Introducing the Broken Frontier Awards 2022 – Socially Conscious Work Goes Hand-in-Hand with Pure Comics Escapism in a Nominations List Reflecting the World Around Us in 2022

Broken Frontier proudly presents the shortlists for our 19th 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 2022.

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 2022 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, 2023.

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 “big name” creators sit side-by-side with newer voices you may not have discovered as yet and, as ever, there will be omissions that may surprise you. But this is a representation of work that particularly spoke to our team in 2022 and reflects the ethos, approach and values of Broken Frontier.

To say the least it has been another challenging twelve months for us all on multiple levels. Perhaps reflecting that, this year’s nominations are a mix of socially conscious work reflecting the times we live in and genre-led escapist reading. And sometimes, as in the case of venerable British all-ages comics institution the Beano, which has become a beacon of inclusivity in terms of its characters’ diversity, a mix of both. Once again the nominations process was not an easy one, with the Graphic Non-Fiction category, in particular, being near impossible to whittle down to just five choices.

We’ve been generously flexible in our definitions for each category. In a world of constant reboots, never-ending renumberings (thanks Marvel…) and series that are made up of multiple connected limited series who can tell what constitutes an ongoing or a miniseries anymore? Hence the two “periodical” categories that encompass both. Books that debuted in the last month of 2021 and missed 2022’s list are eligible. And this year we’ve decided to relax the guidelines about work published by former team members so that the artists they champion don’t miss out on exposure. You may also notice at the bottom of the list that the BF team will be inducting two worthy names into the Hall of Fame this year as we expand our celebration of those with a decade-plus work of community endeavours and creator support.

One last plea. These nominations give a shout-out to everyone from established names in the industry to lesser-known but just as exciting talents from the worlds of DIY Culture and self-publishing. Do check out some of those creators whose work you may be unfamiliar with by either using the search function on Broken Frontier or finding them elsewhere online. Everyone included below is here because they do amazing things with the language of comics, or they’re at the forefront of socially conscious activism in sequential art, or they are *the* most promising newer voices on the scene. They deserve your support and interest, and the BF Awards offer you the chance to make some new favourites.

Once again, your input will play a vital role in the final results. Join us in acknowledging some of the best indie comics of the year by clicking on the blue ‘Vote now!’ button below and casting your votes from this year’s choices!

Broken Frontier Awards 2022: The Nominations

Best Writer

• James Tynion IV (The Department of Truth)
• Jamila Rowser (Wash Day Diaries)
• Jeff Lemire (Black Hammer Reborn, Little Monsters)
• Marjorie Liu (The Night Eaters)
• W. Maxwell Prince (Ice Cream Man)

Best Artist

• Anna Readman (Peach Fuzz)
• Molly Mendoza (Stray)
• Robyn Smith (Wash Day Diaries)
• Tillie Walden (Clementine)
• Zoe Thorogood (It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth)

Best Colorist

• Chris O’Halloran (Ice Cream Man)
• Dave McCaig (We Have Demons)
• Dave Stewart (Black Hammer Reborn)
• Jean-Francois Beaulieu (Twig)
• Tamra Bonvillain (Once & Future)

Best Letterer

• Aditya Bidikar (The Department of Truth)
• Ed Dukeshire (Once & Future)
• Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (World of Krypton)
• Nate Piekos (Black Hammer Reborn)
• Tom Napolitano (We Have Demons)

Breakout Talent

• Alxndra Cook (Momotekku, Koguchi Comics)
• Norm Konyu (The Junction, Titan)
• Shanti Rai (Sennen, Avery Hill Publishing)
• Trinidad Escobar (Arrive in My Hands, Black Josei Press)
• Veronika Muchitsch (Cyberman, Myriad Editions)

Best Periodical Series

• Beano (Anthology series – various creators, D.C. Thomson)
• Colossive Cartographies (Anthology series – various creators, Colossive Press)
• The Department of Truth (James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar, Dylan Todd, Image Comics)
• mini kuš! (Anthology series – various creators, kuš! comics)
• A Pocket Chiller ( (Anthology series – various creators, Strip for Me)

