Introducing the Broken Frontier Awards 2023 – Vote for Your Shortlisted Favourites in What Was an Undeniably Vintage Year for Comics

Broken Frontier proudly presents the shortlists for our 20th 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 2023.

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

The BF crew (present and past) have kicked off the Broken Frontier Awards 2023 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 an extended selection of the Broken Frontier team from across recent years. Voting will run until the end of January 9th UK time, with the results to be announced on January 11th, 2024.

So, the usual blurb at this point: 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 2023 and reflects the ethos, approach and values of Broken Frontier.

This was a year when in-person events began to re-establish themselves on the calendar and yet one where we felt the absence of those that did not survive the pandemic all the more profoundly. But more festivals/fairs equals a greater profile for self-publishing which is notable in some of the names listed below. Socially relevant work is once again a huge part of our shortlist selection while the Breakout Talent category was especially hard to get down to just five names (“breakout”, of course, doesn’t simply mean entirely new or emerging voices and is equally applicable in this context to small press mainstays with a considered body of work who have found themselves thrust onto a wider publishing stage).

As ever, we choose the word “periodical” over “serial” or “serialised” for a reason. And we have included work that debuted at the very end of 2022 as eligible, especially in regards to the Best Book on Comics category, as it’s simply not feasible to expect academic books on comics studies published in November, for example, to be read and digested in the couple of weeks before nominations are due. We’re also loosely defining graphic novels as being 100-plus pages in length, so graphic novellas are included in the One-Shots section, while graphic memoir that may play with meta subjectivity is still eligible in ‘Best Graphic Non-Fiction’. ‘Best Colorist’ is shorthand for best use of colour and ‘Best Letterer’ can include both digital and hand-lettering. Yes, that may all seem rather arbitrary but, let’s face it, categorising comics always will be to some extent.

And, of course, we know there are lots of eminently readable and fun Marvel/DC super-hero comics out there on the shelves but they are not a part of BF’s coverage ethos so rarely feature in our awards. These are the Broken Frontier Awards after all, chums. Not the “You, a Random Dude on Twitter Awards.”

Finally, the most important part. Please check out the work of anyone featured here that you are unfamiliar with. Awards for artistic endeavour have their detractors and, indeed, there are some very valid points that can be made in that regard. But what we hope comes across from our shortlists each year is that there’s excellent practice on offer from every direction, whether that be established household names and renowned publishers. or DIY practitioners totally unknown to you who are still assembling their comics and zines with a long-arm stapler. Comics is a wonderfully democratic scene and we hope that by elevating lesser seen but equally worthy work with this awards process each year we are also making a positive contribution to our community.

So don’t forget your input will play a vital role in the final results. Join us in celebrating some of the best indie, experimental, socially important and alt comics of the year by clicking on the blue ‘Vote now!’ button below and casting your votes in the Broken Frontier Awards 2023 from this year’s choices!

Broken Frontier Awards 2023: The Nominations

Best Writer

• Alice Oseman (Heartstopper Vol. 5, Hodder)
• Dave Cook (Killtopia, Vol. 5, BHP Comics)
• Jeff Lemire (Black Hammer: The End, Dark Horse Comics)
• Marjorie Liu (The Night Eaters: Her Little Reapers, Abrams/Titan)
• Saadia Faruqi (Saving Sunshine, First Second)

Best Artist

• CROM (Birdking Vol. 2, Dark Horse Comics)
• Ellice Weaver (Big Ugly, Avery Hill Publishing)
• Martin Simpson (NORD, Soaring Penguin Press)
• Nicole Goux (Pet Peeves, Avery Hill Publishing)
• Shazleen Khan (Saving Sunshine, First Second)

Best Colorist

• Beth Fuller (Witching Hour, Quindrie Press)
• Ian Simmons (Unicorn, Hunted, ShortBox Comics Fair)
• Joe Sparrow (Cuckoo, ShortBox)
• Miquel Muerto (The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos, Dark Horse Comics)
• Shazleen Khan (Saving Sunshine, First Second)

Best Letterer

• Aditya Bidikar (The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos, Dark Horse Comics)
• Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (Dead Boy Detectives, DC Comics/Black Label)
• Natalie Norris (Dear Mini: A Graphic Memoir Book One, Fantagraphics Books)
• Nate Piekos (Black Hammer: The End, Dark Horse Comics)
• Roger Langridge (Doctor Who: Liberation of the Daleks, Panini)

