About Us

In 2004, Brad Mackay—a writer, journalist, and comics historian—decided to do something about the lack of recognition he felt Canadian cartooning received. He reached out to the artist Seth with the idea of creating an annual awards ceremony celebrating Canadian comics, past, present, and future. They tossed around a few different names, but the front-runner was always “The Doug Wright Awards,” in honour of the creator of the long-running and much-loved comic strip Nipper (later known as Doug Wright’s Family).

Brad and Seth shared their idea to Doug’s widow, Phyllis Wright Thomas, and with the best wishes of both her and her children, the first Doug Wright Awards ceremony took place in a small Toronto bar in the spring of 2005. Two awards were handed out that night—Best Book and Emerging Talent—along with a tribute to the first inductees to the Giants of the North: The Canadian Cartooning Hall of Fame (one of which was Doug Wright, naturally).

New categories were added as the organization grew (Best Small- or Micro-Press Book, in 2008, and Best Kids’ Book, in 2020), while the ceremony graduated to bigger and better venues. In 2016, the Doug Wright Awards officially registered as an Ontario not-for-profit corporation.

During the peak of the COVID -19 pandemic, the awards ceremony pivoted, temporarily, into a pre-recorded livestream, but returned in-person in 2023, in a new permanent home, at the historic Arts & Letters Club, in Toronto.

Today, the annual Doug Wright Awards plays to a standing-room-only crowd, while simultaneously streaming to a global digital audience.

(Illustration by Seth)

The Doug Wright Award for Best Book

This is the big one—the prize for best book of the year by a Canadian cartoonist or team. “Book” doesn’t necessarily mean something with a spine. Publications of all shapes and sizes are eligible, from self-published minis to comic books to graphic novels. The Best Book trophy features a silver ceramic statue of Nipper—Doug Wright’s signature character—designed by Seth, and sits on a wooden base. (The original Best Book trophy, used until 2016 and also designed by Seth, consisted of a piece of etched glass set into a base of wood.)

The Pigskin Peters: The Doug Wright Award for Best Small- or Micro-Press Book

The Pigskin Peters is given to a book not published by a major press. (Experimental or avant-garde works are especially favoured in this category.) The award is named after a popular character in Birdseye Center (later titled Juniper Junction), a Canadian comic strip written and drawn by Jimmy Frise from the 1920s until his death, in 1948, when it was taken over by Doug Wright. (The Hamilton Tiger-Cats mascot, Pigskin Pete, is also named after the character.) Winners of the Pigskin Peters award receive a black felt bowler hat—like the one Pigskin Peters himself wears—and a wooden wall mount to hang it on. The award was introduced in 2008.

The Egghead: The Doug Wright Award for Best Kids’ Book

The youngest Doug Wright Award is, fittingly, the one for books aimed at readers aged zero to seventeen. It gets its name from Doug Wright’s original, unused title for the strip that eventually became Nipper. The trophy features a silver ceramic child’s head (kind of like how Nipper’s head looked in early test strips), designed by Seth, and sits on a wooden base. The award was first presented in 2020.

The Giants of the North: The Canadian Cartooning Hall of Fame

Every year, since the very first Doug Wright Awards ceremony, one or more new members are inducted into the Giants of the North in recognition of their long-standing service to the Canadian comics community. Hall of fame inductees are chosen by the Doug Wright Awards executive, with the help of a small committee of comics history buffs. Giants of the North inductees receive a medal and a certificate, both designed by Seth.

The Phyllis Wright Thomas Award

For nearly two decades, Phyllis Wright Thomas, Doug Wright’s widow, was the biggest and best supporter the Doug Wright Awards could ever hope to have. Phyllis made it out to every ceremony, right up until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, at which point she taught herself how to tune in online and watch from home. Sadly, Phyllis died in 2023. In 2026, to honour her memory, we introduced the Phyllis Wright Thomas Award, a certificate of commendation handed out at the discretion of the Doug Wright Awards executive to a book, organization, or person for a contribution that doesn’t meet the eligibility requirements of the other Doug Wright Awards categories. Honorees receive a certificate, designed by Seth, featuring several drawings of Phyllis by Doug Wright.

