Tag: GoComics

Sunday Comics | Looking at recent awards nominees

Check out the online comics nominated for both the NCS Divisional Awards and the Nommo Awards.

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.

Award nominations for both the NCS Divisional Awards and the Nommo Awards came out in the last week, so let’s take a look at what webcomics earned nods from each of them.

I’ll start with the National Cartoonist Society’s annual awards, which are given out every year in conjunction with the Reuben Award. While their categories range from comic books to graphic novels to advertising to greeting cards, they have two categories focused on online comics — a long-form category and a short-form category. Let’s start with the long-form nominees.

First up is Emily Flake, a very prolific cartoonist with comics appearing in places like The New Yorker, The Nib and others (she’s also a comedian/performer). Based on the image on the NCS site, it looks like she’s nominated for her comic “Visions of the Post-Pandemic Future (Revised),” which appeared on the New Yorker website in April of last year.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Steenz

The cartoonist who took over ‘Heart of the City’ this year discusses the comic strip process, her focus on the characters, her other projects and more.

Christina “Steenz” Stewart has been making comics for years, but earlier this year, she took over making the daily syndicated comic strip Heart of the City when its creator Mark Tatulli stepped down. Since then, as a reader I think she’s managed to improve the strip, but she’s also found a way to transform the strip while remaining true to what it’s always been. Instead of a gag strip, as Tatulli did, Steenz has focused more on character, introducing new people and grounding the comic and the characters as middle schoolers getting older and starting to see the world and their lives in new ways.

Even before taking over the strip, Steenz has emerged as a writer, artist and editor to be reckoned with. She was the artist of the award-winning graphic novel Archival Quality and is working on a graphic novel about the history of tabletop roleplaying. She’s been a contributor to anthologies like Elements and Dead Beats. A former editor at Lion Forge, Steenz edited the recent graphic novel adaptation of Work For A Million and teaches cartooning at Webster University. We spoke recently about how she worked on the strip, bringing her own voice and approach to it, and why she’s not addressing COVID-19 in the strip.

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