Comic Arts Awards of Australia Acknowledging excellence in Australian comics publishing
2016 Judging Panel
Philip Bentley
Philip Bentley is a writer, editor and historian with a long history in Australian comics. A founding partner in the Minotaur comic shop (1977-89) he also co-edited and contributed to two 1980s anthologies Inkspots and Fox Comics. He produced Word Balloons (2006-13), a magazine on Australian comics, wherein he chronicled some of the above events, collecting these writings in A Life in Comics (2013). He continues to have a sporadic career writing comics, most recently published in Going Down Swinging, Tango and Passionate Nomads, a former Ledger winner. He currently reviews comics for Matt Emery’s Pikitia Press blog.
Sonya Kerr
Sonya Kerr is the host of Kapow!, Australia’s largest online comic book review show. She is also an actor and has always hated writing bio’s because her attention wanders and she starts to cheese, potatoes, milk, toothpaste..
Sonya loves comics, movies, cats, and not getting up too early in the morning. She hates clowns, zombies, zombie clowns, and any packaging that says it’s “easy open” but isn’t.
You can find her here:
Kapow! | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Glenn Lumsden
Glenn Lumsden started writing and drawing comics in the 80’s. In the 90’s he worked on a number of books for American publishers, most notably The Phantom for Marvel Comics. He’s just recently started working in comics again, doing covers for ActionLab, Hermes and some sequential work for ComicOz.
Emmet O’Cuana
Emmet O’Cuana is a freelance critic and writer. His published material – reviews, features, comics and fiction – has featured in Hopscotch Friday, FilmInk, Sequart, Film International, Outre Press, Decay Magazine and Aurealis. He also contributed an essay to Darragh Greene and Kate Hoddy’s Grant Morrison and the Superhero Renaissance. He was the host of the Australian comics podcast Beardy and the Geek.
Laura Renfrew
Laura Renfrew is a Melbourne based comic artist. At the University of Melbourne she achieved a Masters of Publishing and Communications where she completed both the Graphic Narratives course and an internship with Milk Shadow Books. Laura is now a comics reviewer for Hopscotch Friday.
Website | Instagram
John Retallick
John is a broadcaster and podcaster, producing 100 episodes of TheComicSpot out of 3CR in Melbourne from 2008-2012 and as a podcast from Tasmania in 2013. He thinks TheComicSpot was the first regular radio program to focus solely on Australian comic art, the comics scene and practicing cartoonists. In 2015 John is again talking Australian comics on the air on Edge Radio in Hobart. This is his second year on the Judging Panel.
Facebook | Twitter
See also:
Judging Process
Gold, Silver and Bronze Ledgers will be presented for outstanding comics work published in the calendar year January 1 to December 31, 2015.
Judged by a panel of experts listed above, the awards are open to any individual comics/sequential art projects, print and/or digital/web, that are produced (all or in part) by an Australian creator (who identifies as Australian or lives in Australia), or publishers whose main business operations are based in Australia.
The Ledger Awards are not a popularity vote, with the judges being asked to consider each project on its own merits in creativity, craft and execution.
Judging Method
1. A “Long List” of works produced across the calendar year will be developed and made available on the Ledgers’ web site. Projects will also be added to the list via a “Call for Entries”.
2. The Judging Panel will assess the “Long List” and each judge will develop a “Short List” of work they believe to be outstanding and worthy of the highest Ledger award: The Gold Ledger.
3. Judges will meet (either in person or online) to discuss the merits of each others Short Lists.
4. Judges each finalise their Short Lists and submit their selections to the Organising Committee.
5. The Committee compare all short lists to arrive at Gold, Silver and Bronze Ledger recipients.
Gold Ledger: awarded when the same project appears on 5 or more judges’ Short Lists.
Silver Ledger: awarded when appearing on only 4 Short Lists.
Bronze Ledger: awarded when appearing on only 3 Short Lists.
In the rare case where a judge has work in the calendar year that is Short Listed, then that judge cannot vote on the work in question. A Ledger Awards patron will step in to vote on that particular work. The Ledger Awards patrons are Christie Marx and Gary Chaloner.