Ginco Award 2020
Award Committee
Our goal is to assemble a diverse committee with the widest possible range of perspectives and expertise, drawing from different areas of the comic and manga scene, as well as the fields of research and press.
In 2020, we were able to enlist the following competent people:
Anna Beckmann
Comics researcher and political activist, is writing her dissertation on narrative unreliability and strategies to clarify ambiguity in comics, is a member of the Berlin Comic Colloquium (http://www.comic-kolloquium.de/), AG Comicforschung in the Society for Media Studies (https: //agcomic.net/) and the Society for Comic Research (https://www.comicgesellschaft.de/)
Marc-Oliver Frisch
is a freelance comic book critic and translator. He is writing his doctoral thesis on comics at Saarland University.
Marc-Oliver at the Tagesspiegel
Niki Smith
is a comic artist from the USA, she lives in Munich. Her comic “Crossplay” was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award. She has digital releases on DC Comics and The Nib. Her latest release, "The Deep & Dark Blue," a queer graphic novel for young teenagers, has been published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
Christina S. Zhu
is a German-Chinese illustrator and comic artist. Her favorite works combine subtle visual messages with melancholic beauty. With her projects, she primarily wants to promote the voices of People of Color in Germany. (http://christinazhu.de/)
Interview with the Award Committee (German)
Lara Keilbart conducting a video interview with Anna Beckmann (political activist and ComFor-member), Marc-Oliver Frisch (independent critic and translator), and Christina S. Zhu (German-Chinese illustrator) about their perspectives on the qualities of comic books.
The award committee consulted independently of the organizing team and also decided, whether they wanted to work with the pre-existing categories or work with their own criteria and ideas.
The shortlift was published a few weeks before the award ceremony. The ceremony was published as a Youtube-Live-Event, as part of the CSE-Digital, supported by the International Comic-Salon Erlangen.
The organizing team supported the work of the committee only on a logistical and communicative level and did not in any way influence the choices of the committee.
About 200 submissions had been entered and viewed.
