This year’s Ignatz Awards, honoring the year’s best independent and small press comics, were held last night at the Small Press Expo in Baltimore, Maryland. Courtesy of the Small Press Expo’s Twitter page, here are the winners:
Outstanding Graphic Novel: “Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me” by writer Mariko Tamaki and artist Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (First Second). Published this year, “Laura Dean” tells the story of Frederica Riley and her on-again, off-again relationship with the most popular girl in her high school.
Outstanding Artist: Rosemary Valero-O’Connell for “Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me” (First Second). Valero-O’Connell’s other comics work includes “Gotham Academy,” “Lumberjanes,” and “Steven Universe,” and she has also freelanced for Capybara Games, Mondo Tees, Kazoo Magazine, and the Minneapolis–Saint Paul alternative newspaper City Pages.
Outstanding Story: “Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me” by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (First Second).
Outstanding Collection: “Girl Town” by Carolyn Nowak (Top Shelf Productions). This collection of short, fantastical stories by Nowak, which includes previous Ignatz Award-winning comics like ‘Radishes’ and ‘Diana’s Electric Tongue,’ explores “young adulthood and the search for connection.”
Outstanding Anthology: “We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology,” edited by Tara Avery and Jeanne Thornton (Stacked Deck Press). This 300-page book features 53 different stories from an all-trans line-up of creators, “some fiction, some nonfiction, some sad, some thoughtful, some funny, some bizarre, all authentic.”
Outstanding Series: The Nib Magazine, edited by Matt Bors (The Nib). Bors’s political cartooning website is going independent following its patron First Look Media’s decision to stop funding the website this year, and you can support the site by subscribing to its print edition here.
Outstanding Minicomic: “Trans Girls Hit the Town” by Emma Jayne (Diskette Press), a 36-page comic where “Cleo and Winnie experience the soaring highs and crushing lows of a night on the town.” You can download a PDF of the comic here.
Outstanding Comic: “Check Please!” by Ngozi Ukazu (First Second). Ukazu’s webcomic follows Eric Bittle, a college ice hockey player coming to terms with his sexuality.
Outstanding Online Comic: “Full Court Crush” by Hannah Blumenreich, which is about a girl helping the basketball player she likes with her homework.
Promising New Talent: Ebony Flowers, whose debut graphic novel, a memoir titled “Hot Comb,” was published by Drawn & Quarterly earlier this year.
Congratulations to all of this year’s winners. For the full list of this year’s nominees, check out the SPX’s website.
