The SKTCHD AWRDS, my absolutely real, completely not fake awards show where I celebrate the year that was in comics, continue today with part two of its creator-centric portion. While next week will get into my Comics of 2024, this week is all about the writers, artists, colorists, and letterers, who helped make this year a standout one. Every day, I’ll be handing out five awards to these folks, with each focusing on a specific trait, aspect, or idea that I noticed from a person’s work in the year that was and the award that best matches that.

As per usual, though, this was an endeavor that was guided by rules. Those rules are the following:

• These are my favorite creators of the year rather than the “best.” As much reading as I did — and I did a lot — I didn’t read everything and I can only represent myself anyways, so “favorite” felt fairer than “best.”
• The SKTCHD AWRDS only consider work released in 2024. However, if the material was previously published in print in English or I read it in another format before this year (i.e. single issues), it wasn’t included. Apologies to most trade paperbacks released in 2024 as well as reprints of graphic novels (like E.M. Carroll’s When I Arrived at the Castle)!
• Cartoonists were omitted from this if their only work of the year makes the cut in the Comics of 2024 list that arrives next week. That is, unless they did other things that ensure they make it for reasons beyond that single work. That means some creators who would have made this list were exempted and that this list isn’t necessarily a predictive guide to my favorite comics of the year. Keep that in mind when you ask things like, “Where is (creator x) or (creator y)?”

That’s it! No more rules! It’s time to continue celebrating my favorite creators of 2024, with those organized alphabetically by first name. And today’s entry is another quintet of talents that helped make this year as great as it was for me as a reader.

The Style and Substance Award: David López

2024 Work: FML

Why They Earned This Award: This isn’t always true, but sometimes it’s true: style and substance in comics can come into conflict. And by that, I don’t mean the natural style an artist has. I mean when their electric stylistic choices take away from the storytelling. It looks cool, but does it read well? That can be difficult to balance, and finding that line can be a challenge for some artists.

It isn’t for David López, though.

FML is a great comic in all the ways it can be great, but perhaps its greatest strength is López’s art and how he perfectly meshes style and substance into something astonishing. His incorporation of different art styles into the book and even into single images at times — see: the above introduction of Savvy, one of the core cast members of the series, from issue #1 — isn’t about doing cool things for doing cool things sake. It’s about incorporating the personality of this cast into its world, with the stylistic choices adding to the substance of the series. It amplifies the storytelling, almost acting as meta commentary from its cast that readers can pick up on or not. But for those who recognize what López is doing, it’s impossible to not be wowed by it.

Even ignoring the blending of styles, López does what he does here, and that’s telling a story perfectly while bringing characters to life in an almost unparalleled way. This is an electric read, but it’s also a deeply personal one. You need a special kind of artist to do that. You need someone like López, an artist who has always been great but has proven himself as something even more within this series.

To learn more about how López does what he does, don’t miss my art feature interview with the artist about his work on FML.

The Real Life Award: Deniz Camp

2024 Work: Ultimates

Why They Earned This Award: Making superheroes that reflect our reality is baked into the DNA of Marvel comics. It may not always seem like that, if only because sometimes entertainment needs supersede the whole “world outside your window” foundation of the House of Ideas. But when they’re at their best, they make us feel about the humanity we all share even if they’re stories about superhumans. That’s when they can really sing, even if those types of stories don’t have an exclusive on that feeling.

Perhaps oddly, the best place to find those types of Marvel stories are in the Ultimate universe right now, and the best version of that is in Deniz Camp and Juan Frigeri’s Ultimates. That’s no surprise to anyone who has read Camp’s work before, though. He’s not a writer that can forget about the world he lives in, as previous efforts like 20th Century Men paired a different, non-corporate superhero story with the realities of our world. He’s carried that feeling over to this series, and why wouldn’t he? This version of the Ultimates is about a group of enhanced people who were left behind — either because their potential for greatness or because the perception that they were disposable — trying to take down the secret powers who run the world. It’s tailor-made for it.

While the original Ultimates envisioned that team as blockbuster superstars with celebrity lookalikes to match, Camp positions them as revolutionaries, ones fighting for the way the world should have been and could still be. Don’t get me wrong: It’s still an absolute blast to read. There’s high drama, there’s incendiary formalist techniques deployed like in issue #4, and there’s exceptional action sequences. This is still a superhero comic, through and through. But its heart is with humanity, and its brain is in this moment. That’s because Camp cannot help but bring that type of feeling to this type of story.

There are any number of ways this volume of Ultimates could have played out, and many of them would have succeeded at what Marvel was trying to do. But having Camp at its head ensured this isn’t just an entertaining comic, but a powerful one, one that reflects our reality and our hopes for more.