Congrats to Seth, Michael DeForge and Marc Bell.
Press release:
Canada’s finest comics and graphic novels were celebrated last night as the 6th annual Doug Wright Awards touched down in Toronto?s Bram & Bluma Appel Salon in a ceremony hosted by ReGenesis actor Peter Outerbridge.
This year?s top honours included:
BEST BOOK: George Sprott: (1894-1975) by Seth (Drawn and Quarterly Books)
BEST EMERGING TALENT: Michael DeForge Lose #1 (Koyama Press)
The Pigskin Peters Award: Hot Potatoe by Marc Bell (Drawn & Quarterly)
As the featured event of the 2010 Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), which is being held at the Toronto Reference Library, the evening also featured a moving tribute to pioneering Canadian cartoonist Martin Vaughn-James, who was posthumously inducted into The Giants of the North, The Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame, in a talk delivered by cartoonist Kate Beaton.
The winners were decided by a jury comprised of Matt Forsythe (editor of Drawn.ca, winner of the 2009 Pigskin Peters Award for Ojingogo), Geoff Pevere (Toronto Star book critic; author of Mondo Canuck), Fiona Smyth (artist; cartoonist) and Carl Wilson (editor/writer Globe and Mail, author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste).
Speaking on behalf of the jury, Pevere praised the Best Book winner George Sprott as “a portrait of a character, of a country?a country that is no longer with us,” adding that:
“It is a work about memory, a work about culture, a work about the past and a work about the future.”
Speaking for Wright Awards nominating committee, which chooses the annual Pigskin Peters Award, Matt Forsythe described Hot Potatoe as “a collection of seven years of work that is insulting and hilarious and sarcastic and sincere,” and continued that it has “influenced a whole wave of comics and artists ? myself included.”