Breakout Talent

• Deb JJ Lee (In Limbo, First Second)
• Emilia McKenzie (But You Have Friends, Top Shelf Productions)
• Lawrence Lindell (Blackward, Drawn & Quarterly)
• Natalie Norris (Dear Mini: A Graphic Memoir Book One, Fantagraphics Books)
• Pigeon/Kamila Krol (Rusalka: Whispers of the Forest, Strangers Publishing)

Best Periodical Series

• mini kuš! (Anthology series – various creators, kuš! comics)
• Monster Fun (Anthology series – various creators, Rebellion)
• PeePee-PooPoo (Caroline Cash, Silver Sprocket)
• A Pocket Chiller ( (Anthology series – various creators, Strip for Me)
• The Re-Up (Chad Bilyeu & Juliette de Wit, Bistro Books)

Best New Periodical Series

• Blab! (Edited by Monte Beauchamp, Dark Horse Comics/Yoe Books)
• Boxes (Edited by Steven Ingram, ThirdBear Press)
• Con & On (Paul Cornell & Marika Cresta, Ahoy Comics)
• Fractures (A Wolfgang Crowe, Colossive Press)
• The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos (James Tynion IV & Tate Brombal, Isaac Goodhart, Miquel Muerto and Aditya Bidikar, Dark Horse Comics)

Best One-Shot

• Don’t Worry, I Die at the End (Beck Kubrick, Self-published)
• The Gift (Jamila Rowser and Sam Wade, Black Josei Press)
• Of Thunder & Lightning (Kimberly Wang, Silver Sprocket)
• Times Tables (Gareth Brookes, Self-published)
• Zayani Zam (Mereida Fajardo, Self-published)

Best One-Shot Anthology

• Change (Edited by Joe Stone, WIP Comics)
• The Color of Always: An LGBTQIA+ Love Anthology (Edited by Brent Fisher and Michele Abounader, A Wave Blue World)
• Drawn to Change the World: 16 Youth Climate Activists, 16 Artists (Edited by Emma Reynolds, HarperAlley)
• The Power of Welcome: Real-Life Refugee and Migrant Journeys (Anthology – various creators, Scholastic)
• What Awaits Them (Liam Cobb, Breakdown Press)

Best Webcomic

• After School Lessons for Unripe Apples (Soonkki)
• Guide to the Oblivion (Kry Garcia)
• Hell(P) (Oliver Levang & C. Vinter)
• Nap Comix (Rachael Smith)
• To Be an Actor (Kimhaema, from an original novel by Gogwang)

Best Graphic Novel

• Adherent (Chris W. Kim, Conundrum Press)
• A Guest in the House (Emily Carroll, First Second)
• The Gull Yettin (Joe Kessler, New York Review Comics)
• Monica (Daniel Clowes, Fantagraphics/Jonathan Cape)
• Why Don’t You Love Me? (Paul B. Rainey, Drawn & Quarterly)

Best Graphic Non-Fiction

• But You Have Friends (Emilia McKenzie, Top Shelf Productions)
• Dear Mini: A Graphic Memoir Book One (Natalie Norris, Fantagraphics Books)
• Glass Half Empty (Rachael Smith, Icon Books)
• The Last Gay Man on Earth (Ype Driessen, Street Noise Books)
• Thomas Girtin: The Forgotten Painter (Oscar Zarate, SelfMadeHero)

Best Collection of Classic Material

• Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos (Jay Jackson, New York Review Comics)
• The George Herriman Library: Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1927 (George Herriman, Fantagraphics Books)
• Misty: 45 Years of Fear, the Essential Collection (Edited by Olivia Hicks, Treasury of British Comics/Rebellion)
• A Very British Affair: The Best of Classic Romance Comics (Edited by David Roach, Treasury of British Comics/Rebellion)
• Where I’m Coming From: Selected Strips 1991-2005 (Barbara Brandon-Croft, Drawn & Quarterly)

Best Book on Comics

• Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts (Michelle Ann Abate, University Press of Mississippi)
• Comic Book Punks: How a Generation of Brits Reinvented Pop Culture (Karl Stock, Rebellion)
• Howard Cruse (Janine Utell, University Press of Mississippi)
• I Am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future (Michael Molcher, Rebellion)
• Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders (Edited by Heike Bauer, Andrea Greenbaum & Sarah Lightman, Syracuse University Press)

Best Publisher

• Avery Hill Publishing
• Conundrum Press
• Drawn & Quarterly
• Rebellion
• 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 – Avery Hill Publishing and C. Spike Trotman (Iron Circus Comics)
• 2023 – ??? and ???

Thank you for voting in the Broken Frontier Awards 2023!