The nominees are in for this year’s Ignatz Awards, which represent high honors for comics creators. Among the many noms is Saito Nazuna’s Offshore Lightning manga, which Alexa Frank translated and Drawn & Quarterly published. Offshore Lightning was nominated in the Outstanding Collection category. Its competition includes:
Buzzelli Collected Works Vol. 1: The Labyrinth (Guido Buzzelli, translated by Jamie Richards, Floating World Comics)
Complete and Utter Malarkey (November Garcia, Fieldmouse Press)
Gender Studies: The Confessions of an Accidental Outlaw (Ajuan Mance, Rosarium Press)
Resenter (Gigi Murakami, self-published)
Visit the official site for more info on the voting process and to see all the other categories and nominees.
Here’s how Drawn & Quarterly describes Offshore Lightning and author Saito Nazuna:
Nazuna Saito began making comics late. She was in her forties when she submitted a story to a major Japanese publishing house and won an award for newcomers. She continued to work through the 1990s until she stopped drawing to take care of her ailing parents. In her sixties, she took a job teaching drawing at Kyoto Seika University and became inspired by her talented students. When she returned to teaching, her storytelling interests had shifted. Before suffering a stroke she drew “In Captivity” (2012) and “Solitary Death Building” (2015)—both focused on aging and death. Offshore Lightning collects Saito’s early work as well as these two recent graphic novellas.Stories like “Buy Dog Food and Go Home” and “Offshore Lightning” focus on middle-aged men caught in a cycle of self pity and self reflection. Saito gently pokes fun at their anguish and self-involvement while capturing the pathos of these men as they revisit childhood friendships and lost loves. By contrast, “In Captivity” follows three siblings visiting their ailing mother who is succumbing to dementia and resentful at her loss of agency. The siblings take a drive as they reckon with balancing the painful legacy of her caustic personality with attempting to honor this woman at the end of her life. “Solitary Death Building” documents an eccentric cast of elderly gossips as death descends upon the housing complex where they all live.
Source: Small Press Expo
