Virtual Bricks
Year after year, the most unique slate of comics awards nominees, the ones that you wouldn’t have ever heard of otherwise, is found at SPX and the Ignatzen. Small Press Expo will be virtual again this year, but that won’t keep the festival and the jury from finding the best work of the past year for attendees to vote on and award the coveted bricks. And it appears that the creators of one of the most-nominated works of the year won’t be allowed to receive the brick(s) if they win.
There’s anthologies by prisoners, plural, in the Outstanding Anthology category: A Queer Prisoner’s Anthology IV (edited by Casper Cendre) and Confined Before Covid: A Pandemic Anthology By LGBTQ Prisoners. The former is also nominated for Outstanding Series.
Other nominations that caught my eye include Ashanti Fortson for Leaf Lace and Lee Lai for Stone Fruit in Outstanding Artist, Abby Howard’s superlative The Crossroads At Midnight for Outstanding Collection (seriously, go follow that link for my thoughts on the book, it’s great), Maddi Gonzale’s Rhapsodie for Outstanding Comic (along with Leaf Lace again), Sloane Leong’s A Map To The Sun for Outstanding Graphic Novel (along with Stone Fruit again), and Whit Taylor’s Montana Diary for Outstanding Minicomic.
What these nominations have in common, what the Ignatz nominations have in common every year, is that there’s not weak work. Some of it may not be to your taste or mine, but it’s all clearly the work of people who spend a hell of a lot of time and effort thinking about how to make the best comics possible.
Nowhere is that more true that in Outstanding Online Comic, where it’s hard to find two nominees that look anything like each other. There’s Leaf Lace again, along with Michael DeForge’s very stylistic Birds Of Maine, Susannah Lohr’s very moody and spooky Shadows Become You, Alex Robinson’s absurdist joke stretched to the breaking point which only makes it more brilliant Mr Boop, and Shing Yin Khor’s meditation on identity, I Do Not Want To Write Today. They are united only by the fact that they appear online first, and that’s great.
Speaking of great, Khor has another of their very thoughtful, extremely beautiful comics up at Catapult today: Why I Love Airports. It’s entirely of a piece with all their other Catapult contributions, which is to say you’ll learn something about Khor and yourself after you’ve finished reading it obsessively for the third or fourth time. Even money it’ll be a nominee in the 2022 Ignatz Awards.
Since the festival is virtual again this year and physical ballots cannot be handed to Saturday attendees, they will be emailed tomorrow to everybody on the SPX email list. If you aren’t a subscriber to the email list, you can request a ballot here. Voting runs until 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, 12 September, with the awards presented via streaming on Saturday, 18 September, at 8:00pm EDT. Good luck to all the nominees.
Spam of the day:
A new and Revolution bra helping improve posture and relieve back pain.
Y’all really don’t get me, do you?
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