The 2023 Doug Wright Award Winners are!

That’s “Wright”, The Doug Wright Awards celebrating and honouring Canadian cartoonists had been offered on the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (or extra generally referred to as TCAF) in Toronto on Saturday, April 29 2023. The present offered 4 awards and added a brand new inductee the Giant of the North Hall of Fame.

This yr’s Giants of the North inductee is Henriette Valium (1959–2021), a comic book ebook artist and painter, and the winner of the 2017 Pigskin Peters award, for his ebook The Palace of Champions and the winner of the 2018 Albert-Chartier award, for his contribution to the sphere of comedian ebook in Quebec. Valium was a multidisciplinary artist from Montreal whose eclectic different comics work was a pillar of the Montreal Comix scene who sadly handed a lot too younger. If you haven’t already, I might extremely advocate you learn the characteristic Marc Tessier wrote about Valium over at The Comics Journal. It’s a near-perfect abstract of Valium and his work.

The first award of the ceremony, the Egghead, honouring the very best youngsters ebook, went to Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth for You Know, Sex, printed by Triangle Square.

The second award of the ceremony, the Pigskin Peters Award, honouring the very best small-press or micro-press ebook, went to Ivana Filipovich for her self-published comedian Where Have You Been?

The subsequent award of the ceremony, the Nipper, the award for rising expertise, went to Shelterbelts by Jonathan Dyck (printed by Conundrum Press).

The Awards took a while to offer a touching tribute to 2 cartoonists, Scott Carruthers & Mandy Kujawa, throughout an in memoriam phase earlier than transferring on to inducting Henriette Valium within the Giants of the North corridor of fame.

And lastly, the Doug Wright Award for finest ebook went to Ducks: Two Years within the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (printed by Drawn & Quarterly). This ebook has been making loads of waves and just lately received this yr’s version of Canada Reads, the primary time a comic book ebook received this because the occasion’s begin in 2001.

This yr’s Doug Wright Awards mark one other event to replicate on the colourful and numerous ecosystem of Canadian comics. We would encourage you to hunt out the comics of every nominees. They are all distinctive, difficult, distinctive and fascinating work that’s well-worth your time.