Last night the winners of the 2017 Joe Shuster Awards were announced during a private ceremony in Toronto, with Yanick Paquette, Jeff Lemire, Michael Cho, Guy Delisle and many more Canadians walking away with awards.
Established in 2004, The Joe Shuster Awards are Canada’s national award recognizing outstanding achievement in the creation of comic books, graphic novels and webcomics. Named in honor of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, the awards recognize the best of the Canadian comics world; nominees must be either Canadian citizens or permanent residents in Canada. The nominees are chosen by the Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards Association and the winners by a jury, so there is no public vote.
Winners for 2017 are:
Webcomics Creator: Ty Templeton
Writer: Jeff Lemire
Cover Artist: Michael Cho
Artist: Yanick Paquette & Nathan Fairbairn
Cartoonist: Guy Delisle
Gene Day Award: Nunumi – Sky Rover
Named after the late Howard Eugene Day (1951-1982), the Gene Day Award honors Canadian comic book creators or creative teams who self-published their work but did not have the books distributed by a third party such as Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. The nominees were selected from individual publications submitted for review before the deadline of May 30th, 2016.
Harry Kremer Award: L’imaginaire (Laurier, Quebec)
Named after the Harry Kremer, the original owner of Now & Then Books (in Kitchener, Ontario). The CCBCAA maintains a list of active comic book stores and a database of recommendations, referrals and secret shopper reports. A separate Retailer Award Committee overseen by Scott VanderPloeg (Comic Book Daily) reviews the data and selects a short list of stores that have shown merit in a variety of categories.
The Dragon Award: Eric Orchard – Bera the One-Headed Troll
The Dragon Award recognizes the works which capture the attention and fascination of young readers, and help to create a passion for life-long reading. Works considered for this award are comic books and graphic novels by Canadian creators that are targeted at readers 14 and under. Nominees for this award are selected by a team of educators led by Jennifer Haines, MA, B.Ed., who is also the proprietor of Guelph, Ontario’s The Dragon comic book shop.
Canadian Comic Book Hall of Fame: Inductees included Jack Tremblay, Gabriel Morrissette, Lovern Kindzierski, Julie Doucet and Stuart Immonen.
A lifetime achievement award honoring Canadian comic book creators (artists, writers, cartoonists, editors and in some cases, publishers) for their contributions to comic books.
The T.M. Maple Award: Kenneth Ketter
The T.M. Maple Award goes to someone (living or deceased) selected from the Canadian comics community for achievements made outside of the creative and retail categories who have had a positive impact on the community. Ketter was the founder and primary organizer of COSMICON (Winters College – York University, 1972-76), one of Canada’s earliest comic book events and predecessor to modern pop culture conventions by being multi-genre, mixing comic books, film and music, complete with notable industry guests, dealers, art shows, film presentations and live music.
T.M. Maple was the pseudonym of Jim Burke (1956-1994), a fan who wrote more than 3,000 letters to comic book letter columns between 1977 and 1994.