And The Winners Are…. The Bleeding Cool Reader’s Awards

It’s been an exciting few weeks watching the thousands of votes come in. In some cases there was runaway winners from the get-go, and in others we were watching as flipped back and forth between leaders in some ridiculously tight races.

We’ve tallied the count – got rid of those that were multiples from the same computer, though we did keep the first entry from each – and have your favorites from over the past year. One thing we have taken to is around the best actor/actress categories. In each of the pairings, there is a Best Performance award. What we did is between the men + women of a category, whomever got the overall most votes was the Best Performance award. Then whomever in the same gender got 2nd place got the best for that gender, and the top vote-getter of the other gender is their own best.

It’s been a really fun first go at this for us, and we’ve already got lots of plans for new areas to add for next year. Anyway, without further ado, but with color commentary sprinkled in along the way – here’s the results.

Comics:

Best Superhero Comic: Superman

The eternal battle between Superman and Detective Comics was pretty close for the first week, but then Superman pulled ahead and wound up taking the prize.

Eliot Cole (EC) – I can’t say I’m surprised here. This book has been outstanding, and the family drama really, really, does connect well with readers. Not surprisingly The Vision was also close in the runners up here for some similar reasons, but absolutely faultless storytelling from King.

Lauren Sisselman (LS) – Superman? Really? Superman?!

Jeremy Konrad (JK) – Superman is the best book on the stands right now

Joe Glass (JG) – Superman has been a really great book. Fatherhood suits Clark. And it’s brought Superman back to the image of what he could be. Little surprised The Vision didn’t win, but yeah, Superman is a worthy winner too.

 

Best Supernatural / Horror Comic: Spirits

EC – I don’t know enough about Spirits to say much, however it’s a part of the troupe of LINE Webtoons that did very well in the voting (mobilisation!). Of the rest, Gail Simone’s highly superior horror Sci-Fi Clean Room was the best runner up, and for me the best of the bunch.

 

Best Science Fiction Comic: Saga

EC – Saga, standard, innit? I voted Vader, as it was a heavily awesome book last year, easily one of the best on the shelves, and Saga had a little … sag. The main Star Wars book was close behind with Paper Girls, and … obviously the LINE Webtoon Dents did well here. Seriously I’m not surprised by this result at all, I do think that Gillen’s book was superior, but the people have spoken!

JG – Saga is genius, and perfect, and oh my god just destroys me every time. Worthy winner here.

 

Best Military / Spy Comic: Grayson

EC – Dat butt.

 

Best New Comic: Moon Knight

EC – Moon Knight along with Old Man Logan has been the first time that I can say that I’ve consistently enjoyed reading Jeff Lemire stories, this is a fabulously woven tale of a schizo anti-hero. Must read stuff.

JG – Moon Knight is a pretty good choice for Best New Comic. I’ve enjoyed how it handles mental health issues, especially in a recent issue. And the art has just been beautiful. It’s one of the best books Marvel is putting out atm.

LS – Well done to MK, but 4 Kids is fantastic. If you’re not reading it you should.

 

Best Web Comic: Space Boy

 

Best Small Press Comic: Motor Girl

EC – I wasn’t surprised here. Terry Moore would’ve benefited from being known by way more than his competition, I feel. I was, of course, rooting for my mate Tim, a credible shared second place.

 

Best Letterer: Stephen McCranie

 

Best Cover Artist: David Aja

EC – If you didn’t check out Aja’s Scarlet Witch covers last year, do yourself a favour. Actually I’d say specifically the cover to Scarlet Witch #10, as not only is it a stunning piece, the book is easily one of the best single issues of last year. Sad it didn’t make it through to the Single Issue competition.

 

Best Inker: Paolo Rivera

 

Best Single Issue of an Ongoing Series: Vision #11

JG – Oh, that issue of The Vision was superb. The whole series was.

EC – Agreed. Whilst I was all in on A-Force #4, The Vision could have had a couple of issues in there. But this one had such a hard one-two punch that it left you reeling. I still feel it on re-reads.

