March 24, 2026

For immediate release

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, VERMONT – Each year, The Cartoonist Studio Prize will be awarded to work that exemplifies excellence in cartooning. The creators of two exceptional comics will be awarded $500 each. This year, there are fourteen nominees in each the “long-form” category and the “short-form” category. The winners for each category will be announced in April 2026.

Studio Prize Shortlist
Short-Form

Anywhere but Barbun— Sinan Demirer (Self-published)

A white vlogger follows her roommate Selin on a trip to visit family in Turkey, where Selin must contend with past demons both metaphorical and literal. Demirer navigates the complexities of going back home with equal parts humor and grace, making clever use of vlogging as a framing device while resisting its call to easy narrativization.

a root bound plant needs space to grow— Stacey Zhu (Fieldmouse Press)

In her debut comics collection, Zhu collages together musings on multiple fraught relationships, from the romantic to the familial, to explore deeper questions about the nature of love and the role of distance therein. Making deliberate use of pauses and whitespace, Zhu’s panels dwell on recurring absence even as her narration overflows with a yearning for connection.

Good Grief — Sadie Levine (Self-published)

A short but incisive memoir comic reflecting on Levine’s relationship with a now-deceased classmate from middle school into college. Softening her narrative’s edges with lushly risographed foliage, she captures with unflinching honesty the intense social pressures of dating as a tween, and the later adult regrets that accompany an unresolved parting.

The Island — Lucy Haslam (Self-published)

The sole survivor of a plane crash grapples with their time spent staying alive on an uninhabited island after they return to a world in which induced hibernation is now a common elective medical procedure. Haslam’s writing is tight and restrained, her sepia-toned drawings smudged with the haziness of memory.

Know Not A Man — C.S. García Martínez (Self-published)

A dense and ambitious science fiction novella following a PhD student’s increasingly erratic solo endeavor to grow sperm from scratch. Drawing from their own background in medical communication, García Martínez paints a classic portrait of a lone scientist spiraling into obsession, while raising nuanced and thorny questions about bioethics, reproductive agency, and queer liberation.

Orthinomancy— Lily Vie (Self-published)

A plumber’s life is thrown into upheaval after his estranged parents die and bequeath him the android they commissioned in his image. Vie’s intricate and layered colored pencil work continues to push the boundaries of the comics page in this moving tale of grief, agency, and found family.

Running Out — Myfanwy Tristram (Self-published)

Making innovative use of collage to delve into mortality and the excesses of consumerism, Tristram weaves her own observations into a fictional story of two siblings confronting their father’s hoarding tendencies while at their mother’s deathbed. A bitingly funny story at turns irreverent and poignant.

Swapping Genders With My Ex — Cesario “Cee” Lavery (Crucial Comix)

Rendered in soft ink wash, Lavery’s first comic for Crucial relates his story of coming out and transitioning alongside his then-partner. He chronicles their parallel gender journeys, break-up, and subsequent reconciliation with tenderness and care, framing their bodies in perennial mirror image to one another.

Testament— J. Marshall Smith (Bulgilhan Press)

An android is sent to accompany a religious order on their one-way voyage to establish a scientific colony on a remote exoplanet. Armed only with his preprogrammed liturgical knowledge, his duties devolve into comforting the last surviving colonists as they face their impending end. Smith’s lengthiest and most narrative work to date is a powerful examination of mortality and humanity.

Them-shaped Clouds— Max Huffman (CRAM Books)

Huffman’s compendium of humorous shorts pays loving homage to older eras of comics and animation, from Hirschfeld to Tartakovsky, while playfully confronting the many contemporary absurdities of living under late-stage capitalism. Colorful, inventive, and visually uncompromising.

Two Snakes — Suerynn Lee (Alright Press)

In only fifteen pages, Lee traces the entire arc of a relationship through a series of philosophical vignettes, as two snakes from opposing families navigate their place in the world and what they mean to one another. Drawn in ink wash and printed in blue-toned risograph, its watery visuals heighten the fluidity of a tenuous connection.

Valley Valley / Idella Dell — Audra Stang (Frog Farm)

Utilizing the split-zine format to its fullest potential, Stang’s twin narratives follow the artistic tensions and parallel angsts between two cousins and rival cartoonists, Valley and Idella, who share a house in the fictional town of Star Valley. Each struggles with her envy for the other as both succumb to similar creative pressures.

Word from the Bird— Grayson Bear (Secret Room Press)

A concise and surreal snapshot of a violent confrontation at a party. In a notable stylistic departure, Bear sketches a world unsettling and unfamiliar, yet operating with a dream-logic that threads together twentieth-century patter with the inevitability of fable.

You’re So Cool — Giles Crawford (Self-published)

Over the course of a single night on Halloween, 1994, a partygoer disappears into an imagined evening between himself and a crush, only to have to navigate their subsequent real-life encounter from where both are actually at. A skillful exercise in wordless cartooning in which Crawford makes evocative use of paneling and color to blend desire and reality.

Studio Prize Shortlist
Long Form

Black Arms To Hold You Up — Ben Passmore (Pantheon Graphic Library)

This meticulously-researched work of graphic nonfiction follows Passmore as he bears witness to key moments in the history of Black armed resistance. Beginning with Robert Charles’s uprising against New Orleans police in 1900 and following the growth of underrecognized Black nationalist movements of the 1960s and 70s, Passmore brings readers up to present day to ask: what now? 