Best New Periodical Series

• The Adventures of the Anomalous Viola Holm (Ria Grix, self-published)
• G.I.L.T. (Alisa Kwitney, Mauricet, Rob Steen, Ahoy Comics)
• Image 30th Anniversary Anthology (Anthology series – various creators, Image Comics)
• Monkey Meat (Juni Ba, Image Comics)
• SHELTER (Lucy Sullivan, self-published)

Best One-Shot

• Arrive in My Hands (Trinidad Escobar, Black Josei Press)
• The Black Man’s Guide to Getting Pulled Over (Johnny Parker II, Felipe Horas, Scott Ludwig, Shawn Atkins, Kayla Ruffin, Microcosm Publishing)
• Cicatrix (Elle Shivers, Silver Sprocket)
• Sorry for the Inconvenience… We Are Trying to Save the World (Myfanwy Tristram, self-published)
• Stray (Molly Mendoza, Bulgilhan Press)

Best One-Shot Anthology

• Animal Stories (Peter & Maria Hoey, Top Shelf Productions)
• Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors (Gareth A Hopkins, self-published)
• Movements and Moments (Various creators, Drawn & Quarterly)
• Sensory: Life on the Spectrum – An Autistic Comics Anthology (Various creators, Andrews McMeel)
• WiPXL (Various creators, WIP Comics)

Best Webcomic

• Buuza!! (Shazleen Khan)
• Drowse (Frank Verano, Nick Klinger, Jaime Huxtable & Taylor Esposito)
• I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand (ND Stevenson)
• Lore Olympus (Rachel Smythe)
• Ragwort Wood (Sarah Gordon)

Best Graphic Novel

• Acting Class (Nick Drnaso, Granta Books)
• Forest Hills Bootleg Society (Dave Baker & Nicole Goux, Atheneum)
• No Surrender (Sophie Rickard & Scarlett Rickard, SelfMadeHero)
• Thieves (Lucy Bryon, Nobrow Press)
• Ultrasound (Conor Stechschulte, Fantagraphics Books)

Best Graphic Non-Fiction

• Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (Kate Beaton, Drawn & Quarterly/Jonathan Cape)
• It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (Zoe Thorogood, Image Comics)
• Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine (Mohammad Sabaaneh, Dalia and Mouin Rabbani, Street Noise Books)
• Sleeping While Standing (Taki Soma, Avery Hill Publishing)
• Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis (Tom Humberstone. Avery Hill Publishing)

Best Collection of Classic Material

• Badtime Bedtime Stories (Leo Baxendale, Rebellion/Treasury of British Comics)
• Friday Foster: The Sunday Strips (Jim Lawrence & Jorge Longarón, Ablaze)
• Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016 (Geneviève Castrée, Drawn & Quarterly)
• Love and Rockets: The First Fifty (Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Fantagraphics Books)
• Talk to My Back (Yamada Murasaki, Ryan Holmberg, Drawn & Quarterly)

Best Book on Comics

• Anatomy of Comics: Famous Originals of Narrative Art (Damien MacDonald, Flammarion)
• Filth & Grammar: The Comic Book Editor’s (Secret) Handbook (Edited by Shelly Bond, Off Register Press)
• The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions (Edited by Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren,  University Press of Mississippi)
• See You At San Diego: An Oral History of Comic-Con, Fandom, and the Triumph of Geek Culture (Mathew Klickstein, Fantagraphics Books)
• Seeing Comics through Art History: Alternative Approaches to the Form (Edited by Maggie Gray and Ian Horton, Palgrave Macmillan)

Best Publisher

• Avery Hill Publishing
• Conundrum Press
• Drawn & Quarterly
• Fantagraphics Books
• Silver Sprocket

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 – Steve Walsh (Gosh! Comics, Avery Hill Publishing)
• 2022 – ??? and ???