Introducing the Broken Frontier Awards 2021 – Celebrating Twelve Months of Inspiring Comics Practice in a Year of Adversity

Broken Frontier proudly presents the shortlists for our 18th annual Broken Frontier Awards. Our team has selected five nominees for each of the 15 main categories that comprise the BF Awards, honouring some of the creators and publications of the past year whose work has particularly spoken to us in 2021.

As always, you will have a big say in who gets to take home an award!

The BF crew have kicked off the Broken Frontier Awards 2021 by compiling this year’s nominations and now it’s up to you to play your part in deciding our winners in the public ballot. As ever, the final decision will come from an equal 50-50 consideration of the votes of the comics community and the Broken Frontier staff. Voting will run until January 1st, with the results to be announced on January 4th, 2022.

As we say every year our nominations look to provide an eclectic list giving as much consideration to self-published tiny print run comics and zines as we do to popular serialised genre work. Acclaimed, established creators sit side-by-side with newer voices you may not have discovered as yet and, as ever, there may be omissions that may surprise you. But this is a representation of work that particularly spoke to our team in 2021 and reflects the ethos, approach and values of Broken Frontier.

(Also please note that every year we designate that a certain percentage of nominations must be from material featured on the site in some way over the previous twelve months. So if we’re not already on your digital comps lists then you’re at a disadvantage!)

With a world in crisis on multiple levels it’s perhaps unsurprising that this year’s list has so much socially relevant and socially conscious work on it. This is, of course, a strand of practice that we are especially keen to promote here at Broken Frontier and as always we invite your review/coverage submissions for comics with a community edge or that champion the marginalised. The nominations process was certainly not an easy one this year with the Breakout Talent section and Best Graphic Non-Fiction categories really standing out as areas where we could easily have expanded the nominations threefold.

Once again, your input will play a vital role in the final results. This has been another challenging twelve months for all of us but we’ve seen so many supportive initiatives in indie comics, so many examples of the comics community pulling together, and so many projects using the form to give a voice to the under-represented. And that’s worth celebrating too. Join us in that by clicking on the blue ‘Vote now!’ button below and casting your votes from this year’s choices!

Broken Frontier Awards 2021: The Nominations

Best Writer

• Darryl Cunningham (Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator)
• Jamila Rowser (Ode to Keisha)
• Paul Constant (Snelson: Comedy is Dying)
• Pornsak Pichetshote (The Good Asian)
• Ram V (The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, The Swamp Thing)

Best Artist

• DaNi (Black Beth and the Devils of Al-Kadesh)
• Hurk (Jinx Freeze)
• Juni Ba (Djeliya: A West African Fantasy Epic)
• Molly Mendoza (The Drake’s Sword)
• Nicole Goux (Everyone is Tulip)

Best Colorist

• Dave Stewart (Echolands)
• Dee Cunniffe (Crossover)
• Ellie Hall (Everyone is Tulip)
• Sarah Gordon (Vicious Creatures)
• Sofie Dodgson (Bitter Root)

Best Letterer

• Aditya Bidikar (The Department of Truth)
• Hassan Ostmane-Elhaou (Bitter Root, What’s the Furthest Place from Here?)
• John J. Hill (Crossover)
• Nate Piekos (Black Hammer Reborn)
• Todd Klein (Echolands)

Breakout Talent

• Sabba Khan (The Roles We Play, Myriad Editions)
• Sharon Lee De La Cruz (I’m a Wild Seed, Street Noise Books)
• Will McPhail (In., Sceptre)
• Zara Slattery (Coma, Myriad Editions)
• Zuo Ma (Night Bus, Drawn & Quarterly)

Best Periodical Series

• Bitter Root (Chuck Brown, David F. Walker, Sanford Greene, Sofie Dodgson, Hassan Ostmane-Elhaou, Image Comics)
• Chad in Amsterdam (Chad Bilyeu et al, Bistro Books)
• The Department of Truth (James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar, Dylan Todd, Image Comics)
• A Pocket Chiller (Anthology series – various creators, Strip for Me)
• š! (Anthology – various creators, edited by David Schilter and Sanita Muižniece, kuš! comics)

