The awards, first handed out in April 2005, are named in honour of Joe Shuster (1914–1992), the Canadian-born co-creator of Superman.

[2] This was changed in 2008 to a committee-nominated, jury-selected model, with publishers nominating works within the relevant award category.

[4] From the Joe Shuster Award website: "When it comes to defining comics our job is to be as INCLUSIVE as possible when narrowing the selections down to an EXCLUSIVE number of annual nominees – there is only one winner in each category though!

[6] Prior to this, Dave Sim had established the Howard E. Day Prize distributed annually at the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo in Columbus, Ohio, from 2002 to 2008.

[3] Works considered for this award are comic books and graphic novels that are targeted at readers 14 and under.

Nominees are selected by a team of educators led by Jennifer Haines, MA, B.Ed., who is also the proprietor of Guelph, Ontario's The Dragon comic book shop.

[citation needed] The Hall of Fame includes dozens of creators such as Hal Foster, Win Mortimer, John Byrne, Dave Sim, Al Hewetson, and more.

[8] The Joe Shuster Awards honour original work published during the previous calendar year in any language.