 

Best Colorist: Stephen McCranie

EC – Jordie Bellaire for me, sorry, webtoons fans.

Best Penciller: Greg Capullo

JG – Capullo has been turning in some of the best work of his career for a while now.

EC – Whilst I had one niggle on Reborn, it’s hard to look past Mr. Capullo as someone way on top of their game.

LS – Greg Capullo and Fiona Staples are the $%&£, literally. Love her work on Archie.

 

Best New Artist: Instantmiso

EC – Well done to instantmiso, her work is not something that I read, but in the voting for this I checked out Siren’s Lament and … well, I get it.

JG – Shame for Stephen Byrne here. A lovely fellow, and his artwork is fun, dynamic and full of character. Glad to see Stephen did well.

 

Best Writer of an Ongoing Series: Tom King

EC – Was there ever any doubt? Not even a LINE Webtoon could destroy the amazing work that Tom King has been doing … basically everywhere in 2016. Such intelligent storytelling, so basically accessible. This is so well deserved.

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Television:

Best Drama Series: Game of Thrones

This one was neck and neck for the longest time with Westworld, but then in the last few days GoT pulled ahead to win handily, with Westworld coming in second. Not far behind was Luke Cage and The Walking Dead, with only seven votes between the two of them. The expanse had done well in the original nomination round, but was all but forgotten when it came time for voting.

Best Reality Series: Comic Book Men

BC is first and foremost a comic-centric site, so it was fun to see Comic Book Men beat the pack on this one. What was a bit of a surprise was that coming in second was MasterChef and then RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s ok, those are some of our favorites as well.

Best Comic to TV Adaptation: Daredevil

Another close one but Daredevil eked out a very close win over The Flash. If the 11th hour surge would have kept up, it would probably have been a different result.

Best Limited Series: Agent Carter

Before you race for the comments section and tell us that Agent Carter wasn’t a limited series, yea, we know. But that’s as much on us, because we weren’t terribly clear on what we were looking for with this one. The number of nomination votes it received made it impossible to ignore. In the end it wound up winning with more than 4x the votes of the nearest opponent (which was BBC’s The Night Manager).

Best Comedy Series: Bob’s Burgers

A clean win, a quarter lap ahead of Archer, and a full lap ahead of all of the other entrants in the category.

Best Performance: Anthony Hopkins, Westworld

Hopkins just basically wanders into a room and oozes epic levels of awesome. He says, “what’s behind that door?” And we say, “I don’t see any door.” He takes the top overall votes between the men and women nominees for Best Performance.

Best Actress: Melissa Benoist, Supergirl

This was another one where the lead was shifting every few hours between Benoist and Evan Rachel Wood for her performance in Westworld. In the end, it was the android that ran out of steam and Supergirl saved the day.

Best Actor: Stephen Amell, Arrow

After Hopkins in the men’s category, Amell came in not far behind, after that the rest of the pack were fairly far behind. My own favorite, Travis Fimmel from History Channel’s Vikings came in a few centuries behind, but that doesn’t mean he’s still the winner in my book.

Best Supporting Performance: Simone Missick, Luke Cage

As with the case of Hopkins, Missick simply knocked it out of the park, both with her performance as well as her voting support who kept it going strong throughout the voting.

Best Supporting Actress: Morena Baccarin, Gotham & The Flash

Best Supporting Actor: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, The Walking Dead

I wonder how many votes Negan’s bat, Lucille, would have gotten if we had it in a category all its own. The evil monologue-champion of the world took the lead early and never looked back. However that wouldn’t have helped for long, with the rate at which Ed Harris had been catching up on the lead in the last 24 hours.

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Movies:

Where many of the television categories had very tight races, it was less so in the case of films. It seems that people were pretty specific in what they liked across the board. But there were a few in here that were neck and neck (Horror being the main one).

