When the third annual Ignatz Awards were presented at the Small Press Expo on Sept. 18, the recipients were selected from a controversial pool of nominees including one title nominated by the creator himself and two titles as far from small press as Gen13 and the DC/ Vertigo anthology Heartthrobs. Intended to "recognize outstanding work that challenges popular notions of what comics can achieve, both as an art form and as a means of personal expression," this year's award has instead revealed some flaws of the Ignatz nomination system.

Frank Cho, one of this year's jurors, nominated his own strip collection, Liberty Meadows, for best comic book. Brubaker posted on the Journal's on-line message board that, "from talking to Chris, a lot of the initial guidelines ... were not actually recorded and passed down, because it was assumed the jury would be people of knowledge and integrity." Dylan Horrocks, creator of Hicksville, responded that "the key thing then (and even now) is who is on the jury. Shouldn't it be people ... who've already got an established, unshakable reputation and status in the field? Hopefully, that way, we wouldn't get such absolute travesties as Liberty Meadows beating Jew of New York for best comic. That's kind of like - I dunno - Terry Pratchett beating James Joyce for a Nobel Prize for Literature or something. Unbelievable."

Cho defended his decision to the Journal, citing the lack of quality books available to nominate. "It was hard to find four or five quality books to nominate in some of the categories. It seems like anyone who can do thick brush lines is a hip, alternative creator. There are a lot of artists out there who can't draw worth a damn," Cho said. He added that he was "a little bit offended by the mini-comics. All of these other publishers spend a ton of money to put out decent product. Then you have these college kids who do a poorly drawn mini, completed at Kinko's. You should weed out the crap like that. There are a lot of talented people. Having this amateur stuff out there makes it difficult to find the really, really nice quality of selection."

Having such trouble filling his nominee list, Cho looked to his own work. "I knew I'd get some flack about this," he told the Journal. "I did nominate myself in the comic-book category. Again, it's a quality issue. I asked [former Ignatz juror and friend] Mark Wheatley if I should exclude myself. He said 'Use your judgment. Do you think of it as a quality book? Do you think you would've nominated the book if it weren't your own? If you can honestly say you would, then do it.' There is a conflict of interest, but I thought the book warranted the attention. If there were a list of rules, I wouldn't have done it. Hopefully, I didn't come across as an ass."

When asked about the controversy surrounding the inclusion of mainstream titles Gen13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy and a short story from the DC-Vertigo anthology Hearthrobs, Cho said, "I liked the Gen13 book, but I can understand the complaint. Ninety percent of the people there were biased against mainstream. Those people against mainstream would not have been good judges of the quality of the material. They bitch and moan about the mainstream, but deep down inside, they want to be mainstream. I just like mainstream. I grew up reading mainstream and I got thrown into judging these smaller titles."

He added, "It was a great learning experience."

In an e-mail sent to SPX's executive director Mike Zarlenga and posted on the comix@ list, Ed Brubaker, one of the original jurors and developers of the award, took this year's jurors to task for their lack of support and acknowledgement of "INDEPENDENT vision in comics" and for allowing self-nomination. Brubaker further questioned whether the Ignatz guidelines he and Expo board member Chris Oarr had developed were provided to this year's judges.

Oarr told the Journal those guidelines had not been provided to the judges because they had never been codified. "It was not put before them in a concrete way - 'This is the kind of work we're looking at,'" he said. "We want the jurors to look at what's come out in as expanded and delimited a way as possible. What became the Ignatz is not what Ed Brubaker or I initially envisioned. It's a nice compromise between the two."

Regarding the inclusion of mainstream titles on the list, Oarr said it was decided to let the judges' decisions stand. He argued that such stringent categorization of the books is arbitrary. "Well, how do you make that distinction [between mainstream and small press]? We've made no attempt to delineate what that means [because] it's like trying to nail Jell-o to a tree. I don't think it's fair to select on genre, distribution, etc. SPX is trying to be inclusionary on all fronts. We'd never want to exclude anything."

Zarlenga added, "Small press does not specifically mean Kinko's and a stapler. We've never limited who could be at the show. The nice thing is that there aren't any politics involved [with the Ignatz awards]. We don't want to get into the slippery slope of changing the ballot. We give the discretion to the jurors to determine what is considered a mini-comic, etc. Something like Gen13 is clearly creator-owned. It doesn't have to be the artist who owns it. That's never been our rule." However, when asked about Heartthrobs, he replied, "I don't have an opinion on that."

Though not willing to restrict the jury's choices, Cho's self-nomination has been considered sufficient reason for a complete about-face on the laissez faire nominating process. "This next year," Oarr said, "you'll see a re-emphasis that jurors not nominate their own work. Work of jurors has appeared on the list in the past, but not because of that particular juror nominating himself. We want to prevent any appearance of impropriety, like preventing nomination of a juror's own work. Next year, you'll know that if an artist is on the jury and his work is on the ballot, he didn't nominate it."

Greg McElhatton, part of the SPX Steering Committee, indicated on the Journal's message board that the incident will lead to the drafting of new guidelines for future jury panels, available on the SPX website later this fall. Zarlenga denied that any discussion of juror guidelines had occurred. "As of this date, we have done nothing in terms of drafting new guidelines," he said. "Things that turn up as problems will not occur again because they reflect on the award. I see [nominating oneself] as an anomaly rather than a general occurrence. I think people out there have enough discretion not to do it. We've had 15 judges and one in 15 is a good average. If a nomination is that important to the artist, I think it illustrates the artist has more issues than the show itself does."

New guidelines would certainly reduce the latitude provided jurors, but Oarr noted that "obviously we need to make it clear that artists can't nominate their work. We need to do a better job of clarifying the guidelines. It could be clearer what we're after. Whatever we can do to fix what is perceived as broken, we'll do."