I would limit nominees to reviewers who have reviewed 24+ books in the year under consideration. The committe that puts together the ballot would send out a ballot to reviewers they feel have met this criteria. They would also announce publicly that ballots have been sent so someone who feels they have been overlooked can petition for a ballot.

Who is it that gets to nominate titles? Reviewers? Publishers? Anyone? If you don’t want this to end up as a people’s choice award, you may want to set some limits. You may also want to find a way to ensure that folks can only vote once.

JRBrown, it’s killing me that there is no SciFi category on my ballot, but honestly I couldn’t think of enough current series to justify having one. Also titles like Vampire Hunter D and Dragon Eye occupy that strange middle ground of being a blend of scifi and fantasy. I was hoping a categories like Epic Adventure and Drama might catch most of these titles. If there are enough scifi or fantasy or crime or historical titles in a given year then we could add that category to the ballot to reflect the influx of that genre. I would like to think a committee of several people would sit down and hammer out the ballot each year.

This might be getting ahead of myself, but once the categories are nailed down for a given year, my idea would be to have people fill out a nominee ballot. Here they would put their four favorite titles, in order of preference, for each category. It would be totally unrestricted. So it’s possible for a title to end up in more than one category. Actually, with a Best Overall category, I would expect titles in there to show up in other categories as well.

Once we have nominee ballots collected we simply do A LOT of data crunching. Each series nominated in a category would be listed, then points are given based on how people ranked it. 4 pts for 1st, 1 pt for 4th. The top four point winners in each category would then go on to the voting ballot.

It might be a little crazy for the first couple of years, but I think natural limits and patterns for each category would eventually emerge. I want to keep this as spontaneous as possible.

lys and Johanna, okay we have are first change. The category is now titled “Best Older Manga”.

Best Non-Fiction Manga might be an interesting addition, but I’m not sure there are enough good titles to populate it.

And… as for shoujo/josei, sorry, I might’ve just been pointing out something that I (as a reader of lots’n'lots of shoujo) saw as a possible flaw, but that maybe seems fair to others with a broader range of interest. The drama/comedy genres do seem the best fit for most shoujo manga titles. I guess it just seemed to me that stories with non-realistic settings had an advantage, with categories like urban fantasy/epic adventure (since such stories could qualify in terms of tone (drama/comedy) as well as setting?), while stories set in school or “real life” (as most shoujo are) are limited to just a couple categories. Still, I understand the reasoning that you can’t just make a category for every little subgenre, and with so much manga being published, inevitably something must be left out. And, I recognize my own bias as a fan–sure, there are tons of shoujo manga series I love, but they may not all be deserving of an award. So I don’t want to be too much of a whiner :D

Er, but then I thought… what about a category for historical-based works (this could include biography/nonfiction, some of the genres that aren’t covered by the ones above)? Or are there not enough of them being published these days? Kaze Hikaru is a series I would consider deserving of a nomination… Maybe for a drama category though, if there aren’t enough other good historical works to merit a whole new category.

1. Your categories probably covers the bulk of manga being currently released, but there are some that primarily fit into genres not listed: mystery/crime, science fiction, slice-of-life, autobiography, nonfiction… Obviously expanding the categories to cover every possible genre would be way too much. Do these minor types get the “rotating category” treatment or are they only in competition for “best overall”?

2. Who decides which categories a title would fit into? F’rinstance, is Loveless (one of my favorite indescribable series) Urban Fantasy or Drama or Dramatic Romance? Is After School Nightmare eligible for the Dramatic Romance category even though it’s labeled as horror? What happens if a title gets nominated into multiple categories?

The US comics awards are mainly categorized by publication type (one-shot, miniseries, black-and-white, etc) and work role (author, artist, colorist); obviously for the mostly book format, mostly single-(credited)-creator manga-in-translation market that’s not so useful. But maybe a blended approach might work: considering both genre (drama, humor, nonfiction, kids…) and some elements of publication (standalone volume, continuing series, single-author anthology, multi-author anthology…).

With Best Reprint, the idea is recognize the publication of older manga. These are series that were completed years ago in Japan, but are just seeing print in the US. Black Jack is an odd case of one publisher printing some of the series, then dropping it and another publisher picking up the license and publishing the entire series. Because the new publisher is printing stories never before printed in the US it qualifies for this category. If it was a publisher simply bringing an old title back into print that wouldn’t qualify.

The other thing is, I wasn’t sure what “Best Reprint” means–the best presentation of the manga as an English-language work? The best re-licensed and re-adapted publication? I hadn’t heard of Swan being published here before CMX’s version, but I could be missing something.

I like the Best Light Novel category. It kind of works the same way Best Comics-Related Book does for the Eisners, in that so much manga is derived from, or spins off to, a light novel. And unless we define manga as being specifically “comics made in Japan for a Japanese audience,” instead of “manga is the Japanese word for comics,” then OEL/Global Manga should be able to fit right in with the other categories.

Eva, That’s a good question. I don’t know why Gon is rated for teens. I’ve read a couple of volumes and the only risky material is wildlife violence. But it’s no more graphic than a nature show. I do want to take publisher’s age rating into consideration. But, if the rating seems out of place, then we disregard it.

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