#liza donnelly

Congratulations to all six of the (very deserving) women who won at last night’s Reuben Awards, held by the National Cartoonists Society in Washington DC.

The top prize, Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year (also known simply as The Reuben), went to New Yorker cartoonist and memoirist Roz Chast. She is only the third woman to win The Reuben in the award’s 69 year history and the first in over 20 years. Chast was preceded by For Better or For Worse’s Lynn Johnston (1985) and Cathy’s Cathy Guisewite (1992). The award caps off a year of acclaim following the publication of her memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? about her experience as an only child caring for her aging parents. The book was a New York Times #1 bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award. Her career goes way back to 1978, when she sold her first gag cartoons to the New Yorker a year after receiving her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

The first female winner of the night, Marla Frazee, took the prize in Book Illustration for her picture book The Farmer and the Clown, followed by both Single Panel categories: Liza Donnelly of The New Yorker for magazines and Rhymes with Orange’s Hilary Price for newspapers.

Both Online Comics categories were also won by women: Danielle Corsetto in Short-Form for her recently concluded Girls with Slingshots, and Minna Sundberg in Long-Form for her post-apocalyptic Nordic Stand Still, Stay Silent.

Other women to be nominated were Jen Sorenson (Editorial Cartoons), Batgirl artist Babs Tarr (Comic Books), This One Summer’s Jillian Tamaki (Graphic Novels), Time for Bed, Fred’s Yasmeen Ismail (Book Illustration), and Maria Scrivan (Greeting Cards).

Though not quite half of the sixteen categories, I feel perfectly justified in calling it a sweep for women cartoonists; it is certainly a vast improvement over last year’s one female winner (Isabella Bannerman in Newspaper Comic Strips for Six Chix, though she is, as the title suggests, one of six female cartoonists on the strip). I hope it’s the beginning of a trend for the Reubens and not a fluke.

(Credit to Michael Cavna for the Roz Chast image above. Check out his write-up of the event on his Comic Riffs column at the Washington Post.)