The Beat is Nominated for an Eisner!
- Kristina Elyse Butke
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
I am a bit on the late side finding this out. The announcements for all nominees and categories were made on the Comic-Con website as well as The Beat on May 15, and I found out through a late log-in to our team's Slack just now. Oops.
Anyway, I thought I'd talk about how amazing it has been to write for The Beat (who I sometimes call Comics Beat) and how that all came together, and to celebrate their nomination and look brightly into the future.
I first joined The Beat staff in 2023 when one of the staff openly sought writers through Twitter/X. She was looking for writers specifically for manga and anime. I don't know what possessed me to reach out, other than I didn't think I had anything to lose, and I shot her a link to my anime reviews on this website.
To my surprise, I was welcomed to the team! I wrote my first review on both the manga and anime My Happy Marriage and from then on contributed here and there to roundtables and similar types of articles. However, I never really figured out what I wanted to do on my own as a writer, and I also had a slew of health problems that had me drop out of the ring (in terms of writing individual articles) for almost a whole year. I was straight MIA and had no idea what was going on.
I reached out to the head of The Beat to express my desire to continue writing, and how I hoped to get back on track. Soon after that I was connected with my editor, who looks over my posts for The Beat and has been essentially reteaching me how to write. She is so wonderful to work with and very supportive, with a solid critical eye.
When 2025 hit, I dove into writing for The Beat as much as I could given my time constraints with teaching and working on novels. I would do maybe 1-2 articles a month, and it took me (still kind of takes me) a bit to get a feel for reviewing manga. It's a visual medium but I tend to overlook that to gab about the plot (I am so guilty of summarizing all the time!). I need a little extra help until I get a true knack for writing about manga but I think I'm improving!
On top of that, a PR rep covering works and news by TOKYOPOP reached out to me after catching one of my BL manga reviews, and now I'm part of the TOKYOPOP Beat. I am regularly sent manga, light novels, and press releases to cover on The Beat. Life got busier for certain, but I'm so happy with this turn of events.
Anyway, when I found out The Beat got nominated for an Eisner, I felt so proud. They are a really great and supportive team to write for, and they cover SO MUCH in the comics and pop culture world. I can't believe I was so warmly welcomed to the team, and what a team they are. It's nice that all of our hard work is being recognized by the Eisner Awards and I would absolutely love it if we won.
I hope to do right by The Beat and continually improve my writing skills as a reviewer of a brilliant, visual, and unique method of storytelling. My interests lie in BL, horror, and fantasy, but with my new role reviewing works by TOKYOPOP, my tastes should expand even more, and I hope I cover a diverse array of manga for The Beat.
Things can only continue to go up from here, and thank you to The Beat for believing in me!
If you want to read all of my Beat reviews, you can see them compiled here.