Sunday Comics | Looking at the NCS Divisional Award nominees

Check out webcomics by Tom Siddell, Ariel Ries, Rosemary Mosco and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below, or on Twitter of Facebook.

The National Cartoonist Society has announced the nominees for this year’s Reuben Award and the accompanying NCS Divisional Awards, so this week I thought I’d spotlight the six webcomics nominated in the “Online Comics – Long Form” and “Online Comics – Short Form” categories. We’ll start with the latter.

Lone Shadow is a short story by Mia Nie, whose work you can purchase on Gumroad. It’s about “Sekiro, trans philosophy and the touch of others.” Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a video game about a shinobi warrior named Wolf set in a fictionalized Japan, and Nie has an accompanying essay you can read as well (although it focuses a bit more on Dark Souls, a really, really difficult game made by the same studio as Sekiro.)

The second nomination is one I’ve featured in this column before —Rosemary Mosco‘s Bird and Moon. She’s a a naturalist, science writer and comics creator; she worked on First Second’s Science Comics line, on the graphic novel about the solar system, and has done a few other children’s books as well.

The final nomination in the Short Form category is Heart and Brain by Nick Seluk. It is, quite literally, about a heart and a brain who have different views of the world, as one might expect. Other body parts, like gall bladders and noses, also show up in the strip. You can find print copies and more in Seluk’s shop.

Jumping now to the three nominations in the Long Form category, we’ll start with the long-running Kill Six Billion Demons, which I believe has been around almost a decade now. It takes a while to kill six billion demons, y’know? You can find Tom Parkinson Morgan’s comic in print as well — volume four just came out — and he also has a shop set up to sell related merch.

Ariel Ries’ Witchy is another one I’ve featured here before. It won the Ignatz Award last year for “Outstanding Online Comic.” It’s about a young witch, Nyneve, who is haunted by her father’s death and the organization that is complicit in his death. The comic is currently on hiatus as Ries works on a YA graphic novel called Strange Bedfellows.

And finally, Tom Siddell’s Gunnerkrigg Court is another long-running webcomic that’s had more than 80 chapters at this point, and it’s still going strong. The fantasy comic has been published by BOOM!’s Archaia imprint as well as by Titan in the UK. Siddell also has a shop where you can buy merch, collections and other comics he’s created.

Congratulations and best of luck to all the nominees this year. Winners will be announced the weekend of Oct. 15-17 during NCSFest, which will be streamed online again this year.

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