(Photos by Thomas Blanchard)

About Doug Wright

Phyllis Sanford and Doug Wright (engaged but not yet married) in Doug’s office in the Sun Life Building, Montreal, 1952.

Douglas Austin Wright was the creator of Nipper, arguably the most widely recognized Canadian comic strip in the history of the medium. Doug was, alongside Charles M. Schulz and George Herriman, one of only a handful of truly seminal twentieth century cartoonists, noted for his unparalleled draftsmanship and his touching, compact narratives.

Born in England, in 1917, Doug immigrated to Canada as a teen. He was a proud Canadian citizen, a fact that often showed in the modest, suburban Ontario life depicted in his signature strip. Doug’s cartooning career began when he landed a job as an editorial cartoonist for The Montreal Standard. In 1948, he took over the reins of Juniper Junction, a strip originated by Jimmy Frise in the 1920s, that previously was known as Birdseye Center. Doug continued the strip until its end, in 1968.

In 1949, Doug’s Nipper, a mostly wordless comic strip focused on the everyday lives of a typical, middle-class Canadian family, began appearing in the Standard.

Doug brought childhood to life, capturing the daily charms and frustrations of domestic life in the mid– to late twentieth century. He was a skilled draftsman, and his fluid cartoon figures whirled through meticulously rendered backgrounds and suburban landscapes.

Doug and his family moved from Montreal to Ontario in 1967. Soon after, Nipper also switched homes, to The Canadian, a weekend newspaper supplement, where it was renamed Doug Wright’s Family. The strip enjoyed a long run, entertaining a generation of Canadians on a weekly basis until its end, in 1980. Doug died in 1983, at the age of sixty-five.

Today, Doug Wright and his work are kept alive through the award ceremony that bears his name. In 2005, Doug became the first inductee to the Giants of the North: The Canadian Cartooning Hall of Fame. The Doug Wright Awards team also produced a two-volume retrospective of his career, titled The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist.

Read more about Doug Wright.

The Doug Wright Awards

The Doug Wright Awards was founded in 2005 and is a registered Ontario not-for-profit corporation (Ontario Corporation Number 1960090).

Staff

Conan Tobias
Executive Director

Conan Tobias is an editor and writer with a long history of working in the comics field. For more than two decades, as the editor of Taddle Creek magazine, he published work by some of Canada’s best and best emerging cartoonists. Several of those comics were nominated for National Magazine Awards and featured in the anthology series Best American Comics. Conan’s profile of the Canadian cartoonist Lou Skuce earned an honourable mention at the Heritage Toronto Awards. In 2018, he became the first executive director of the Doug Wright Awards.

(Portrait by Hartley Lin)

Brad Mackay
Chair

Brad Mackay is an award-winning writer, journalist, and comics historian. He is the co-founder of the Doug Wright Awards and the co-editor of the two-volume Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist. He was a reporter at both the National Post and the CBC, and has written hundreds of articles, including a National Magazine Award–nominated profile of the Hungarian-Canadian cartoonist George Feyer, for Canada’s History, and a profile of the Vancouver cartoonist-logger Bus Griffiths, for The Comics Journal.

(Portrait by Noah Van Sciver)

Seth
Secretary

Seth is a cartoonist, designer, and collector. His books include Clyde Fans, Wimbledon Green, George Sprott (1894–1975), and It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. He designed the twenty-six-volume Complete Peanuts series, the two-volume Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist, and The New World: Comics from Mauretania. Seth is the subject of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada documentary Seth’s Dominion and won the prestigious Harbourfront Festival Prize. Clyde Fans, published in 2019 after twenty years of serialization, made history as the first graphic novel ever nominated for the Giller Prize. In 2021, his bronze sculpture arrangement Living Room Suite was installed in front of the Art Gallery of Guelph. The following year, Seth was honoured by the French government as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is the co-founder of the Doug Wright Awards.

(Portrait by Seth)

Jeet Heer
Treasurer

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and the host of the weekly Nation podcast The Time of Monsters. He also writes the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” Jeet is the author of In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays, and Profiles. He has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe. Jeet is the co-editor of Walt and Skeezix, a series collecting the early Gasoline Alley strips of Frank King, and has written introductions to collections of Little Orphan Annie, Buz Sawyer, and Krazy Kat.

(Portrait by Joe Ollmann)