Acknowledging Greatness
EAGLE CON has several awards it gives out each year, celebrating a variety of contributions to sci-fi/fantasy in media.
Imaginator Award
This award is given each year honor wondrous achievement in visual conceptualization.
Martin T. Charles (2023)
Martin’s story begins in Grenada, where he revealed a talent for music at a young age. He was also passionate about art. The turning point came the day he had a chance encounter with his soon-to-be mentor, Leo Carty, a graduate of Pratt Institute in New York. Leo’s influence was exactly the impetus Martin needed to make the decision to choose art over music. So, he left the warn winds of the Caribbean begins for the cold, mean streets of New York City where he entered a state of complete culture shock. With more that 50 feature films to his name, including popular hits such as the 2016 “Ghostbusters” as well as “Saving Mr. Banks.” “42,” “Public Enemies,” “Love and Other Drugs,” “Miami Vice,” “Leatherheads” and “Charlie Wilson’s War,” graphic designer Martin T. Charles has spent his career working with top Hollywood directors, producers, production designers and television and movie stars. From collecting vintage BMWs to becoming the first Graphic Designer in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Martin T. Charles’ story is as unique as many of the film he’s helped to create.
Previous Winners
Dawn Brown (2021)
Prism Award
The Prism Award is given every year for outstanding contributions to diversity in science fiction and fantasy across media.
Gilbert Hernandez
Jaime Hernandez
Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez (2023)
Gilbert Hernandez was born in 1957 in Oxnard, California, and is considered one of the greatest living comics writer-artists in the world. In 1982, Hernandez co-created, along with his brothers Mario and Jaime, the ongoing, iconic, internationally acclaimed comic book series Love and Rockets, one of the greatest bodies of work the medium has ever seen. In addition to his work on Love and Rockets, its spinoffs, and side series, Hernandez has released a prodigious amount of original graphic novels and miniseries, such as Sloth, Bumperhead, and Marble Season. He also collaborated with Darwyn Cooke on The Twilight Children for DC. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2017 and is the recipient of a Fellow Award from United States Artists and a PEN Center USA’s Graphic Literature Award for Outstanding Body of Work. Hernandez lives in Ventura, CA, with his wife and daughter.
Jaime Hernandez was one of six siblings born and raised in Oxnard, California. His mother passed down a love of comics, which for Jaime became a passion rivaled only by his interest in the burgeoning punk rock scene of 1970s Southern California. Together with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Jaime co-created the ongoing comic book series Love and Rockets in 1981, which Gilbert and Jaime continue to both write and draw to this day. Jaime’s work began as a perfect (if unlikely) synthesis of the anarchistic, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the punk scene and an elegant cartooning style that recalled masters such as Charles M. Schulz and Alex Toth. Love and Rockets has evolved into one of the great bodies of American literary fiction, spanning five decades and countless high-water marks in the medium’s history. In 2016, Hernandez won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his graphic novel, The Love Bunglers. In 2017, he (along with Gilbert) was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and, in 2018, he released his first children’s book, the Aesop Book Prize-winning The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America. He is a lifelong Angeleno.
Octavia E. Butler Award
This award is given out in honor of Cal State LA alumna Octavia E. Butler to celebrate a creator whose writing exemplifies the spirit of her work.
John Jennings (2021)
John Jennings is a professor, author, graphic novelist, curator, and all-around champion of Black culture. He is half of the legendary comics duo known collectively as Black Kirby, and has adapted the work of authors such as Octavia E. Butler and Nnedi Okorafor into graphic novel form.
As Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), Jennings examines the visual culture of race in various media forms including film, illustrated fiction, and comics and graphic novels. He is the director of Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels focused on the experiences of people of color. His research interests include the visual culture of Hip Hop, Afrofuturism and politics, Visual Literacy, Horror, and the EthnoGothic, and Speculative Design and its applications to visual rhetoric.
Jennings is co-editor of the 2016 Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers) and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. He is co-founder and organizer of the MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and also SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University
Lemonade Award
The Lemonade Award is for acts of kindness by individuals that further science fiction community, and was created by author Nalo Hopkinson with support from the Speculative Literature Foundation.
Dr. Jaymee Goh
Photo by Francesca Myman
Dr. Jaymee Goh is a Malaysian-Chinese writer, reviewer, editor, and essayist of speculative fiction. Her work has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies, such as Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, and reprinted in LeVar Burton Reads and Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. Her reviews and nonfiction have appeared on Tor.com, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Strange Horizons. She co-edited The Sea Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (Rosarium 2015), and edited The WisCon Chronices Vol. 11: Trials by Whiteness (Aqueduct 2017). A graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in 2016, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside, where she dissertated in science fiction studies and critical race theory. She is an editor for Tachyon Publications.
K Tempest Bradford
Photo by K. Tempest Bradford
K. Tempest Bradford is a teacher, media critic, and author of fantasy and science fiction steeped in Black Girl Magic. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines, including In The Shadow of the Towers and Strange Horizons. Her media criticism and essays on diversity and representation have been published at NPR, io9, Ebony Magazine, and more.
Tempest began giving talks and teaching classes on representation and creating diverse narratives in 2014 for Writing the Other and has been invited to teach at Clarion West, LitReactor, universities, and gaming companies. Her debut middle grade novel will be out in Fall of 2022 from FSG for Young Readers.
The 501st Legion
501st Legion Logo
The 501st Legion is the world's definitive imperial Star Wars costuming organization, with over 14,000 members in over 60 countries. An all-volunteer organization, the members celebrate STAR WARS™ through the creation and use of quality costumes that portray the villainous, morally ambiguous, or non-partisan characters from the universe. The local unit of The 501st Legion is the Southern California Garrison with almost 500 members. The local garrison spans the width of the state from San Luis Obispo County to Riverside County and is organized into 5 regional Squads: Channel Islands, Inland Empire, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Joaquin. The 501st Legion works with and promotes the causes of the American Cancer Society, Starlight Foundation, Make a Wish Foundation, and various children's hospitals worldwide. They are the bad guys doing good.