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Joe Shuster Award

The Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards (or Joe Shuster Awards) are given out annually for outstanding achievements in the creation of comic books, graphic novels, webcomics, and comics retailers and publishers by Canadians. The awards, first handed out in April 2005, are named in honour of Joe Shuster (1914–1992), the Canadian-born co-creator of Superman.

The Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards Association is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2004 to administer the awards.

The Joe Shuster Awards are comic book industry-oriented awards that recognize the achievements of Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Founded initially as an English-language comics award, the criteria have been changed and refined since 2006 to be inclusive of all works published in Canada (see Language criteria). The majority of the awards were initially committee-nominated, public-vote awards, with write-in nominations accepted for the International Creator award. This was changed in 2008 to a committee-nominated, jury-selected model, with publishers nominating works within the relevant award category. The model established in 2008 was designed to eliminate voter bias and ballot stuffing. The jury deliberates until they agree on a winner, discussing the merits of each candidate.

They are named after Canadian-born cartoonist Joe Shuster (1914–1992), who co-created Superman in 1938. The award, which focuses on professionally published and distributed comics from all publishers including those designated as mainstream such as DC Comics and Marvel Comics, is complemented by the Doug Wright Awards, which focuses on alternative comics, cartooning, and comic strips and avoid mainstream published works.

From the Joe Shuster Award website: "When it comes to defining comics our job is to be as INCLUSIVE as possible when narrowing the selections down to an EXCLUSIVE number of annual nominees – there is only one winner in each category though! We strive to ensure that our nominates represent the entire country's output – whether that output is in English or French (Canada's two official languages) or in other languages – the central defining characteristic of our nominees are that they are Canadian. We don't censure Canadian creators who work with non-Canadian publishing houses – while Canada is a large and diverse country, for the creative awards, there are a very limited number of Canadian publishers."

The late Harry Kremer, owner of Now & Then Books in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, was a true pioneer in the industry and a constant and tireless promoter and patron of the medium and owner one of the first comic book specialty stores in Canada.[citation needed] His memory is kept alive in the award that has been named after him – the Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Retailer Award. The Award was given to Kremer's store in 2005, with open voting from 2006 onwards.

Named after the late comics artist and self-publisher Gene Day (1951–1982), this award honours Canadian comic book creators or creative teams who self-published their work, but did not have the books distributed by a third-party distributor. The award winner receives a bursary of $500. The award was introduced in 2009. Prior to this, Dave Sim had established the Howard E. Day Prize distributed annually at the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo in Columbus, Ohio, from 2002 to 2008.

This award was established in 2004. Works considered for this award are comic books and graphic novels that are targeted at readers 14 and under. Nominees are selected by a team of educators led by Jennifer Haines, MA, B.Ed., who is also the proprietor of Guelph, Ontario's The Dragon comic book shop.[citation needed]

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