The Ignatz nominees were announced earlier today, and I found the honorees for Outstanding Online Comic to be … odd. Maybe more than other comics awards, the Ignatzes vary widely in character from year to year, but like other named-year awards, they’ve pretty much always looked at work for the year before the award: the 2009 award honored work primarily done in 2008, the ’08 award for work in ’07, and so forth.

This year, however, they seem pretty determined that the 2010 award will honor work done in 2010 (which isn’t quite 2/3 done yet). Consider the nominees:

• John Callahan’s Callahan Online is a now-frozen two-week archive of Callahan’s panel gag toons. Frozen, because he died at the end of last month, so anybody looking to examine his work will have those ten panel gags to judge and not much else. Hate to say it, but this feels like an Oh crap, did we honor him while he was alive? afterthought.
• Sarah Becan’s I Think You’re Saucesome is a diary comic that focuses on weight loss. It’s got a taste of Bellen!, here, a bit of Kinokofry there, and reminds me a lot of Stop Paying Attention, so that’s okay. Lots of updates (between 3 and 6 new strips a week), but it only began on March 1st of this year.
• Stephen Gilpin’s The Lesttrygonians features an archive going back to 1998 (!), but only 21 of those strips (weekly, from April of this year) are more recent than October 2000. It’s nice stuff, between a half- and full-page each week, but it’s a small amount of work in a short amount of time; the decade-long hiatus means the older stuff could barely be considered the same strip.
• David King’s Reliable Comics is a bit tougher to parse, temporally speaking — he posted a series of strips done in 2007-2008 between Dec 2009 and Feb 2010. February to April he posted strips from 2009, and since April work done this year, for a total of 26 “recent” strips.
• Mike Dawson’s Troop 142 began at the end of November 2009, and is currently in progress. Of the nominees, it appears to be the only one that features a traditional story, with a beginning, middle, and end; tonally, it feels a lot like Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison.

None of this is meant to say That strip shouldn’t win/even be nominated because it’s ____ !; if the jury decided that the best comics work of the past year is heavily skewed towards the past five months, then that’s their call. I just can’t recall any award iteration that took the year quite so literally. I won’t be at SPX so I don’t get to vote, but I like (and this may be a side effect of having the fullest bodies of work to judge) Dawson and Becan quite a lot.

• Speaking of time, Amulet Book 3: The Cloud Searchers is out in two weeks!
• You may have heard that Our Kate (Beaton, that is … look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, son) is about to decamp from Canada for a period of time and hunker down in Brooklyn for a spell. Not content to see what a change of venue will do to her creative side (whenever she travels, she gets a bunch of really good comics from it), Beaton’s decided that she’s going to celebrate her new home by working for the good of others.

  Specifically, she’s joined up with a team of comics types to participate in the 2010 Run for Congo Women (New York, 5K, 25 September), with monies raised going to Women for Women International. Team Comics has their fundraising page here, and they could use your help. Hop to it, people, and Kate, next time I see you I owe you a tasty beverage for being a Damn Good Person.