Tekkonkinkreet Wins Eisner Award

Taiyo Matsumoto's Tekkonkinkreet: Black & White (Viz Media) has won the Will Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Japan at Comic-Con International on Friday evening at San Diego, California. Tekkonkinkreet is only the second winner of the recently added category. (Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi's Old Boy won the award last year.) Although Japanese manga titles were nominated in seven other categories, no other Japanese manga won awards this year. Tekkonkinkreet was competing against Jiro Taniguchi's The Ice Wanderer and Other Stories (Fanfare / Ponent Mon), Osamu Tezuka's MW (Vertical), Naoki Urasawa's Monster, Yuichi Yokoyama's New Engineering, and Fumiyo Kouno's Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. The award-winning edition of Tekkonkinkreet is actually Viz's second English-languge release; Viz first released the manga under the Black & White name in several installments in 1999.