Last week, the Eisner Awards released their nominees ahead of the event set to happen during San Diego Comic Con. 2025 was an eventful year as K-Comics Beat’s parent site, The Beat, took the award for Best Comics Journalism. What stands out this year is the nomination of two stories that are published on the WEBTOON’s platform. Within the Best Webcomic list of nominees are The Legend of Parvaterra by Raúl Arnáiz, and Superfish by Peglo. In December, Superfish was on K-Comics Beat’s list of Best Webtoons and Webcomics of 2025.
This marks another year where two WEBTOON series have made it in the Eisner Awards; astoundingly, one is from the CANVAS self-publishing side of the platform. The previous years’ nominees for series published on WEBTOON include:
- Brother’s Bond by Kevin Grevioux and Ryan Benjamin
- Lavender Jack by Dan Schkade
- Let’s Play by Mongie
- Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe
- Third Shift Society by Meredith Moriarty
- The Kiss Bet by Ingrid Ochoa
- Batman: Wayne Family Adventures by CRC Payne, Starbite
- 3rd Voice by Evan Dahm
This year’s full list of nominees for Best Webcomic are as follows:
- The Accidental Undergrad by Christian Giroux (Fieldmouse Press)
- Keeping Time by Kody Okamoto (keepingtimecomic.com)
- The Legend of Parvaterra by Raúl Arnáiz (WEBTOON)
- Sable: A Ghost Story by Ethan M. Aldridge (sablecomic.com)
- Superfish by Peglo (WEBTOON)
- Terran Omega: The Ghosts of War by PJ Holden (pauljholden.com)
- Tiger, Tiger by Petra Erika Nordlund (tigertigercomic.com)
K-Comics Beat’s resident webcomic creators, Justin Guerrero and Masha Zhdanova, weighed in their opinions on this year’s Best Webcomic nominees and the two WEBTOON published titles.
I really love Keeping Time and Tiger, Tiger! I think those are both 100% deserved. Tiger, Tiger I saw was nominated back in 2019 but didn’t win then, so I’m glad it has a second chance. I haven’t read most of the rest of the Best Webcomic nominees, but I do like Ethan Aldridge and Tony Cliff’s work generally. In the Best Digital Comic category, DeadAss is great but again, the only one I’ve read.
I am confused, however, that Practical Defense Against Piracy is nominated in the Best Digital Comic Category this year (and in 2024) when it was nominated for Best Webcomic in 2023 and 2025. Why does this particular webcomic alternate categories every year, and why has it made the shortlist four years in a row in these two categories? It’s probably good, but is it that good?
Lore Olympus won the Best Webcomic Eisner three years in a row, and I’ve noticed False Knees has received multiple nominations for stand-alone strips and not the full body of work. The Accidental Undergrad was also nominated last year in addition to this year. That’s a lot of recurring titles out of hundreds of thousands of possible entries.I think that once a webcomic wins the Eisner, they should be taken out of the running for the following year, and once a comic is nominated, they should not be nominated the immediate next year but maybe the year after that. I also think the Best Digital Comic category needs to be either merged with Best Webcomic or clearly defined so it’s obvious why it’s a different category and why different comics should be nominated for that category.
Overall, I feel the selections for Best Webcomic and Best Digital Comic show, year after year, that the Eisner committee is not familiar with comics on the internet outside of a very narrow range of things, and that motivates their selections, which is disappointing to me.
Of those listed, 3rd voice is the only previous series that is self-published on CANVAS. So it is a treat to see more CANVAS series get some recognition within the Eisner Awards. This is also not including the other webtoons that were nominated on other platforms such as Tapas and Webtoon Factory.
One thing I do wonder when it comes to the WEBTOON Canvas series, such as 3rd Voice and The Legend of Parvaterra, is what qualities make them earn the nomination for the Eisner awards? Pretty curious as those two canvas series can’t be picked for popularity sake as they have around a subscriber count range of 2k to 5k. This is small compared to other hit series on CANVAS that garnered over 250k to even 1.7M subscribers or even more. As I have yet to sit down and read through these two CANVAS series in their entirety, I can only suspect it has to come down to a high quality of storytelling that allows them to stand out from their more “popular” counterparts on the platform. Honestly, I quite like to see as it shows that sometimes you don’t need to be popular or have high numbers to qualify to be nominated in such a prestigious award. Sometimes, it comes down to the art and the story itself. I do hope as the years go on and more webcomics gain recognition in various awards, that many aspiring creators are reassured that there is a likelihood that someday even their own works could gain such recognition in the industry.
