2017 Locher Award Winner: Damian Alexander

This year's AAEC/John Locher Award for best aspiring college-age cartoonist has been awarded to Damian Alexander, a graduate student at Boston's Simmons College. The award was founded in 1986 by members of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists as a memorial to the late son of Dick and Mary Locher. (Dick Locher, an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune and cartoonist of Dick Tracy, died this last month.)

Alexander's illustrations highlight personal experiences with social equality, LGBTQ issues, and mental health. "Through compelling and brutally honest storytelling, Damian's entries successfully make the personal political. His comic about his teenage self thinking he had AIDS simply because he was gay speaks to the importance of media representation. His meditations on technology and suicide are also thoughtful and socially-relevant."

Excerpt from "I'm Gay. That Means I Have AIDS, Right?" by Damian Alexander in Narratively

See the rest of this comic at the Locher Award site or in scrollable format at Narrative.ly.

I hope he's seen "Jeffrey," "The Broken Hearts Club," or "To Wong Foo" by now.