The Reuben Nominees are in for the 2022 Cartoonist of the Year!

Each year, during the NCS Annual Reuben Awards Event, the Society honors the year’s outstanding achievements in all walks of the profession. The recipient of our profession’s highest honor, the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year is chosen by a secret ballot of the members.

The Reuben was introduced in 1954 and is named after longtime Honorary President Rube Goldberg. The statue is based on one of Goldberg’s irreverent pieces of sculpture. The eight winners who had received the “Barney,” as the Billy DeBeck Award was dubbed, subsequently received Reuben statuettes and are termed Reuben winners in the Society’s annals.

Congratulations to all of this year’s nominees!

Bill Griffith

 
“Are we having fun yet?” This non sequitur utterance by the clown-suited philosopher/media star Zippy the Pinhead has become so oft-quoted that
it is now in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Zippy has in fact become an international icon, even appearing on the (former) Berlin Wall. Zippy’s creator, Bill Griffith, began his comics career in New York City in 1969.
His first strips were published in the East Village Other and Screw Magazine and featured an angry amphibian named Mr. The Toad.
He ventured to San Francisco in 1970 to join the burgeoning underground comics movement and made his home there until 1998. His first major comic book titles included Tales of Toad and Young Lust, a best-selling series parodying romance comics of the time.He was co-editor of Arcade,The Comics Revue for its seven issue run in the mid-70s and worked with the important underground publishers throughout the seventies and up to the present: Print Mint, Last Gasp, Rip Off Press, Kitchen Sink and Fantagraphics Books. The first Zippy strip appeared in Real Pulp #1 (Print Mint) in 1970. The strip went weekly in 1976, first in the Berkeley Barb and then syndicated nationally through Rip Off Press.
In 1980 weekly syndication was taken over by Zipsynd (later Pinhead Productions),owned and operated by the artist. Zippy also appeared in the pages of the National Lampoon and High Times from 1977 to 1984. In 1985 the San Francisco Examiner asked Griffith to do Zippy six days a week, and in 1986 he was approached by King Features Syndicate to take the daily strip to a national audience.Sunday color strips began running in 1990. Today, Zippy appears in over 100 newspapers worldwide. There have been over a dozen paperback collections of Griffith’s work and numerous comic book and magazine appearances, both here and abroad.
He’s published three graphic novels since 2015, including this year’s “Three Rocks”, a graphic biography of “Nancy” cartoonist, Ernie Bushmiller (Abrams ComicArts)
He became an occasional contributor to The New Yorker in 1994. Griffith presently lives and works in East Haddam, Connecticut.

Hilary B. Price

 
Hilary Price is an award-winning cartoonist, speaker and educator. She has been writing and drawing Rhymes With Orange, her award-winning daily newspaper comic strip, since 1995. At the age of 25, she was the youngest woman ever to have a syndicated strip. It appears in newspapers internationally, and has also appeared in Parade Magazine, People, and Glamour. She has cartoons in the collections of The Library of Congress, The Billy Ireland Cartoon Art Museum at The Ohio State University, and The San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum. She now collaborates on Rhymes With Orange with Canadian cartoonist Rina Piccolo. Hilary teaches single panel cartooning at The Center For Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT. She tells stories for The Moth and on NPR. When not at her desk, Hilary walks her overly large dog through the woods of western Massachusetts.
 

Will Henry

Will Henry was born in 1984 in the Renaissance city of Providence, RI. He began his cartooning career while studying at the University of Connecticut and writing for their student paper, The Daily Campus. He now works from the sunny island of Jamestown, RI, is a proud member of the NCS, and creates the syndicated comic strip “Wallace the Brave”.
Wallace the Brave is elaborated from sketches of a child Henry began to make after working on Ordinary Bill. He has claimed both Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac as influences on the strip’s style. The setting of Snug Harbor incorporates elements of Henry’s hometown of Jamestown, Rhode Island.
 

Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith is the writer & artist of comics and graphic novels like BONE, RASL, TUKI, SHAZAM: The Monster Society of Evil, ROSE and Tall Tales. Both BONE and RASL were self-published and are New York Times Bestsellers. BONE began the current YA Graphic Novel explosion by launching Scholastic Books’ Graphix imprint and has won 48 national and international awards including 10 Eisner Awards and 11 Harvey Awards and has been translated into over 33 foreign languages. RASL won an Eisner for Best Graphic Novel. The webcomic version of TUKI won the National Cartoonists Award for Best Online Comic in 2014.

Mark Tatulli

 
Mark is a comic strip writer/artist, animator, and television producer, known for his strips Liō and Heart of the City.Tatulli is also the author/illustrator of the middle-grade novel series, Desmond Pucket. Three books in the series were released: Desmond Pucket Makes Monster Magic (2013), Desmond Pucket and the Mountain Full of Monsters (2014/2015), and Desmond Pucket and the Cloverfield Junior High Carnival of Horrors (2016).

Tatulli released a biographical graphic novel, Short and Skinny in 2018. It chronicles a summer in middle school in which he was inspired by the original Star Wars to make his own parody of the film while dealing with navigating relationships with bullies, friends, parents, and body image.

The winner of the Reuben will be announced on September 7th, 2023 at the Hyatt Regency Jersey City. Details here.
See all of our previous Reuben winners, visit our Awards section.