A New Comics Golden Age

After the last of the 2012 Eisner Awards were handed out, and before the after-party began, all the year’s winners gathered on the stage at the San Diego Bayfront Hilton’s Indigo Ballroom for a group photo. The evening’s grand champion was front and center: writer Mark Waid, whose work on Daredevil and other titles had netted him three Eisners. Also honored: Darwyn Cooke, for his adaptations of Donald Westlake’s Parker novels; Craig Thompson, for his epic romantic folktale Habibi; James Kochalka, for the goofy kids’ comic Dragon Puncher Island; and the publishers IDW, Fantagraphics, and Drawn & Quarterly for their reprints of classic material from the U.S. and abroad. Looking at the assembled talent, Maggie Thompson (one of the original comics journalists, via her editorship of Comics Buyer’s Guide) noted the diversity of the material that had just been honored: superheroes, archival newspaper-strip collections, true crime, children’s books, Japanese war stories, and much more. “This is the golden age,” she said.