This Year’s Eisners Need to Be Redone

Eisner Awards logo

With no in-person San Diego Comic-Con this year, the Eisners are still taking place virtually.

However, there have been a lot of questions about how the voting took place. In short, it was shut down just before the deadline ended due to “an anomaly” which turns out to be some voters being able to access the data of others. It was reopened, for a complete revote, but it seems that some people who heard about the problem and thus didn’t vote in the first round weren’t able to vote in the second round. Some were, though, making the results questionable, as not everyone got to participate who wanted to and were eligible to.

Gary Tyrrell, noted webcomic journalist and technology instructor, wrote an insightful analysis that points out that California, in particular, has some strong data privacy laws that require user notification in cases like this, which the company did not follow.

Joe Grunenwald put together a comprehensive history of the mistakes that indicates that the convention committee knew about the problems for longer than they wished to portray. The end result is that the result of this year’s Awards — and perhaps previous years’ as well — will always be considered questionable at best.



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