You may have noticed Hervé St-Louis kicking up a fuss in our comments section regarding the Doug Wright Awards — the bone of contention is the fact that the Awards only honor work in ENGLISH. Canada, as you may recall, is a bilingual country. St-Louis lets it all hang out in a column here:
While the top news concerning the 2008 Wrights Awards is about the comic book creators who received, prizes on August 8, 2008, the main news as far as The Comic Book Bin is concerned, is the refusal of the Wright Awards to consider Canadian original comic books published in French. In the view of the Comic Book Bin, the refusal of the Wright Awards’ to consider French language works makes us challenge their legitimacy as a Canadian comic book award.
The Giants of the North organization, created the Wright Awards in 2005. The awards are named after cartoonist Doug Wright who created several comic strips published in various newspapers between 1948 and 1980. One of the regulations of the Wright Awards is that they will only consider Canadian comic books published in English. They accept pantomime comic books (shut up and be beautiful) and French works translated into English.
Edgar Wright Awards? Do those just go to Edgar Wright for being awesome every year?
Well, Herve, start your own awards.
Well, Alan, you can be Canadian without speaking English. Maybe Herve could call his award “Alan is part of the problem”.
Unfortunately by leaving out French-Canadian comics they may find themselves running out of cartoonists to give awards to a few years from now. there are a lot of small-press cartoonists in Canada but very few professionals.