Calvin Reid wins 2023 Tom Spurgeon Award

Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) has introduced the winner of this 12 months’s Tom Spurgeon Award and it will somebody close to and expensive to The Beat’s coronary heart: Calvin Reid.

The Tom Spurgeon Award is offered yearly to those that have made vital contributions to the comics trade however usually are not creators; it’s open to retailers, distributors, journalists, editors, publishers, and others.

Calvin actually qualifies as somebody who has made a major contribution to comics. As senior information editor at Publishers Weekly he helped introduce comics protection to the mainstream publishing world and pioneered graphic novel opinions in that extremely influential publication. He launched PW Comics World, PW’s on-line protection of the comics and graphic novel market, in addition to The Fanatic, PW’s present publication comics and popular culture. And together with myself, Kate Fitzsimmons and Meg Lemke, Calvin cohosts More to Come, PW’s weekly podcast on comics and graphic novel publishing. That’s Calvin on the appropriate within the above picture, which is l-r myself, Kate, Meg and Calvin ending up one other episode. It was, consider it or not, the primary time we had all been in the identical room, and Calvin is doing what he does greatest: smiling!

You can learn extra of Calvin’s deeds right here. He employed me to assist with quite a lot of the above initiatives, and I’m so grateful to him for his assist and mentorship, and I can say there isn’t any yet another passionate, extra knowledgable or extra necessary to the rise of the graphic novels over the past 25 years. In 2006 he gained the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award by the San Diego Comic-Con International for all his efforts to boost the understanding and enterprise profile of graphic novel publishing within the ebook commerce.

“This is a terrific honor and I can’t tell you how much it means to me,” says Calvin in a press release, “It’s even more meaningful to get an award named after Tom Spurgeon, who went out of his way to make sure I was able to attend CXC in the first place.”

“Calvin was one of the very first grown ups to get that comics are an art form, not a genre; they are a medium of literature,” says Vijaya Iyer, Cartoon Books writer and CXC co-founder, “It took a pivotal figure like Calvin Reid to not only recognize the value of comics and graphic novels, but to use his position as a writer at the most important book trade magazine, Publishers Weekly, to shout it from the mountain top!”

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The Spurgeon Award is called after the late Tom Spurgeon, himself a drive of nature who ran the Comics Reporter weblog and helped discovered CXC as founding govt director.

“I think the way that graphic novel and comics journalism was practiced by me has been to focus on opening the comics marketplace to the full expanse of what the comics medium can do as both literary expression, a commercial reading product, or any creative combination of both,” says Reid.

“I want new readers (as well as comics artists) to know that the world of comics they live in now is very different than it used to be,” says Reid, “It’s a world of indie, literary comics, superhero, manga, Webtoon, just an endless variety of genre comics of all types for all kinds of readers. And that I was lucky and proud to be able to help bring about some of that change and growth in the marketplace.”

The Tom Spurgeon Award was awarded to author, translator and manga scholar Frederik L. Schodt in 2022. In 2021, the award’s first 12 months, it was given posthumously to Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News syndicate vice-president and director Mollie Slott; All-Negro Comics founder and writer Orrin Evans; and Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson.

As illustrious as these earlier winners are, nobody is extra deserving than Calvin and I’ll be giving a hearty digital cheer when he’s offered with the award!