The late Shel Dorf devoted his life to comics — strips more than books but he was a great lover and supporter of the form and of the folks who created great comics in both forms. He certainly deserves great recognition and remembrance for his contributions to the form and fandom, particularly for his role in launching the institution we now know as San Diego's annual Comic-Con International.
I'm not sure how he would have reacted to the new industry awards that have been established in his name — the Shel Dorf Awards, recently presented at (and planned as an annual event of) The Detroit Fanfare. Shel was a mercurial soul. He might have felt honored by the concept, especially since he had an important role in a thing called the Detroit Triple Fan-Fare that took place back there in the sixties. The con there is named after the old one, the one Shel worked on. On the other hand, Shel was not a particular fan of most of the "new" comic books of the nineties and later. He didn't read most of them and didn't seem to like most of the ones he did read. (Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, which won a big award this year, was a notable exception. That one, I know he liked because he told me so. I think at the time he said it and Groo were the only two current comics he read at all.)
So I don't know how Shel would have felt about this award bearing his name. I do know that I'm a little bothered by the publicity surrounding it, and some other things that have been written about Shel since his passing, that seem to give him all the credit for that yearly con down in San Diego. His friends and co-contributors did give him the title of "Founder" but they never called him the "Sole Founder," perhaps because he wasn't. A gentleman named Ken Krueger was as responsible as anyone for the existence of that convention and many other folks made massive contributions, usually doing hundreds of hours of unpaid labor. To mention only Shel as the guy responsible for the con is to do an injustice to Ken and people like Mike Towry and Richard Alf and Barry Alfonso and Scott Shaw! and so many others. It does not insult Shel's memory in any way to acknowledge the efforts of these people.
When Shel passed away in 2009, I wrote a lot of pieces about my friend and did many interviews. I hope I have not contributed to any perceptions that he single-handedly conceived and staged the first convention down in San Diego. Because that is simply not true.