Last week the nominations were announced for the 2009 Doug Wright Awards, which celebrate excellence in Canadian cartooning. By no means are the DWAs the only Canadian comics awards, but they are certainly the awards whose nominees are easiest to review. Finalists for the more mainstream/genre-friendly Joe Shuster Awards are named next week, but these awards go to individuals rather than books, making capsule reviews a smidge difficult. Nominations for the Prix Bédéis Causa came out this week, but I have been a bad Canadian and an unlettered anglo and haven’t tracked down any of the nominated works. Enough with excusing my laziness, though—let’s start off by delving into the titles nominated for the Doug Wright Awards’ Best Book.

Burma Chronicles, by Guy Delisle. This latest in Delisle’s series of travelogues from politically restrictive countries, following Shenzhen and Pyongyang, finds him in Rangoon. While his career in animation led him to China and North Korea in his previous books, this time it’s his wife’s position with Médecins sans frontières that has the cartoonist and their infant son wandering the Burmese capital. Along the way they interact with locals and other expats, wrestle with arbitrary bureaucracy, and learn of the nation’s customs and recent history, all while remaining definite outsiders. Of course, they’ve been encouraged to remain outsiders—as with the other nations Delisle’s cartooned about, Burma comes off as friendly enough, but aloof, if not forbidding. Drawing from everyday life, the artist’s detailed anecdotes—about the different kinds of monks one encounters, or about bus trips to outlying regions, or about the enclave-ish existence of the expat communities—reveal nuances and implications about the culture that complement the bigger-picture information he conveys in quick, diagrammatic ways elsewhere. But his insights feel strictly surface-level, and the persona Delisle has created for himself never seems self-conscious or -reflective enough to move much beyond the ins and outs of baby-walking and air-conditioning, nor is he able to make those concerns seem any less trivial. His style, too, veers dangerously close to clip-art, especially now he’s abandoned his previous books’ hand-textured greys in favour of lifeless flat tones. Some silent sequences (Delisle’s real strength), and some architectural and landscape drawing, do lend the occasional bit of vitality to the page, but otherwise the look is hurried, static, utilitarian. Lucky for Delisle that a book dealing with daily existence in Burma can’t help but be of interest, just on its own.

Drop-In, by Dave Lapp. Like Delisle’s book, the subject matter in Drop-In provides most of the attraction, rather than anything specific to Lapp’s presentation. A collection of vignettes taken from the artist’s experiences working at a drop-in art centre for underprivileged youth in Toronto, the book often finds awkward humour in the cruddiest of situations. It’s decent apprentice work; I reviewed it at greater length here.

Paul Goes Fishing, by Michel Rabagliati. The title’s a bit misleading—Paul, Rabagliati’s stand-in, does indeed go fishing in this volume, but only for a couple of pages. More important is the trip he takes to get to his fishing hole, an outfitter’s with furnished log cabins in the country north of Montreal. Along the way, the cartoonist’s eye for detail unfussily captures what it felt like to live in decades not long past, as well as the distinctive look of both urban and rural Quebec. The pace of life on vacation, too, gives Rabagliati multiple opportunities to drift off into effortless digressions from the leisurely main narrative. So, reading in his bunk, Paul will begin to meditate on why Catcher in the Rye resonates with him, or the sight of his brother-in-law fishing will lead Paul to think for several pages about corporate downsizing, or when leaving for the country he’ll launch into a jovial tirade about how he’s been complicit in helping computers ruin everyone’s lives. More cute than funny, it’s a pleasant stroll of a book, but it doesn’t shy away from any of the messy stuff of life. Rabagliati leads Paul through reminiscences of hit-and-run accidents and child neglect and miscarriages, too, but it’s all drawn in the same jaunty, imperturbable Franco-Belgian style, full of clear lines and mild caricature. The style so influences how we read the book—we don’t gloss over ugly events so much as we take them in stride, carried along by the smooth cartooning—that it rarely feels like anything of consequence goes on. But I’m not sure that same easygoing hardiness isn’t the whole point of the book.

Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. “Skim” Cameron attends a girls-only school where overbearing students and teachers are trying to stamp out the spectres of suicide, depression, and homosexuality that have lately been haunting their hallways. Though socially withdrawn, Skim keeps a diary which serves as our narration, letting us know of her rocky relationship with her best friend, of the blinkered hypocrisy among her schoolmates, and how she falls, hard, for someone she shouldn’t. Writer Mariko remembers how much is at stake in our teenage years, and demands that we take the sincere goofiness of those times seriously, but without sentimentality. Her use of words is careful and sparing, avoiding treacly YA pitfalls by not overstating her case, or pushing the authentic voices she’s created too far. It is artist Jillian, though, who sells every moment of the story, even—perhaps especially—the gigantic and potentially cheesy ones, emotional high notes that require big splash panels or two-page spreads. It would lessen the story if we felt we could simply breeze by this artwork, so it’s a happy thing that lingering over these moments is such a pleasure. Her places and objects have a familiar specificity to them, while her characters look and gesture and behave like actual people, but without ever losing their cartoon expressiveness. Jillian’s artwork feels like the ideal counterpart to Skim’s healthily unsettled life. She draws fearlessly, with great energy and varying technique, but without ever showing off, leaving everything looking windblown and uncertain despite the obvious sure hand laying out each page. Skim tops this award category, easily.

