The finalists for the 2008 Doug Wright Awards for Canadian cartooning have been announced! There were no major upsets: Montreal-based publishing house Drawn and Quarterly practically swept the nominations, but there are also a considerable number of self-published works on the shortlist. One exciting twist this year was the addition of a new category, The Pigskin Peters Award for works that are "more experimental in nature or lack a traditional narrative structure." The winners......

The inimitable Torontonian cartoonist John Martz has recently completed the impressive exercise of drawing every face (more than 1000 in total) that appears in his mother’s 1968 high school yearbook. The final results are available for purchase on his website, and can be also be viewed on Flickr. John writes: “Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon......