Mike Dawson Comics

This year’s Ignatz Award nominations were announced this morning, and I was shocked and surprised to learn that TROOP 142 had received a nod in four different categories. The Ignatz Awards are a festival prize voted on by the exhibitors and attendees of the Small Press Expo, held every year in Bethesda, Maryland.

If anyone is going to the show, and is a fan of my work, please consider voting for me in any of these four categories:

Outstanding Artist
Outstanding Series
Outstanding Mini-Comic
Outstanding Online Comic

If you’ll excuse me getting all “emo” for a minute, this is actually a really big deal to me. I’ve been around comics for a while, but my work has never really been nominated for anything before.* Also, SPX is such an important show to me personally, and played a huge role in my development as a cartoonist. I first traveled down there in the late ‘90s at a time when I was only just learning about a wider-world of comics, outside of the Mainstream companies. With the exceptions of the cancelled 2001 show and 2009, I’ve never missed a year. SPX introduced me to so much work I’d never seen before (a more difficult feat to pull off in those dark-pre-internet days), as well as so many great cartoonists.

So yeah, this is super-exciting – and even if I don’t win anything, I really do feel great to have been nominated!**