Best Fantasy Film: Doctor Strange

Sherlock Holmes in a Cloak kept well ahead of the reject from Hogwarts with his traveling menagerie. Personally I had thought Warcraft would have gotten more votes, but it seems that just like when we reviewed it, people were happy to just forget it’d ever existed.

Best Comedy Film: Deadpool

The biggest blow out of any category by an order of magnitude. The only other film that significantly played into things was The Nice Guys. Ghostbusters fans, take heart, your film got more votes than Warcraft did at least.

Best Science Fiction Film: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

For all of the intellectual fans that love to talk about how much they dug Arrival, they gave it a shot, but Rogue One ran away from the field. Eh, who knows, it’s popular enough, maybe they’ll make a sequel out of it after all.

Best Animated Film: Zootopia

Huh, another surprise, given the comments made on the site over the past year, I would have expected Sausage Party to take it, but nope, Zootopia took it by more than 1/3rd again ahead of the two nearest followers (which were Moana and Kubo and the Two Strings).

Best Horror Film: Don’t Breathe

I was so mad, I had been all set over the past week watching 10 Cloverfield Lane leading the pack. Cloverfield and Green Room were my two favorites of the year, but in the end, Breathe pulled ahead, winning by under a dozen votes. Green Room was low in the pack, but I’m proud of Cloverfield’s showing. I need to go watch Don’t Breathe again, because really, I didn’t understand why people liked it so much when it had such a dumb motivation for the kids – I mean, they’d always robbed empty houses before, now they go into the home of a special forces vet? How could that possibly go poorly?

Best Comic to Film Adaptation: Deadpool

So this was a close fight, Deadpool and Civil War duking it out. In the end, the chimichanga-munching mercenary ran away with it. The irony would definitely be that the X-Men film without Bryan Singer won the award, and the X-Men film with him (Apocalypse), came in so dead last that the horse basically made it two furlongs out of the gate then dropped over dead.

Best Performance: Emma Stone, La La Land

Well it would seem that a heartfelt performance, good love story, and a mediocre singing ability is what the doctor ordered this year. Emma was a clear fan favorite.

Best Actress: Amy Adams, Arrival

She was definitely the best part of the movie. I just wonder how much better she should have been if they’d not gotten cold feet during production and left the original storyline intact and not completely retooled the last act.

Best Actor: Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge

Come on, after being saddled with the dumpster fire that was both of the Amazing Spider-Man films, Garfield deserved to get a real role. Director Mel Gibson gave him that chance, and damn if he didn’t make the best of it. Another few films of this caliber and we might even begin to forgive him (not that the horror that was the Spider-Man films was all his fault, he just got stuck with it).

Best Supporting Performance: Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures

This is me standing from a hilltop applauding Spencer’s win. She led the team of amazing actresses that has brought a much-needed film to the screen. It’s box office performance deserves every dime, and to the teachers taking their students to see it each deserve their own awards.

Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis, Fences

My biggest regret of the year was that Davis and Denzel Washington’s Fences had to go up against Hidden Figures. Any other year, Fences would be the runaway winner for their individual as well as ensemble performances. It’s hard enough to do a direct-lift of a stage play to the screen and make it still be compelling, but this film is one of those master-class workshops in owning a scene.

Best Supporting Actor: Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water

This was tight, between Bridges and Mahershala Ali in Moonlight. Only 9 votes separated the two, and with multiple thousand individual votes, 9 is a photo-finish.

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Games

Special thanks to our games writer, Madeline, for her commentary and contributions to the games award!

Game of the Year: Overwatch

Overwatch was always going to be a huge hit, being a Blizzard MOBA that hit on consoles and PC. If Blizzard can do only one thing well, it is sell you a game you’re going to enjoy. That Pokemon Go was the runner up was a bit of an upset, given that its a mobile title, but I think we can all agree that it wasn’t much of a surprise. We could all finally be Pokemon Trainers in our own back yards. And there is something to say about a game’s popularity when it simultaneously causes car crashes and gets people walking around when they normally wouldn’t.

