The 14th annual Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning were held at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival this Saturday. The main prize, the Doug Wright Best Book Award, went to Jesse Jacobs’s psychedelic graphic novel “Crawl Space.” Here’s how publisher Koyama Press describes the book (and Jabobs):
In the basement, through the appliances and past the veil that separates realities, lies a rainbow-hued world where a group of kids have found retreat from their suburban mundanity with a coterie of iridescent creatures. But in the fraught realm of adolescence, can friendship survive the appeal of the surreal?Jesse Jacobs was born in Moncton, NB, and now draws comics and things from his home in Hamilton, ON. He made his debut with Koyama Press in 2012 with the psychedelic creation myth By “This Shall You Know Him,” which was followed by the trippy take on nature versus nurture, “Safari Honeymoon” in 2014.
The Doug Wright Spotlight Award (a.k.a. The Nipper), which aims to spread wider recognition for a creator or creative team deemed worthy by the jury, and the Pigskin Peters Award honoring the year’s most experimental comic, were also presented on the night. This year’s Spotlight Award went to Jenn Woodall, the writer/artist behind “Magical Beatdown” and “Marie and Worrywart,” while the Pigskin Peters prize went to Sami Alwani’s “The Dead Father.”
Congrats to Sami Alwani, @je55ejacobs and Jenn Woodhall for their wins tonight!!!! #dwa2018 #tcaf2018 #comics #teamcanada pic.twitter.com/EKN4bAHGdS
— Doug Wright Awards (@WrightAwards) May 13, 2018
This year’s Giants of the North: The Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame inductee was Duncan Macpherson (1924 – 1993), an editorial cartoonist for Maclean’s and the Toronto Star. For more on this year’s Doug Wright Awards winners and nominees, head to The Beat for their live coverage of the ceremony, and to the awards’s own website for what they had to say about the winners.
