Winners Announced for the 2008 Weird-Ass Picture Book Awards!

The results are in! The 2nd annual Weird-Ass Picture Book Awards concluded this week, ending frenzied speculation and putting to rest months of controversy over the WAPBA's arcane selection process as well as ballot-stuffing rumors related to the 2007 WAPBA winner The Fuchsia Is Now, by J. Otto Seibold.

Actually... almost none of that happened, aside from the Weird-Ass Picture Book Awards themselves. The WAPBAs are a fiction created by popular kid-lit blogger MotherReader, while she was antsy waiting to hear the Oscar nominations in January. But it's such an entertaining fiction that it's hard not to love. And the winners? They're all great books--nominated by MotherReader readers and selected by the MR herself:

WAPB Award for Cover Art: New Socks, by Bob Shea

WAPB Award for Illustration: Bow Wow Bugs a Bug, by Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash

WAPB Award for Story: Five Little Gefiltes, by Dave Horowitz

2008 Award for Best Weird-Ass Picture Book: Cowboy and Octopus, by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith

And alas, there's no love for what many pundits and odds-makers put as a favorite for the Best WAPB award: the Steve Martin and Roz Chast collaboration The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z! ("[While it] was nominated and considered, ultimately it was rejected by the committee (uh, me) as being an adult book in children’s picture book clothing, and therefore ineligible for the award. Plus it sucked.") --Paul