Harvey Awards Sends Out Clarifications Over Vetting Process

I got a strange e-mail from the Harvey Awards today which read they were like in full defense mode about a couple of awards. Here's the text.

July 17, 2015

The Harvey Awards would like to address questions posed by the comics press and other concerned parties since the release of The Harvey Awards Final Ballot.

The Harvey Awards were formed over 28 years ago with the intent to enable the creative community to honor their peers. The Harvey Awards administrators, as well as fans, retailers, and convention professionals, have no vote. That is the guiding principle of the nomination ballot, and we work very hard to maintain that vision.

As with all Harvey Award categories, "Most Promising New Talent" and the "Special Award for Humor" are selected through the voting of the comics professional creative community exclusively. Beyond a publishing date in 2014, we provide no eligibility guidelines for works in these categories and, as such, we continue to rely on the judgment of our voters, and not impose arbitrary limits.

Our vetting process also leaves us confident that all nominations in the Best Original Graphic Album category are indeed eligible, containing enough new and revised material to meet the category definition.

The Harvey Awards committee is open to suggestions from the professional community and we welcome the input. As we do every year, we will review the Harveys voting process and identify areas where improvement can be made.

Thank you,
Paul McSpadden
The Harvey Awards

I'm guessing from what's provided there that there were objections to some of the nominees. I can't hazard a guess as to what the Special Award For Humor objection might be, because humor tends to be considered wholly subjective, but I'm guessing the others at play here are nominations for Steve Bryant (working for about a decade) and Jen Van Meter (working approaching two decades) as most promising new talent, and maybe the Athena Bryant Compendium, which contains work going back to I think 2006, as an original graphic album.

The explanations are that 1) they have a vetting process that provides assurances that takes care of one of the objections and 2) they don't have a vetting process at all except what the voters bring to the table and that explains some of the others and kind of binds their hands in terms of fixing things. That's an interesting strategy.

This kind of thing is indeed one longstanding weakness of the Harveys: by counting on the voters to do the primary sort and vote that is nominating, you're counting on those folks as a group and whoever might be marshalling energy behind certain choices to make rational decisions. They never do. This usually doesn't get expressed in terms of bizarre nominations in terms of elgibility but it certainly does in terms of nominations that very few people have heard of and that others might not consider even arguably award-worthy. I don't see much you can do here except maybe just make a hard rule out of the New Talent thing for future years. On the other hand, it is very exciting to think we're all up for the newcomer award every time out.
 
posted 12:15 am PST | Permalink
 

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