Best Performance in a Game: Nolan North

Runner Up – Jennifer Hale, Zhang Yu

Nolan North has done an insane amount of voiceover work for video games, arguably his most well-known role is as Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series, but he’s been in more games than I have space to list including Destiny, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, Lego Dimensions, and Batman: Arkham Knight. Jennifer Hale has done voiceover work for a number of games including Halo 5: Guardians, Mortal Kombat X, and World of Final Fantasy. Zhang Yu is mostly known as Overwatch’s Mei – aka the one in the parka, for those not in the know. 

Best Storyline: Uncharted 4

The Last Guardian was supposed to do well with how much it’d been promoted at conventions this year. And who doesn’t like having your own companion fantasy creatures right? Uncharted 4 taking this category is pretty much what we expected to see given Nathan Drake’s enduring popularity as a protagonist. And it is the last game in the series, so it had a lot of plot to give us in order to tie up Nathan Drake’s story.

Best Mobile Game: Pokemon Go

Everyone else can go home in this category, Pokemon Go has it all tied up in a massive landslide. After all, what’s better than a moble-based augmented reality game where you can catch Pokemon in your backyard, at school, waiting in line at Starbucks, in the back of your favorite bar..? Nothing. Hearthstone picked up the Runner Up place here, as it is another Blizzard title which directly ties in to World of Warcraft. So that was always going to place.

Best Multiplayer: Overwatch

League of Legends may be a popular MMO with a reported 100 million monthly followers, but it can’t beat the pure fun of crushing your friends in Overwatch. Sure, we all like to go raiding with a pack of friends and online acquaintances, but if I can crush my best friend’s dreams in one game, it would be something a bit faster, a bit more suited for PVP. And isn’t that what we all love to do in multiplayer anyway?

Best RPG: Final Fantasy XV

What I find most surprising about this category is that Adventure Quest Worlds actually placed with 7 votes. 7 of you play that game still? Damn. I mean, I get it. I used to play Adventure Quest back in the ancient days of Flash games. That said, Pokemon Sun and Moon was a big draw for Nintendo with the popularity of Pokemon Go, it’s been a Poke-renaissance. Square Enix wanted absolutely everyone to love FFXV so much that they tossed as many things into it as they could and I’m glad to see it come in first. You knew that was coming. I’ve got a giant weakness for Final Fantasy titles.

Best Action Game: Overwatch

While Overwatch is a fantastic game, I’m not sure I would have classed it as an action game given that it’s a battle arena, but I’ll give it to you. Overwatch was a clear favorite this year and beat out Uncharted 4 by a good hundred votes. Uncharted 4, while awesome, just wasn’t action-driven enough to take the lead.

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Fandom:

Best Genre of Pop-Culture Convention: San Diego Comic Con

It felt like there was a cosmic game of ping-pong with the lead flipping between ReedPop’s New York Comic Con and San Diego a few times every day throughout the voting. In the end, the party in the Gaslamp District beat NYCC by only around a dozen votes.

Best Webseries: ComicPop

This was one of the categories that everyone else didn’t really even come to the party. If the votes of all the others were added together, and doubled, it would ComicPop would still have won. Actually we could have doubled it a second time, and it would have only barely lost. Yea, it was a hell of a win.

Best Podcast: The Weekly Pull

Not as much of a crush as in the Webseries category, but it was a pretty solid win – Elseworlds was pulling in second place behind. Next year though, I kind of expect Elseworlds and Weekly Planet will both make up ground and give Elseworlds a run for its money.

Best Cosplayer: Nicole Marie Jean

It was clear early on that it was going to be between Nichole Marie and Vampy Bit Me. Congratulations to both cosplayers as the worthy adversaries that they were.

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So that’s the list, thanks again everyone for having participated and making your voices heard. What do you think of the final results? Were the voters crazy? Did they get anything completely wrong? What categories should we include for next year? Chime in below.