Davis, Ostertag and more take home 2018 Ignatz Awards

Annual awards presented at the Small Press Expo honor excellence in independent comics.

Eleanor Davis, Richie Pope, Molly Ostertag and Carta Monir are among the winners of the 2018 Ignatz Awards, as presented last night at a ceremony held in conjunction with the Small Press Expo (SPX) in Bethesda, Maryland.

Ignatz image by 2017 Promising New Talent winner Bianca Xunise.

The Ignatz, named after George Herriman’s brick-wielding mouse from his long running comic strip Krazy Kat, recognizes exceptional work that challenges popular notions of what comics can achieve, both as an art form and as a means of personal expression. The nominees for the ballot were determined by a panel of comic artists: Mita Mahato, Carolyn Nowak, kevin czap, Leila Abdelrazaq and Taneka Stotts. The votes for the awards were cast by the attendees at the show

The complete list of nominees can be found below, with the winner in bold.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Sophia Foster-Dimino on ‘Sex Fantasy’

The creator of the minicomic-turned graphic novel discusses the new collection from Koyama Press, process and much more.

Sophia Foster-Dimino has been making comics for years. A designer who worked at Google for years, she crafted a number of the famous google doodles, in addition to other projects. She’s drawn the webcomic Swim Thru Fire, which was written by Annie Mok, and a number of short comics, but Foster-Dimino is best known for her minicomic series Sex Fantasy. The series manages to both live up to and not fulfill all the expectations that the name implies in different ways. Each issue of the comic was different but there were thematic links that tied the issues together in different ways.

Last year Koyama Press published a collection of Sex Fantasy. The collection is a small brick of a book, containing the eight issues that had been published in addition to two comics exclusive to the book. I reached out to Foster-Dimino to talk about the book, how the stories are connected and the ways she thought about the 10-issue structure.

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