What Constitutes “Literary”?
February 8th, 2009 by Editors
In general we are extremely pleased with the coverage that science fiction awards are getting thanks to the success of Neil Gaiman’s film, Coraline. However, there is one aspect of the coverage that is a little annoying. Someone around the blogosphere has floated the idea (and it is rapidly being copied) that Sandman was the first comic to win a “literary award”. Well, it won a World Fantasy Award in 1991. Watchmen won a Hugo Award in 1988. And that fact is hardly unknown, because the fact that Watchmen is the only comic ever to have won a Hugo has been a standard part of coverage of the forthcoming movie.
What are we to make of this? Well, you could argue that a Hugo for “related work” is perhaps not a “literary award”, in particular because the Hugos have generally taken pains to reward the artist as well as the writer where comics are concerned. However, it seems unlikely that movie reviewers are aware of such subtleties. Simple incompetence is also a plausible explanation, especially given that some idiot movie reviewers credited Coraline to Tim Burton (probably because the actual director, Henry Selick, also directed The Nightmare Before Christmas). However, we have this sinking feeling that some people have it in their heads that the World Fantasy is a “literary” award, because it has a proper jury, and the Hugo is not, because it is voted on by fans.
Given that it’s normally me who says it, I think the point is not that a World Fantasy Award is more literary than a Hugo. (I have both. They are both very literary, although only the World Fantasy Award has a small, custom-made bowler hat.) It’s that it was (to the best of my knowledge) the first time that a comic went up against works of prose in a category and won in that category. Watchmen getting a “Best Other Forms” Hugo was like Maus getting a Special Pulitzer. What Watchmen (one of TIME magazine’s 50 greatest novels of the 20th century) should have taken home, and been in competition for in the Hugos, was Best Novel — or at least, had a chance to compete against The Uplift War et al, rather than be in an odd little one-off category not actually ever seen since, with the I Robot Screenplay, Cvltvre Made Stvpid, etc.
Sandman 19 was nominated for Best Short Story, and it won. It’s like Jimmy Corrigan, or the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware winning the Guardian Fiction prize in 2001: it wasn’t a special prize.
So that’s what I mean, when I say it in interviews: nothing to do with fans and judged awards, everything to do with categories.
Oh, well that makes perfect sense, because you understand the categories. As I said above, I don’t expect movie reviewers to be aware of such things, so if they had come up with it themselves then I would have looked for another explanation. But if they got it from you that’s OK.
Having said that, I still prefer the Hugos having a separate category for graphic story-telling that explicitly recognizes the role of the artist in creating the story. I thought it was daft putting Dreamhunters in Related Book because it was a piece of normal fiction with a number of very beautiful plates added, but Sandman and Watchmen are very different animals that you can’t compare easily with fiction that is solely words.
I also think that a Hugo for Best Graphic Story is a legitimate literary award.
One other think about the gandalf Neil won, is that they changed the rules so all other graphic works would end up in a category where they would be competing against editors and fanzines instead of other works of fiction.
The World Fantasy Award is not a “Gandalf”. The Gandalf was a fantasy award given out at Worldcon alongside the Hugos between 1974 and 1981. Locus has a list of winners. If anything the World Fantasy Award is a “Howie”, as the trophy is a bust of H.P. Lovecraft.
The World Fantasy folks are adamant that they have not changed their rules, although as these are, for the most part, not public, it is hard to say whether this is true. However, despite the name of the “Special Award Non-Professional” I think it unlikely that fanzines stand much of a chance. The award appears to be primarily for small press publishers and others who do “professional” work in the field, but not as their full-time job.