* * *

Next up is the Pigskin Peters Award, which continues to puzzle me a bit. The award verbiage claims this category “recognizes avant-garde comics and other non-traditional works” but I don’t really see how, say, pantomime strips (Ojingogo) or gag panels (All We Ever Do…), both formats commonly used since the early 20th century, fall under the banner of experimental work. In any case, I haven’t snagged a copy of nominee Small Victories by Jesse Jacobs yet, and I’m a little surprised not to see Marc Bell’s Illusztraijuns for Brain Police among these titles, but for the moment I’m pretty comfortable with singling out the next book as the best of this lot.

Hall of Best Knowledge, by Ray Fenwick. Fenwick’s bitter, typographical anomaly of a book plays out in a series of elaborately hand-lettered plates. These cantankerous missives from the pen of a self-proclaimed “powerful golden eagle of mental fitness” are meant to share tips on how properly to be a genius (hint: gather knowledge, study theatre), but more often degenerate into sneering resentment, spewed forth in florid prose. This misunderstood, Kinbotean mind reveals itself only through his writing, so although these screeds come decorated with all sorts of curlicues and motifs, we’re never vouchsafed a glimpse of the narrator’s real world beyond the veil of these thoughts. Thankfully, Fenwick’s skill with design renders the handwritten words adaptable and full of stubborn character, turning them into a cocky little world of their own. HOBK goes a little too far into the realm of the unlikely and exaggerated in order for its skewering of pomposity to be totally effective, but it does allow for the snarkiest answer I’ve come across to the question, “What is art?” Fenwick’s unabashed reply: “Art is, to be sure, a massive oil painting of a natural scene, rendered in a photorealistic style.” Coming from a book like this, as far from photorealism as possible, that’s enough funny, ingenious knowledge for me, right there.

Ojingogo, by Matthew Forsythe. The monster-battle/video-game narrative has almost become its own comics genre in recent years. Forsythe’s wordless book, which follows a tough but eensy girl as she searches for her camera among mummies and squids and other beasties, is another entry in that canon of work guided by dream logic and structured according to inscrutable goals. It’s a zippy run through the type of stuff we usually see in these comics—creatures ingest strange objects and shrink or grow or transform or multiply, then chase or fight or eat each other until it all happens again. Forsythe’s creature designs can be fun—I like his lanky furry men, or the box-thing with the gaping mouth—and his rugged inkwork lends them a strong physical presence. Still, nothing seems at stake here, and the world of Ojingogo doesn’t feel especially concrete or self-contained—qualities which the best dumb monster comics are able to achieve with intensity.

All We Ever Do Is Talk About Wood, by Tom Horacek. The cartoonist fills this slim collection of neatly drawn and shaded gag panels with hydrocephalic adults and animals cracking wise. The gags are clever enough, turning convention on its head—the driver in a car tells his passenger, “Sure I enjoy being in traffic, but what I really want to do is direct it,” or a man at a dinner party says, “All my puns are intended”—but their execution feels overdetermined, the amount of thought and effort that goes into the cartooning incommensurate with the quick rimshot we get from reading it. Horacek’s style may have something to do with this, in that his rounded, fully-realised, big-headed drawings impose funniness in big bold letters on the events he depicts, rather than letting it evolve naturally out of the situation. In the right hands this imbalance could prove wry or unsettling—Chris Ware and Mark Newgarden have done just that, with panels where copious text or big noses overwhelm every other consideration—but Horacek doesn’t quite pull it off.

* * *

A couple final thoughts: First, in the Best Emerging Talent category, I’m only glancingly familiar at best with the others’ works, but man, isn’t Kate Beaton something else? Her dashed-off, devil-may-care lines seem put to paper by the ghost of a harried Al Hirschfeld, while her banter is currently snappier than anyone’s in comics. That so much of it is a loving piss-take on Canadian history only makes it the more endearing. Second, two of the best Canadian comics from 2008 that I read were Seth’s slow-motion lament “Thoreau MacDonald” and Shary Boyle’s serpentine, unnerving “Grow Old”—both mere two-page strips, in the new Kramers Ergot volume, and neither of which the DWAs would be able to call attention to. Not that those artists are in desperate need of more plaudits, but as with my favourite Canadian comic of 2007, I’d love to see the few strips that are getting ghettoized thanks to our current mania for book-length works share way, way more of the spotlight. Maybe when Kate Beaton’s webcomics win that award it will help me sleep easier with it all….