Award-winners at the 2015 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards – the industry’s top honor – include two Pittsburgh talents.

Ed Piskor won Best Reality-Based Work for volume two of his uber-successful Hip Hop Family Tree series (published by Fantagraphics). (Here’s our interview with Piskor from back when volume one came out.)

And Jim Rugg won Best Publication Design for Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream (Locust Moon). The book compiles work by contemporary artists inspired by newspaper-comics pioneer Winsor McCay. The book, edited by Josh O’Neill, Andrew Carl and Chris Stevens, also won Best Anthology at the Eisners, and was recently the basis for an exhibition at Pittsburgh’s own Toonseum.

(Here’s an article I did on Rugg in 2010, when he published, with Brian Maruca, his great comics pastiche Afrodisiac.)

The awards were handed out July 10 in San Diego.

Both Piskor and Rugg are area natives who, despite their growing national reputations, still live and work here. And we’re pleased to say that both of them have also done illustration work for CP.

Here’s Rugg’s June 2012 parody of an infamous Time cover, this one illustrating our article about former Gov. Tom Corbett’s friendly treatment of big business.
And here’s Piskor’s cover for our Spanish-language issue, from October 2011.