The Doug Wright Awards for Canadian cartooning are pleased to announce that Lynn Johnston, the award-winning cartoonist behind the long-running comic strip For Better or For Worse, will be the guest of honour at their 2008 awards ceremony.
Organized in partnership with the Toronto Public Library, the free event will take place Friday, August 8 at 7 p.m. at the Toronto Reference Library during which time Johnston will be inducted into the Giants of the North: the Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame.
Carried in more than 2,000 newspapers around the world, For Better or For Worse has been collected in more than 30 bestselling books since it first appeared in September 1979, making Johnston arguably the best-known and most successful Canadian cartoonist ever.
Over her three-decade career Johnston has received a number of honours including a Gemini Award (for her animated For Better or For Worse TV series), a Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist (the first woman winner in the history of the National Cartoonists Society) and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her controversial gay storyline in the early 1990s. In addition, in 1992 she became a Member of the Order of Canada.
On August 8, Johnston will join other giants of Canadian cartooning like Peter Whalley, George Feyer, and Doug Wright, when she is inducted into the Giants of the North hall of fame. The event will feature a retrospective of her more than 30-year career, a moderated Q&A with the audience and a book signing with Johnston.
The ceremony will comprise just part of the 4th Annual Doug Wright Awards, the country’s premier comics awards, which recognizes the best in new and established cartoonists and graphic novelists. The 2008 Wrights will see announcement of the winners of the Best Book trophy, Best Emerging Talent trophy and the Pigskin Peters award; a new category dedicated to non-traditional or non-narrative cartooning. (To learn more about the 2008 nominees, visit www.wrightawards.ca.)
As usual, the Doug Wright Awards will also play host to the best and brightest in Canada’s cartooning community from Chester Brown (Louis Riel) and Seth (Palookaville) to Ho Che Anderson (King) and Mariko Tamaki (Skim).
The awards will be decided by a jury made up of members of the country’s arts and cultural community, including author and film critic Katrina Onstad, cartoonist Ho Che Anderson, Toronto book seller Marc Glassman, writer/performer Mariko Tamaki, and Power Plant curator Helena Rickett.
About the DWAs
The Doug Wright Awards were founded in 2005 as a means of casting light on the wide range of cartoonists and comic artists working across Canada. The country’s premier comic awards, The awards are named after Doug Wright (1917–1983) a cartoonist whose strip Doug Wright’s Family (also known as Nipper) ran for more than 30 years across Canada and several other countries.