Alternative gekiga creator Yoshihiro Tatsumi won two Eisners Awards for his autobiographical A Drifting Life book in a Saturday ceremony at Comic-Con International in San Diego. The first award for this book published by Drawn & Quarterly was in the Best U.S. Edition of International Material - Asia category. The second award was for the Best Reality-Based Work of the year.

Naoki Urasawa, Takashi Nagasaki, and Jiro Taniguchi had also received nominations this year, but no other manga besides A Drifting Life won an award on Saturday.

Update: Peggy Burns of Drawn & Quarterly accepted the awards on Tatsumi's behalf and noted that Tatsumi attended Comic-Con International as a special guest in 2006. She added that his biggest observation of that visit was that he had never even signed a book for a woman in Japan. Tatsumi's works have now sold 60,000 copies in North America. Burn said, "He really is the embodiment of everything that is great with comics. He went to the drawing board every single day and drew what he believed in.”