of classics, including To Kill a Mockingbird (a parent objected to the word “nigger,” which seems to miss the point), Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (a perennial on this list) and the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which, shockingly, contains the term “oral sex” and has therefore been (no joke) removed from classrooms in the Menifee, California, Union School District and may be banned permanently there. The most often-challenged book in 2009, according to the ALA’s top ten list, is ttyl and its companion volumes ttfn, l8r, and g8r, which, as you might guess, are YA novels.
The list contains a handful of comics, as well:
