The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards are given out each year at San Diego Comic-Con. The awards are given for creative achievement in the American comic book industry. They also give out an award each year for best academic or scholarly work, many of which we have available in the Libraries in either print or digital format. You can see a full list of previous nominees in this category on Wikipedia.
The Claremont Run: Subverting Gender in the X-Men by 
Super Bodies: Comic Book Illustration, Artistic Styles, and Narrative Impact by 
Asian Political Cartoons by 
In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s by 
Desegregating comics: debating Blackness in the golden age of American comics by