The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced last night, and the Graphic Novel award went to David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. The judges commented:

Mazzucchelli’s monolith is a beautifully executed love story, a smart and playful treatise on aesthetics, a perfectly unified work whose every formal element, down to the stitching on its spine, serves its themes. No wonder the main character is an architect finding his way back to his Ithaca and his Penelope: “Asterios Polyp” is an odyssey of design as well as writing and art and cartooning. Steeped in classicism and wholly modern, it’s a pleasure to read, and maybe even more of a pleasure to contemplate and discuss.

This is the first year the prizes have included a graphic novel category; the website calls graphic novels "an expanding part of the book landscape, both aesthetically and commercially."