They represent striving for excellence. Doing it as well as you can, and doing it better.

They’re about improving the medium. If you want an Eisner Award, strive for excellence. If you want one, do it better. If you feel it went to the wrong man or woman, and it should have been yours, then do it better next year, whatever it is that you do. Strive toward excellence. If the judges don’t put you on the Eisner list, then fuck ’em, and let posterity be your judge. If you feel that great work by other people is going unrecognized and unrewarded, then make a noise about it. Tell everyone you know. Word of mouth is still one of the best sales tools there is.

Nobody wants a world of identikit comics. Do the comics only you can do. Tell the stories only you can tell. Do not lose sight of the fact that this is an industry that can create real art.

And in the meanwhile, do it better. And love what you do.

I gave this as the Keynote Speech before the handing out of the 2003 Eisner Awards, given for creative achievement in American comic books.

2004 Harvey Awards Speech

The Harvey Awards, named after writer-artist-editor Harvey Kurtzman, and the Eisner Awards are, I suppose, the Oscars and the Golden Globes of the comics world. Both are prestigious. The Harveys tend to be voted on by comics professionals, rather than by everyone. This was the speech I gave at the Harveys in 2004, having given one at the 2003 Eisners, and I decided I wanted to address the creators in the audience. This also was the original prototype for the Make Good Art speech I would give eight years later.

I’m in the middle of writing a novel currently, and unlike the pleasant social world of comics, where, if you’re me, you talk on a daily basis to editors and artists, to letterers or colorists or cover artists, writing a novel is something that’s done solo. It’s just me and a lot of pieces of paper. Even my family leaves me alone to write.

This means that when finally offered the opportunity to speak, I’m liable to begin with apologizing for being so out of practice, and then to start blithering unstoppably.

Forgive me if I blither.

HARVEY KURTZMAN WAS a genius. And that was not what made his work special. We’ve had a number of geniuses in comics, and we have a number of them still. Some brilliant work is cold. There are some things one admires, but one cannot love.

Kurtzman was someone who was doing what he wanted to do, enjoying himself. Happy to rewrite the rules because there were no rules, as long as you were creating art.

Most of us are happy to have created just one world-class, life-changing work. Harvey did it a number of times. He is one of the people who created the world in which we exist.

He endured Senate hearings, commercial exploitation, watching some of his most treasured creations fail. Along the way he created art that will remain forever, and inspired a list of people longer than your arm, all of whom watched Harvey strive toward excellence, break new ground, tell new stories. Some of them went on to become cartoonists or writers or filmmakers—people like R. Crumb or Terry Gilliam. Others simply discovered that the worlds and visions that Harvey Kurtzman gave them changed their world, in the way that real art does. It gave them new eyes. Perhaps a more cynical view of the world, certainly a more pragmatic one. Harvey’s worlds were, at least in their EC incarnations, never fair. You got what you needed, and what you deserved, and you normally got it in the neck.