Each year at Comic-Con, we present an honor called The Bill Finger Award For Excellence In Comic Book Writing. The award, which was conceived by Mr. Finger's friend Jerry Robinson, is for a body of writing work by an individual who has not received a fair amount of recognition and/or reward. In fact, we present two awards each year: One to someone who is still with us, one to someone posthumously.
I'm hereby asking for suggestions and nominations as to who should be this year's honorees but before I do, let me remind you of the past recipients. The ones not marked deceased were alive at the time the award was bestowed though sadly, Mssrs. Drake, Schwartz and Connell have since left us…
- 2005: Jerry Siegel (deceased) and Arnold Drake
- 2006: Harvey Kurtzman (deceased) and Alvin Schwartz
- 2007: Gardner Fox (deceased) and George Gladir
- 2008: Archie Goodwin (deceased) and Larry Lieber
- 2009: John Broome (deceased) and Frank Jacobs
- 2010: Otto Binder (deceased) and Gary Friedrich
- 2011: Bob Haney (deceased) and Del Connell
Please, if you're going to suggest a worthy candidate, notice two things about the list. These are all men who were primarily writers. A few were also editors but they all had a large body of work as writers.
For some reason, every time I solicit nominations here, a lot of folks send me the names of their favorite comic book artists and when I point out that this is an award for writers, they either complain we're discriminating against artists (yeah, the same way the Best Actor Oscar discriminates because they don't give it to camera operators) or they say of their artist nominee, "Well, I think he did write a couple of scripts once so technically, he qualifies as a writer!" Perhaps…but he doesn't have a body of work as one.
And the other thing to note is that the above winners are all folks who did not receive a lot of recognition or reward during their careers. Some didn't even get their names on most of their work. I have great admiration for so much of what Stan Lee has done but each year, a lot of people submit him and ask, "How can you have an award for writing comic books and not give it to Stan Lee?" To which I ask back, "How can anyone think that Stan Lee has been overlooked?" He may well have accrued more fame and maybe even more fortune than all the other writers who've ever worked in comics combined.
(Next week, I've been invited to attend the world premiere of that big documentary about him — which I'm in, by the way. If you want to argue Stan is under-recognized, meet me there at 7 PM when I'm supposed to be on the red carpet. We can debate the topic between pre-screening interviews about him.)
With all that in mind, is there someone you think the Blue Ribbon Committee should consider? We have a number of names to bat about but one thing about an award for being unnoticed: It's real easy to not notice those people. Please help us honor the insufficiently-honored and drop me an e-mail if you have a name in mind.