Sunday Comics | A closer look at the Ignatz Awards nominees

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.

The nominees for the 2022 Ignatz Awards came out a few days ago, with five webcomics being honored in the “Outstanding Online Comics” category. So let’s take a look at them!

Blind Alley is a webcomic by Adam de Souza that’s been running since May of 2022. Earlier this year the strip won the 2022 Cartoonist Studio Prize Award, and it’s easy to see why — it’s a sometimes funny, sometimes touching and always well-executed four-panel strip that captures the magic and hardships of childhood.

It follows a group of kids who live in “the strange and lonely neighborhood of Blind Alley,” and you can see feel the love and influence that everything from Peanuts to Calvin & Hobbes to The Simpsons has had on the strip. de Souza released a collection of the first year’s worth of strips back in May, and if you support him on Patreon, you can see the strips early (among other rewards).

As the image above gives away, Ride or Die by Mars Heyward is a comic about cars — street racing, to be exact. It follows Lucky and his childhood crush Vick, who find a car once owned by Lucky’s mother and embark on a journey to find out more about her and the sport she loved. “But what they don’t know is something’s lurking under the hood of the car, something fueled by revenge… and gasoline.” You can read it on Webtoon or on its dedicated website.

Heyward is also the creator of Long Exposure, which you can also read on Webtoon or on its dedicated website. You can also support Heyward on Patreon.

Vattu by Evan Dahm actually won the Ignatz Award in this category back in 2014, and here it is again eight year later. Dahm has actually been posting the webcomic for more than 12 years now, and he plans to bring it to a close in September. So it’s fitting that it finds its way back onto the nomination list again.

Vattu is an “anthropological fantasy epic; a story following a member of a nomadic culture caught in the midst of a clash of cultures.” You can read it online, or you can buy it and Dahm’s other work on Topatoco.

Alexander, the Servant & the Water of Life by Reimena Yee is, as you might have guessed from the title, about “the legendary life and accomplishments of Alexander the Great.” Yee has put a lot of time into not only the creation of the strip, but also researching the life of the main character, as you can see when visiting the resources page. It also contains more details on the process of creating the comic.

Yee is currently crowdfunding a hardcover collection of the first book (she plans to release four of them in total) so you can get in on the ground floor if you’d like to read it in print.

Finally, there’s Technofeelia Vol. 4 ‘Help’ by Amy Kurzweil, which, while it tackles a serious subject, is a fun one purely for the technological experience. Click through on the link to see what I mean.

Kurzweil’s graphic novel Flying Couch was released in 2016, and according to her website she’s currently working on Artificial: a love story, which “chronicles my father’s mission to resurrect his own father through a union of A.I. and the documents saved in a storage unit.”

Congrats to all five cartoonists for their nomination; the Ignatz Award winners will be announced at the Small Press Expo Sept. 17-18. You can request a ballot if you’d like to vote.