The 2018 Doug Wright Awards Nominations

From the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

The nominations for the 2018 Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning have been unveiled and this year’s winners will be announced at a gala ceremony at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on May 12.

Here are the nominees:

Doug Wright Award
Presented for the best graphic novel book published in Canada (in English)

• Hostage, Guy Delisle (Drawn & Quarterly)
• I’m Not Here, GG (Koyama Press)
• Crawl Space, Jesse Jacobs (Koyama Press)
• The Abominable Mr. Seabrook, Joe Ollmann (Drawn & Quarterly)
• Anti-Gone, Connor Willumsen (Koyama Press)

Spotlight Award (a.k.a. The Nipper)
Presented to a Canadian cartoonist (or writer-cartoonist team) deserving of wider recognition

• Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes, The Case of the Missing Men (Conundrum Press)
• Gillian Blekkenhorst, All-Inclusive Fully Automated Vacation and House of Strays
• Eric Kostiuk Williams, Condo Heartbreak Disco (Koyama Press)
• Jason Loo, The Pitiful Human-Lizard Nos. 12, 13 and 14 (Chapterhouse Comics)
• Jenn Woodall, Magical Beatdown Vol. 2 and Marie and Worrywart

Pigskin Peters Award
Experimental, unconventional, or avant-garde comic

• The Dead Father, Sami Alwani
• The Death of the Master, Patrick Kyle
• Crohl’s House Nos. 1 & 2, Alexander Laird, Jamiel Rahi and Robert Laird
• Creation: The First Three Chapters, Sylvia Nickerson
• Potluck, Wavering Line Collective

In addition to the awards, every year the Doug Wright organization inducts a cartoonist into its Hall of Fame, The Giants of the North.

This year the inductee is Duncan MacPherson  (1924-1993), the legendary editorial cartoonist who used his virtuoso talents to lampoon Canadian foibles from the Diefenbaker years through the 1970s.

Duncan Macpherson, this year’s Giants of the North inductee, was born in Toronto in 1924, and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. 

He studied at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Ontario College of Art, and began his career at the Montreal Standard in 1948. 

Over the next five decades, Macpherson’s cartoons became a fixture of the political scene in English Canada and his wickedly wrought black-and-white work helped define the country’s political conversation in such publications as the Toronto Star and Maclean’s. 

Terry “Aislin” Mosher, once referred to Macpherson as “the king of the third wave” of Canadian editorial cartoonists while a journalist colleague described his work as a combination of “Mary Poppins, Mark Twain and Attila the Hun.” 

Though he took on politicians of stripes and affiliations, his caustic portraits of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker helped make him famous, with Pierre Berton citing them as being “the beginning of the country’s disillusionment with the Diefenbaker government.” 

MacPherson received six National Newspaper Awards, the Royal Academy Medal, was a Member of the Order of Canada, and his work was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario. 

He died, in Beaverton, Ontario, in 1993.