Nominees for the 14th annual Doug Wright Awards have been announced by the nominating committee. The Doug Wright Awards honor “the best work and most promising talent in Canadian comics.”
Duncan Macpherson, editorial cartoonist at the Montreal Standard, Toronto Star and Maclean’s magazine over the course of five decades, is this year’s inductee to the Giants of the North, the Doug Wright Awards’ hall of fame. Macpherson passed away in 1993. You can read more about him on the Doug Wright website.
Other nominees include:
Doug Wright Best Book Award, presented for the best graphic novel book published in Canada (in English):
- Hostage by Guy Delisle (Drawn & Quarterly)
- I’m Not Here by GG (Koyama Press)
- Crawl Space by Jesse Jacobs (Koyama Press)
- The Abominable Mr. Seabrook by Joe Ollmann (Drawn & Quarterly)
- Anti-Gone by Connor Willumsen (Koyama Press)
Doug Wright Spotlight Award (a.k.a. The Nipper), presented to a Canadian cartoonist (or writer-cartoonist team) deserving of wider recognition:
- Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes, creators of The Case of the Missing Men (Conundrum Press)
- Gillian Blekkenhorst, creator of All-Inclusive Fully Automated Vacation and House of Strays
- Eric Kostiuk Williams, creator of Condo Heartbreak Disco (Koyama Press)
- Jason Loo, creator of The Pitiful Human-Lizard Nos. 12, 13 and 14 (Chapterhouse Comics)
- Jenn Woodall, creator of Magical Beatdown Vol. 2 and Marie and Worrywart
The Pigskin Peters Award, which honors the year’s most experimental, unconventional, or avant-garde comic:
- The Dead Father by Sami Alwani
- The Death of the Master by Patrick Kyle
- Crohl’s House Nos. 1 & 2 by Alexander Laird, Jamiel Rahi and Robert Laird
- Creation: The First Three Chapters by Sylvia Nickerson
- Potluck by the Wavering Line Collective
The jury for this year includes: Bo Doodley, a Toronto-based artist; Jim Munroe, a writer, producer, and creator of games, comics, movies, and novels, living in Toronto; Marc Ngui, a Windsor, Ontario–based sequential artist and speculative designer; and Pamela Marie Pierce, a multi-disciplinary visual artist and illustrator based in Saint John, New Brunswick, whose work has appeared in Heavy Metal and elsewhere..
The winners will be announced May 12 at the 2018 Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), which takes place in and around the Toronto Reference Library, May 12 and 13.