This blog has gotten a little moldy and stale, so to perk it up some I’m going to start a new feature that’ll run daily, or until I get distracted by deadlines, my insane social life, or a passing dust mote. The deal is, I’ll post the day’s strip and offer some kind of commentary or apology or justification. I could make it simpler and just say “I was on a deadline, okay?” every single time, but that’s the lazy way out, so we’ll consider that as understood.

In the editorial cartooning category, Dana Summers of the Orlando Sentinel and Ed Gamble of The Florida Times-Union took second and third respectively.

Sharpen your pencils, sharpen your comic minds — and check back here in this space come Monday, May 10.

UPDATE: I asked Mr. Cavna if he could elaborate at all on the nature of the “cartoon project”. What he could say on record:

“Formally, it will be a project over several months to promote aspiring comic strip cartoonists. Informally, we’ll see what grows out of this project. Comic Riffs is always open to new ideas.”

UPDATE: Apologies to Kelly who submitted this story. I didn’t realize comments were turned off. Please discuss.

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.”

Much to my surprise, I was recently asked to write on comic art for Washington City Paper. My previous contact with the paper, beyond being a regular reader of it since the mid-1980s, was through my ComicsDC blog. At that site since 2006, I’ve tried to keep up with aspects of comic art in the Washington area. As such, when WCP dropped all of its comic strips in November 2007, including Derf’s The City, Lynda Barry, Emily Flake’s Lulu Eightball, and others, as well as Rob Ullman’s cartoons for Savage Love and George Washington University graduate Shawn Belschwender’s ones for News of the Weird, I took the paper to task on my blog. And I apparently did a good enough job to get a call from Editor Erik Wemple, who explained the cold, hard realities of a new corporate owner.

He writes on his blog that he’ll continue to update ComicDC with the short posts, but use the paper column for his longer pieces.

» JC Duffy has launched called “Nightly Deposits.”

Interviews

» Scott Nickel interviews illustrator Danny Hellman.

Webcomics

» Comic Book Resources has posted their review of the year in webcomics.

It’s certainly an example – I mean, the whole fury is an example of how it’s important to get a better and easier way of having a dialogue about things of religious sensitivity for sure. But I mean, I was heavily involved at this, I was Prime Minister at the time all this broke, and obviously it was condemned very strongly, the violence that surrounded it, but I really think from Yale’s perspective it made the right decision. Because this is not a piece of original research that Yale has suppressed. That would obviously be a completely different issue. The question is, does it reignite a controversy that has already been there or not. I think it was an entirely responsible and sensible thing that they did.

In Muhammad cartoon related news, The Copenhagen Post reports that Jakob Scharf, the director of Denmark’s domestic intelligence agency PET, says that Al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks are keeping the the cartoon controversy alive for strategic reasons. He says,

It resonates with people in many Muslim countries. The cartoon controversy isn’t going away and that means the increased awareness of Denmark isn’t going to subside for many years to come.

Big thanks to Mary and John for volunteering to send in the results! See you here on Saturday night!

Hat tip to From the editors blog.