The nominations for the Doug Wright Awards have just been announced.
The Doug Wright Awards are a juried award, founded in 2005, and honour the 'literary end' of Canadian cartooning.
The 2008 DWA finalists for Best Book are:
365 Days: A Diary by Julie Doucet (Drawn and Quarterly)
Spent by Joe Matt (Drawn and Quarterly)
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam by Ann Marie Fleming (Riverhead Books)
Southern Cross by Laurence Hyde (Drawn and Quarterly)
I have read all the nominees, and this is going to be a tough choice, as the books are so different. Julie Doucet's 365 Days is an illustrated diary, but it doesn't have a 'through narrative'. Joe Matt's Spent is a very self absorbed introspective narrative. Laurence Hyde's Southern Cross is a brilliant story told in woodcuts, and it is a reprint. My choice to win would be Ann Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, which is a delightful biography of Ann's great grandfather. It was a wonderful combination of biography, memoir and documentary. And there's magic in it!
The 2008 DWA finalists for Best Emerging Talent are:
Essex County Vol. 1 Tales From The Farm & Vol. 2 Ghost Stories by Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)
Pope Hats by Ethan Rilly (self-published)
Kieffer #1 by Jason Kieffer (self-published)
The Experiment by Nick Maandag (self-published)
There is one clear winner here- I think Jeff Lemire is one of the most talented cartoonists working in the graphic novel field today. His work features world class draftsmanship, concise innovative storytelling, and packs more emotion into one brushstroke than most artists can dream about.
This year the Doug Wright Awards have a new category 'dedicated to works that fall outside the bounds of traditional storytelling'.
The finalists for the first annual Pigskin Peters Award are:
Milk Teeth by Julie Morstad (Drawn and Quarterly)
Little Lessons in Safety by Emily Holton (Conundrum Press)
Excelsior 1968 by John Martz (self-published)
Fire Away by Chris von Szombathy (Drawn and Quarterly)
Full disclosure on this one- I cannot be objective because a) I have only seen one of the books, and b) I am a friend and ex-collegue of John Martz, and I thought his Excelsior 1968 was simply brilliant. John has drawn all the portraits in a high school year book, and something very odd happens- you start seeing the adolescent archetypes that you might have seen at any high school in 1968.
The finalists for the 4th Annual Doug Wright Awards were chosen by a nominating committee that included cartoonists Chester Brown and Seth, Canadian director Jerry Ciccoritti, comics historian Jeet Heer and writer and Sequential blogger Bryan Munn.
The winners will de decided by a jury including writer and film critic Katrina Onstad, gallery curator Helena Reckitt, writer Mariko Tamaki and cartoonist Ho Che Anderson.
The winners will be handed out in Toronto in August 2008.
