Pictured left to right: Kelly Sue DeConnick, Rupert Kinnard, and Sarah Shay Mirk interviewed by OPB for an Oregon Art Beat special.
Cameron Nielsen / OPB
Three of Portland’s prominent comic book creators, Rupert Kinnard, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Sarah Shay Mirk, are nominated for Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards — the Oscars of the comic industry, named for one of the first comic artists in American history. This week, they’re traveling to San Diego Comic Con to speak on panels, sign books, and attend the awards ceremony on Friday night.
“It felt really, really special to me to be nominated because the list of people I’m nominated with is full of such luminaries,” Mirk told OPB in an interview. The awards honor Will Eisner, who began his career in comics at 19 in New York City, then continued making comics after serving in World War II. Receiving an Eisner award is considered one of the highest achievements in the comics industry.
While DeConnick’s book “FML” is up for Best Continuing Series, both Mirk and Kinnard are nominated for Best Comics-Related Book, which Mirk described as “the nerdiest, wonkiest category.” For DeConnick, this nomination is one of many throughout her career after winning the award for Best Single Issue in 2022. For Mirk, this marks nomination number four.
But for Kinnard, this nomination is his very first. After hearing the news from his publisher, he immediately told his partner.
“I was thrilled just to be nominated in a category with these men who have been an important part of my development as a comic artist,” Kinnard told OPB. “My partner got even more excited, and he’s the one who’s making the trip [to San Diego Comic Con] happen.”
"Ooops... I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics" by Rupert Kinnard, courtesy of Stacked Deck Press.
Stacked Deck Press
Kinnard created the first Black queer comic strip characters, although he didn’t know he was first at the time. Born in Chicago in 1954, Kinnard moved to Portland in 1979 and helped start the queer newspaper, Just Out.
He created The Brown Bomber, a nineteen-year-old superhero sporting basketball shorts and a home-made cape, and Diva Touché Flambé, a mystical grade school teacher who knocks sense into closed-minded streetgoers with her power of slapthology.
Together, the duo forms “Cathartic Comics,” a strip that ran in newspapers in Portland and San Francisco, calling out injustice with wit, wisdom, and pride through an intersectional Black queer lens.
His book “Ooops… I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics," released last fall, is the result of a Kickstarter campaign to get Kinnard’s story out into the world.
"Making Nonfiction Comics: A Guide for Graphic Narrative" by Eleri Harris and Shay Mirk, courtesy of Abrams Books.
Abrams Books
Sarah Shay Mirk is a nonfiction comics journalist, publisher, and teacher at Crucial Comix living in Portland since 2008.
Their book “Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison” chronicles the experiences of former Guantanamo Bay prisoners and staff in the form of a graphic novel.
The book is taught in a class at Stanford University every term, and was nominated for an Eisner in 2021. Mirk also previously received two group nominations while working for political cartoon publisher The Nib, where they met Eleri Harris, the co-author of their latest book.
At The Nib “we learned a lot the hard way about how to make nonfiction comics,” and after The Nib ceased publication in 2024, “I didn’t want that knowledge to go away.”
In “How To Make Nonfiction Comics: A Guide for Graphic Narrative,” Mirk and Harris’ knowledge is preserved through helpful tips and illustrations from fifty different artists.
At Comic Con, they will speak on three panels to hundreds of fans. “I had dreamed of doing this and now I’m actually doing it, I’m the person sitting behind the table selling my work.”
FML #1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick and David Lopez, courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.
Dark Horse Comics
Kelly Sue DeConnick is a New York Times Bestselling comics author, known for her reimagining of the character Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel.
Her 2026 nomination for Best Continuing Series is shared with David López, the co-writer of “FML,” a graphic series from Portland-based publisher Dark Horse Comics.
DeConnick moved to Portland with her husband in the early 2000s. She told OPB that after visiting Portland and attending a local comics event, she realized “this is a reader town, and this is a comics town, so I guess this is our place.”
Rupert Kinnard felt that same sense of community when he came to Portland in 1979. Thinking back on that time, Kinnard says he was not “prepared for how much Portland would mean to me.” There’s so much he would tell that younger version of himself: “Hang on to your hat… You will truly learn the meaning of the word ‘community.”
To learn more about these artists, keep an eye out for Oregon Art Beat’s upcoming special on the history of comics in Portland, premiering at Rose City Comic Con in September.
UPDATE — July 25, 2026: Neither Rupert Kinnard, Kelly Sue DeConnick nor Sarah Shay Mirk won the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards at the ceremony held in San Diego Friday evening.