Best New Periodical Series

• Daddy (Beatrice Mossman, self-published)
• The Good Asian (Pornsak Pichetshote, Alexandre Tefenkgi, Lee Loughridge, Jeff Powell, Image Comics)
• Laneha House (Lawrence Lindell and Breena Nuñez, Laneha House)
• The Many Deaths of Laila Starr (Ram V, Filipe Andrade, Inês Amaro, AndWorld Design, BOOM! Studios)
• What’s the Furthest Place from Here? (Matthew Rosenberg, Tyler Boss, Hassan Ostmane-Elhaou, Image Comics)

Best One-Shot

• All the Places In Between (John Cei Douglas, Liminal 11)
• I Prefer the Pierrot That Knows Sadness (Sunmi, Shortbox Comics Fair/self-published)
• Ode to Keisha (Jamila Rowser and Trinidad Escobar, Black Josei Press)
• The Saddest, Angriest Black Girl in Town (Robyn Smith, Black Josei Press)
• Throwing Pennies (Mereida Fajardo, self-published)

Best One-Shot Anthology

• Bystander: Stories, Observations & Witnessings from South Asia (Anthology – various creators, Kadak Collective)
• Catalyst (Anthology – various creators, SelfMadeHero)
• COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology (Anthology – various creators, Graphic Mundi)
• Lucky WIP (Anthology – various creators, WIP Comics)
• When I Was Me: Moments of Gender Euphoria (Anthology – various creators, Quindrie Press)

Best Webcomic

• Buuza!! (Shazleen Khan)
• False Knees (Joshua Barkman)
• HeLL(P) (Oliver Levang and C. Vinter)
• I Am a Leader of My House (PositiveNegatives, Fahmida Azim and The New Humanitarian)
• Webcomic Name (Alex Norris)

Best Graphic Novel

• Crisis Zone (Simon Hanselmann, Fantagraphics Books)
• The Dancing Plague (Gareth Brookes, SelfMadeHero)
• Lights, Planets, People! (Molly Naylor and Lizzy Stewart, Avery Hill Publishing)
• Monsters (Barry Windsor-Smith, Fantagraphics Books/Jonathan Cape)
• Stone Fruit (Lee Lai, Fantagraphics Books)

Best Graphic Non-Fiction

• The Chagos Betrayal: How Britain Robbed an Island and Made Its People Disappear (Florian Grosset, Myriad Editions)
• Chartwell Manor (Glenn Head, Fantagraphics Books)
• Quarantine Comix: A Memoir of Life in Lockdown (Rachael Smith, Icon Books)
• The Roles We Play (Sabba Khan, Myriad Editions)
• Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez, Particular Books)

Best Collection of Classic Material

• EC Archives: Shock Illustrated (Anthology – various creators. Dark Horse Comics)
• Ken Reid’s Football Funnies (Ken Reid, Rebellion/Treasury of British Comics)
• King-Cat Classix (John Porcellino, Drawn & Quarterly)
• The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire Vol. 3 (Mike Butterworth, Don Lawrence, Rebellion/Treasury of British Comics)
•  Scoop Scuttle and His Pals: The Crackpot Comics of Basil Wolverton (Basil Wolverton, Fantagraphics Books)

Best Book on Comics

• 2000 AD Covers Uncovered Annual (Richard Bruton et al, Rebellion)
• All of the Marvels: An Amazing Voyage into Marvel’s Universe and 27,000 Superhero Comics (Douglas Wolk, Profile Books)
• The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering (Nate Piekos, Image Comics)
• The Fun Factory of Farringdon Street (Alan Clark, Half-Holiday)
• The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics’ Crucial Decade (Edited by Brannon Costello and Brian Cremins, LSU Press)

Best Publisher

• Avery Hill Publishing
• Drawn & Quarterly
• Fantagraphics Books
• Myriad Editions
• Shortbox

Broken Frontier Hall of Fame

• 2017 – Annie Koyama (Koyama Press)
• 2018 – Corinne Pearlman (Myriad Editions)
• 2019 – David Schilter and Sanita Muižniece (kuš! comics)
• 2020 – Gosh! Comics
• 2021 – ???