GINCO Award 2025
The Award Committee of 2025
Our goal is once again to assemble a diverse committee with a wide range of perspectives and expertise, drawing from different areas of the comic and manga scene, as well as the fields of research and press.
If you want to suggest yourself or somebody else, please feel free to contact us. We're happy to enlist the help of honorary experts who want to give back to the community and would be happy to do the honors, as time-consuming as it may be.
In 2025, we were able to enlist the following experts:

Catherine Bazabas was born in France and plunged into a cauldron of comic culture at a young age. In Germany, she started as a trainee at Carlsen and was later employed by Tokyopop. Four months ago, she opened her comic store “Petit Kami” in Hamburg and is finally living her dream of talking about comics all day long.

Joanna Straczowski has been the director of the Erika-Fuchs-Haus, the museum for comics and language art in Schwarzenbach an der Saale, since December 2021. There she organizes special exhibitions, events and workshops and offers comic artists a platform to present and exhibit their work

Katharina Hülsmann studied English and Modern Japan in Düsseldorf and wrote her PhD thesis on Japanese fan comics. She has been interested in comics since childhood: initially for bande dessinés, later especially for manga, which is still the focus of her research today.

Maurice Alain founded his own video game company Tiny Roar 10 years ago and works there as managing director, game director, and author. Together with Marvin Clifford, he has published over 300 chapters of the web comic Lootboy, combining his fascination for video games, humor, and comics. In his spare time, Maurice shares his hobbies with his kids and tries to explain to them that reboots, time travel and parallel world stories are mostly just cheap cop-outs.

Tanja Stolle aka meitei miu is architect and mangaka. After a break from comics due to her studies, she went back to the drawing board in 2021 and put her full focus on her passion for storytelling. In addition to illustration projects with various artists, she is currently working on the 4th volume of her mystery manga INCIDENTS, which won the GINCO Award in the Manga Spotlight category in 2024.
The organizing team only supports the work of the committee on a logistical and communication level and does not influence the decisions.