Siegel & Drake To Recieve First Bill Finger Awards
 

Jerry Siegel and Arnold Drake have been chosen as the first recipients of the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. According to Award Administrator Jackie Estrada, who also administers the Eisner Awards, the committee decided to give two awards, to honor both a deceased and a living writer who exemplify the award's criteria and the recipients were chosen by a committee chaired by fellow comics pro Jerry Robinson.

Jerry Siegel was, of course, the co-creator (with Joe Shuster) of Superman and Superboy and wrote the Superman comic books and comic strip from the character's first appearance in 1938 up through the late 1940s. He also co-created The Spectre (with Bernard Bailey) for DC. After leaving DC in 1948, he continued to write comic books for a variety of companies and served as the comics art director at Ziff-Davis in the 1950s. He returned to DC in 1958, where he wrote uncredited Superman and other scripts through 1964. He died in 1996.

"There is a poetic sense of rightness that Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman, and Bill Finger, the unsung hero and writer of Batman, be symbolically united after three-quarters of a century after their iconic characters' debuts," said Robinson. "Although both men led tragic lives, by launching the super-hero genre and the Golden Age of comics, they left legacies that have enriched our culture."

Arnold Drake's comics writing career spanned the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. His credits include Doom Patrol, Deadman, Batman, Superman, Plastic Man, X-Men, Captain Marvel, Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Mighty Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Bullwinkle and Rocky, Stanley and His Monster, Little Lulu, Space Ranger, House of Mystery, and Dark Shadows. His It Rhymes with Lust, with art by Matt Baker and Ray Osrin, published by St. John Publishing in 1950, was one of the very first graphic novels.

"Like Finger and Siegel, Drake is a consummate professional writer," Robinson said. "As the author of hundreds of stories from the Silver Age to the present, his credits demonstrate an amazing versatility, ranging from the super-hero and adventure such as Doom Patrol to the wry humor of Little Lulu."

The other members of the Finger Awards jury were comics writer and historian Mark Evanier; cartoonist, screenwriter, and playwright Jules Feiffer; comics writer and editor Denny O'Neill; and comics writer, editor, and historian Roy Thomas.

The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con International: San Diego.

The 2005 Bill Finger Awards are being underwritten by DC Comics; sponsorship will be open to other companies in future years.