Third Annual Spurgeon Award honors Calvin Reid
Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC), the international showcase for cartoon art, is proud to announce that the third annual Tom Spurgeon Award will go to comics journalist Calvin Reid.
Calvin Reid served as senior news editor at Publishers Weekly. He also worked as editor of PW Comics World, PW’s online coverage of the comics and graphic novel marketplace, and editor of The Fanatic, PW’s twice a month e-newsletter on comics and pop culture. He’s currently co-host of More to Come, PW’s weekly podcast on comics and graphic novel publishing.
“This is a terrific honor and I can’t tell you how much it means to me,” says Calvin Reid, “It’s even more meaningful to get an award named after Tom Spurgeon, who went out of his way to make sure I was able to attend CXC in the first place.”
The Spurgeon Award honors those who have made substantial contributions to the field of comics, but are not primarily cartoonists. The award is named after Tom Spurgeon, a writer, historian, and champion of comic arts who served as CXC’s founding executive director. The award is open to retailers, distributors, journalists, editors, publishers, and others.
“Calvin was one of the very first grown ups to get that comics are an art form, not a genre; they are a medium of literature,” says Vijaya Iyer, Cartoon Books publisher and CXC co-founder, “It took a pivotal figure like Calvin Reid to not only recognize the value of comics and graphic novels, but to use his position as a writer at the most important book trade magazine, Publishers Weekly, to shout it from the mountain top!”
Reid has covered the book industry since joining Publishers Weekly in 1987 as an associate editor. He’s reported on industry news and business trends, as well as digital publishing and the rise of self-publishing platforms, small press and independent publishing, and African American publishing. He provided groundbreaking coverage of comics and graphic novels in the book trade.
“I think the way that graphic novel and comics journalism was practiced by me has been to focus on opening the comics marketplace to the full expanse of what the comics medium can do as both literary expression, a commercial reading product, or any creative combination of both,” says Reid.
In 2006 at the Will Eisner Comics industry Awards, an annual event honoring the best work in comics and graphic novel publishing, Reid was awarded the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award by the San Diego Comic-Con International for his longtime efforts to raise the understanding and business profile of graphic novel publishing in the book trade.
“I want new readers (as well as comics artists) to know that the world of comics they live in now is very different than it used to be,” says Reid, “It’s a world of indie, literary comics, superhero, manga, Webtoon, just an endless variety of genre comics of all types for all kinds of readers. And that I was lucky and proud to be able to help bring about some of that change and growth in the marketplace.”
The Tom Spurgeon Award in 2022 went to writer, translator and manga scholar Frederik L. Schodt. In 2021, the award’s first year, it three posthumous recipients: Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News syndicate vice-president and director Mollie Slott; All-Negro Comics founder and publisher Orrin Evans; and Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson.
You can find Calvin Reid’s bio at:
For all past CXC Award Winners please go to:
Festival organizers will have more information about the awards presentations and other programming in the coming months. Follow CXC on social media (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) or check www.cartooncrossroadscolumbus.org for the latest.
