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2020 Doug Wright Award Winners Announced

By | May 10th, 2020
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Cover by Nina Bunjevac

The 16th annual Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning were held online last night: this year, the main prize — for Best Book — went to Nina Bunjevac’s “Bezimena.” Published by Fantagraphics, Bunjevac’s “surreal and harrowing” graphic novel reimagines the myth of Artemis and Siproites as the story of “a sexually deviant man who, coming across an alluring former classmate, concocts an elaborate, disturbing rape fantasy.”

The Nipper, the Doug Wright Award for emerging talent, went to Sylvia Nickerson for “Creation.” Nickerson’s watercolor graphic novel, published by Drawn and Quarterly, sees her take the reader on a tour of Hamilton, Ontario, “a Rust Belt city born of the Industrial Revolution and dying a slow death due to globalization. This mother represents the city’s next wave of inhabitants—the artists and young parents who swarm a run-down area for its affordability, inevitably reshaping the neighborhoods they take over. ‘Creation’ looks at gentrification from the inside out—an artist mother making a home and neighborhood for her family, struggling to find her place amid the existing and emerging communities.”

The Pigskin Peters Award for best small- or micro-press book went to “Gleem,” a sci-fi anthology by visual artist Freddy Carrasco, and published at Peow Studios. This year also saw the first Egghead — the award for best kids’ book — go to “The Worst Book Ever” by Elise Gravel. Published by Drawn & Quarterly, the book “takes readers on an unexpected journey through the world’s most boring book, [where] the story’s characters and omniscient readers alike quickly become annoyed by the author’s bland imagination and rebel against her tired tropes and stale character choices, spouting sass in an attempt to get her attention and steer the narrative in a more interesting direction.”

This year’s awards also saw Walter Ball (1911–1995), the creator of the comic strip “Rural Route,” being inducted into the Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame Giants of the North, and a tribute to the late Tom Spurgeon. You can watch the whole ceremony on the awards’ newly launched YouTube channel below. According to the organizers, each nominee was asked to record an acceptance speech without knowing if they’d won or not, and like “good sports,” almost all of them did.


Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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