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Akiko Higashimura's Tokyo Tarareba Girls Manga, Junji Ito's 'Frankenstein' Short Win Eisner Awards

The 2019 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards revealed its winners at Comic-Con International: San Diego on Saturday, and Akiko Higashimura's Tokyo Tarareba Girls manga won this year's Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia award. Steven LeCroy translates the manga.

The manga competed against Nie Jun's My Beijing: Four Stories of Everyday Wonder, Tsutomu Nihei's Abara: Complete Deluxe Edition, Inio Asano's Dead Dead Demon's Dededededestruction, and Afro's Laid-Back Camp.

Junji Ito's "Frankenstein" story in the Frankeinstein: Junji Ito Story Collection also won the "Best Adaptation from Another Medium" category. Jocelyne Allen translated the story.

Dark Horse's release of Yoshitaka Amano: The Illustrated Biography—Beyond the Fantasy by Forent Gorges (translated by Laure Dupont and Annie Gullion) was nominated in the "Best Comics-Related Book" category, but Martha H. Kennedy's Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists won the award.

This year Akira Toriyama and Naoki Urasawa were among the 16 people nominated for the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame, but the nominees chosen by vote to be inducted this year include: Paul Levitz, Jenette Kahn, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Wendy and Richard Pini, and Bill Sienkiewicz.

Previous Japanese inductees of the Eisner Hall of Fame include Osamu Tezuka (2002), Kazuo Koike (2004), Goseki Kojima (2004), Katsuhiro Ōtomo (2012), and Rumiko Takahashi (2018).

Last year Gengoroh Tagame's My Brother’s Husband manga won the Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia award. Kodansha Comics' 35th anniversary edition of Katsuhiro Ōtomo's Akira manga won the Best Archival Collection/Project—Comic Books award as well as the Best Publication Design award.

Source: Heidi MacDonald (link 2, link 3)