© Nazuna Saitō, Drawn & Quarterly
The Small Press Expo awarded Offshore Lightning, a collection of short manga by author Nazuna Saitō, the prize for Outstanding Collection in its 2024 Ignatz Awards on Sunday. The collection was nominated alongside Buzzelli Collected Works Vol. 1: The Labyrinth, Complete and Utter Malarkey, Gender Studies: The Confessions of an Accidental Outlaw, and Resenter.
Drawn & Quarterly released Offshore Lightning in July 2023. The book includes Saitō’s earlier works, as well as the stories “In Captivity” and “Solitary Death Building,” which debuted in 2012 and 2015, respectively.
An excerpt from Drawn & Quarterly‘s solicitation reads:
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.
Saito debuted as a manga creator in her 40s, winning Shogakukan‘s Big Comic Newcomer Award with her story “Dahlia” in 1987. She published “Solitary Death Building” (“Bocchi Shi no Yakata“) in Shogakukan‘s Big Comic Original magazine in December 2017. The story was nominated in this year’s 28th Annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize.
The Ignatz Awards, which are named after the character in George Herriman’s seminal comic Krazy Kat, recognize “outstanding achievement in comics and cartooning.” A jury of cartoonists create a ballot every year, and then the attendees of Small Press Expo vote on the nominees. This year’s event was held on September 14-15 in Bethesda, Maryland.
Glacier Bay Books‘ Glaeolia 2 collection of indie manga won the award for the “Outstanding Anthology” category at the 2021 Ignatz Awards.
Source: Small Press Expo’s website
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