Black Cohosh — Eagle Valiant Brosi (Drawn & Quarterly)

Brosi’s debut graphic memoir is a spare, understated, darkly funny exploration of his relationship with his mother growing up on an Appalachian commune. In a clever visual device, Brosi’s speech impediment obscures his dialogue and leaves the other characters around him to speak uninterrupted, slowly laying bare their own worldviews and hypocrisies in the process. 

Buff Soul — Moa Romanova (Fantagraphics)

A relentless tale of addiction, self-destruction, and reconciliation, Romanova’s autofictional memoir is a chronicle of an intense stint on tour in America with her band Shitkid. Adolescent trauma resurfaces as she and her two best friends embark on a hallucinatory campaign of drug abuse, set against a sickly-neon backdrop of Hollywood excess and desolation. 

Cannon — Lee Lai (Drawn & Quarterly)

Set against the backdrop of a Montreal heat wave, Lai’s follow-up graphic novel charts the unraveling of its repressed titular character as she buckles under the weight of mounting responsibilities, including elder care, a toxic workplace, and a strained relationship with her best friend. Carefully crafted, intimate, and sharply funny, Cannon perfectly captures the feeling of trying to hold everything together—and what happens when you just can’t take it anymore. 

Checked Out — Katie Fricas (Drawn & Quarterly)

A queer twentysomething library page navigates life in New York City while obsessing over a mission to write the perfect graphic novel. In her disarming and playful debut, Fricas employs frenetic dabs of color and lively linework to tell a story about creative validation, the search for meaning, and the freedom of finally letting go of expectations. 

Do Admit — Mimi Pond (Drawn & Quarterly)

Pond’s loving biography of the Mitford sisters, six debutantes who rocked English society with their scandalous personal lives and wildly diverging politics, is an at turns joyous and harrowing romp through 20th century history. Even when distilling six lifetimes’ worth of information, Pond’s approach is determinedly playful, arcing words through sprawling and inventive page layouts that bring the reader deep into the Mitfords’ world. 

Drome — Jesse Lonergan (23rd Street Books)

An ambitious formal exploration of myth, spectacle, and collective violence. Lonergan uses expansive page design and minimalist text to create a reading experience that foregrounds movement, scale, and rhythm.

The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief — Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics)

Over a decade in the making, Tyler’s new opus is a monumental exploration of loss, following her through an allegorical journey through “Griefville” as she processes the devastating fallout brought on by the successive deaths of her sister, parents, and multiple friends. Her exquisite black and white linework cuts a meandering path through a lush interior landscape, suggesting the promise of new growth from the squalor of decay. 

Future Me Is Fat — Mollie Cronin (Conundrum Press)

In a moving yet playful treatise on fatphobia, Cronin uses a time-travel dialogue with her past and future selves to interrogate destructive norms, diet culture, and internalized shame, and to vividly imagine a future of fat liberation in which bodies like her own can exist comfortably on their own terms. 

Ginseng Roots: A Memoir — Craig Thompson (Pantheon)

Thompson’s latest graphic novel is a richly-rendered workhorse of a book that explores agriculture, globalization, and labor through the lens of Wisconsin’s ginseng farming industry. Rooted in the author’s own experience of a childhood spending toiling on ginseng farms, Ginseng Roots blends memoir, history, and journalism to trace the plant’s history from its ancient origins to its role in modern trade relationships between North America and China. 

Precious Rubbish — Kayla E. (Fantagraphics)

A formally rigorous memoir confronting a traumatic childhood marked by instability and emotional volatility. Drawing on the wit and visual language of classic comics (tight grids, iconic character design, and elastic exaggeration), Kayla E. builds a sturdy narrative vessel for a book that feels as much like an exorcism as it does a memoir.

Talking to My Father’s Ghost: An Almost True Story — Alex Krokus (Chronicle Books)

In his first long-form narrative work, Krokus reflects on losing his father through imagined conversations with his father’s ghost. With characteristic empathy and impeccable comic timing, Krokus paints a detailed and loving portrait of his family as they process their grief with humor across a series of wryly funny, heartfelt vignettes 

Tongues, Volume 1 — Anders Nilsen (Pantheon Graphic Library)

A modern-day retelling of the Prometheus myth that breaks new ground for the visual language of comics, Tongues is a compendium of Nilsen’s most epic serialized work to date. Across swathes of time and space, panels emerge from intestines, bloom like petals from a flower, and crystallize across the page in geometric forms, wrenching surprising beauty out of the endless ravages of war. 

The Weight — Melissa Mendes (Drawn & Quarterly)
Simple yet sweeping, and starkly rendered in ink wash, Mendes’s newest work is an intimate family saga that captures the darkness and beauty of rural America. The story of a young girl’s life in midcentury Pennsylvania from birth to adulthood, The Weight explores cycles of generational trauma—how they are perpetuated, and how they are broken. 

The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) offers a two-year course of study that centers on the creation and dissemination of comics, graphic novels, and other manifestations of the visual narrative. Experienced and internationally recognized cartoonists, writers, and designers teach classes for our students. CCS programs include a two-year Master of Fine Arts Degree, One- and Two-Year Certificates in Cartooning, and annual summer workshops. The school is located in the historic downtown village of White River Junction, Vermont. cartoonstudies.org