2008 Doug Wright Award Winners
Posted: August 12, 2008 | News Bites Home

August 9, 2008 – Toronto. The winners of the 2008 Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning were announced last night in a ceremony in Toronto that included some of the finest of the country's finest cartoonists, including For Better of For Worse cartoonist Lynn Johnston, Palookaville's Seth and Chester Brown.

The 2008 DWA winner for Best Book is: The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam by Ann Marie Fleming (Riverhead Books)

The 2008 DWA winner for Best Emerging Talent is: Essex County Vol. 1 Tales From The Farm & Vol. 2 Ghost Stories by Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)

The winner of the inaugural Pigskin Peters Award* is: Milk Teeth by Julie Morstad (Drawn and Quarterly)

The trophies were handed out at the Toronto Reference Library, the historic main branch of the Toronto Public Library, in a 90-minute ceremony hosted by Brad Mackay, a writer and director of the Doug Wright Awards.

Johnston, the ceremony's guest of honour, was on hand to discuss her 32-year career and to be inducted in The Giants of the North, the Canadian Cartoonists' Hall of Fame. The medal was presented to her by Seth.

A full list of the 2008 nominees can be found at the DWA website.

The 5th Annual DWAs will be held next May at the Toronto Comics Art Festival.

(* The Pigskin Peters Annual Award for Nominally Narrative Cartooning – or PPAANNC - is intended to recognize progressive works by Canadian cartoonists that are more experimental in nature and/or lack a traditional narrative structure. It is named after a character in the classic Canadian comic strip Birdseye Center, by Jimmy Frise.)

About The Doug Wright Awards

The Doug Wright Awards were established in December 2004 as a means of casting a spotlight on the range of cartoonists and comic artists working in Canada.

The awards are named after Doug Wright (1917-1983) whose strip Doug Wright's Family ran in newspapers in Canada and around the world from the late 1940s to the early 1980s.