Guy Delisle, Joe Ollmann among 2018 Doug Wright Award finalists, which recognize the best in Canadian comics

The Doug Wright Awards, which annually celebrate Canadian comic creators, have revealed the finalists on their three shortlists for 2018.

Guy Delisle's Hostage is among the five nominees for the 2018 Doug Wright Best Book Award. The book tells the true story of the kidnapping and forcible confinement of Christophe André, a Doctors Without Borders administrator working in the Caucasus region. The book was translated into English by Helge Dascher.

• 'It was a very immersive type of story': Guy Delisle on writing Hostage

Joe Ollmann's biography The Abominable Mr. Seabrook is also on the shortlist. The book chronicles the strange, adventurous, controversial life of American writer William Buehler Seabrook, known for — among many things — road testing cannibalism and helping to popularize the term "zombie" within Western culture. 

• How Joe Ollmann wrote his first graphic biography

Joining Delisle and Ollmann on the shortlist are Prairies-based artist GG for her quiet and compelling graphic novel I'm Not Here, Hamilton's Jesse Jacobs for his vibrant suburban fantasy Crawl Space and Montreal's Connor Willumsen for his debut graphic novel Anti-Gone.

The 2018 Doug Wright Spotlight Award, also known as The Nipper, is given to a Canadian cartoonist or team that is "deserving of wider recognition." The shortlist includes:

• Writer-artist team Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes for The Case of the Missing Men
• Gillian Blekkenhorst for All-Inclusive Fully Automated and House of Strays
• Eric Kostiuk Williams for Condo Heartbreak Disco
• Jason Loo for The Pitiful Human Lizard Nos. 12, 13 & 14
• Jenn Woodall for Magical Beatdown Vol. 2 and Marie and Worrywart

The Pigskin Peters Award honours the year's "most experimental, unconventional or avant-garde comic." The shortlist includes:

• The Dead Father by Sami Alwani
• The Death of the Master by Patrick Kyle
• Crohl's House Nos. 1 & 2 by Alexander Laird, Jamiel Rahi and Robert Laird
• Creation: The First Three Chapters by Sylvia Nickerson
• Potluck by Wavering Line Collective

This year's judging panel consists of Bo Doodley, Jim Munro, Marc Ngui and Pamela Marie Pierce. The winners will be announced on May 12, 2018, at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

The Doug Wright Awards also announced that they'd be inducting editorial cartoonist Duncan MacPherson into the Giants of the North hall of fame. MacPherson, a veteran of the Second World War, created iconic political cartoons for the Toronto Star as well as Maclean's. He won six National Newspaper Awards, the Royal Academy Medal and was a Member of the Order of Canada. He died in 1993.