What's your reaction to the Angouleme kerfuffle?

Complicated.

I’m not hugely familiar with the award, I don’t even pay that much attention to awards I am up for as a rule. 

There are a lot of things. I think it was a really decent impulse for so many male creators to withdraw in a show of solidarity with women creators. I never like to throw cold water on anyone doing a thing for the sake of kindness, decency, or fairness.

At the same time, I feel bad for those guys. Regardless of gender, they all obviously deserve their nominations, and it sucks that they felt they had to withdraw for reasons of ethics. I also am not sure what the fix is. I think the process is a quite likely broken, it’s ridiculous that someone like Linda Barry isn’t nominated, just off the top of my head.

But I don’t know what the organization does to fix it this year. Do they start over? That doesn’t seem fair to the people nominated. And who wants to be nominated under protest? I don’t think I would accept such an award nomination (not that one was coming), it feels like doing so would dishonor the guys who withdrew out of a sense of fairness.

I think maybe it may be best to do this year with the remaining nominations, admit that the process likely needs reviewing, and try to make next year better.

Sometimes, there’s a flaw in the concrete of the dam, and at first, the water still holds. But as the years go by and the water level rises, flaws in the concrete become bigger and bigger. So you either do a patch or you blow it up and start over. You can’t just go on pretending.

My approach is to assume everyone meant well, no one was intentionally evil or bigoted. That doesn’t mean the process hadn’t gone awry…it’s almost impossible to look at who achieved what in comics this year, internationally, and still not manage to include one woman in the balloting. For sales, women CRUSHED on the graphic novel charts, particularly outside of the Diamond Distribution system. Women had hugely successful international hits. Women had critical monster successes. And there are women who are still producing astounding work even when they started in darker times (again, see Linda Barry). 

Something smells wrong. I am not accusing anyone of evil intent. I suspect it is not that. But it’s very easy to have a person select a nominating committee who is a bit behind the times. It happens. 

To restore the good name of the award, I think they should consider taking a serious look at their selection process, include some people who have a wider reading experience, and let it go from there. It could fix itself quite handily in a year or two.