COMICA NEWS

Graphic Short Story Prize Exhibition at Foyles Cafe

Posted: November 7, 2011

From today November 7th to December 4th, while you are sipping a latte or cappuccino on the first floor of Foyles Bookshop Cafe on London’s Charing Cross Road, you can also admire and read a free exhibition of four-page graphic short stories by five of the finalists as well as the winner, Isabel Greenberg, and the runner-up, Michael O’Kelly and Olu Oke, in this year’s Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize. Here’s the list of the titles and creators and short bios of those on show:

WINNER:
Love In A Very Cold Climate
by Isabel Greenberg
Isabel Greenberg is a London based illustrator and comic artist. Her work has appeared in publications by Nobrow Press and Solipsistic Pop. Love In A Very Cold Climate is a story from a graphic novel she is currently working on called The Encyclopaedia of Early Earth.

RUNNER-UP:
Ding!
written by Michael O’Kelly and drawn by Olu Oke
Michael O’Kelly is a writer, film maker and assistant director. Every award he has ever won has been for pieces set on the upper decks of buses, which is beginning to make him worry about his range. Born and bred in London, Olu Oke was the quintessential latch key kid. Her artist training started on various walls in and around the home. These skills were further nurtured at Edinburgh College of Art where techniques such as printmaking, digital illustration and book binding, were added to her pen and ink repertoire.

FIVE FINALISTS:
Present
by Matilda Tristram
Matilda Tristram works as a writer on children’s TV programs, including BAFTA award nominated Dipdap. She studied animation at the Royal College of Art. More of her drawings, comics, films and photographs are online by clicking on her name above.

Teapot Therapy
by A. J. Poyiadgi
A. J. Poyiadgi makes films by day and comics by night. He likes the collaborative nature of one and the solitary demands of the other. He has produced work for several advertising agencies and has won numerous film-festival awards. The backgrounds for Teapot Therapy were made using honest-to-goodness English Breakfast tea, brewed for about 6-8 minutes. Any leftover tea was used as late night fuel.

The Cat Ladies Of Czechoslovakia
by Faye Moorhouse
Based in Sussex, Faye Moorhouse studied on the illustration course at the University for the Creative Arts in Maidstone, Kent, where she gained a First Class Honours. Faye loves to tell stories through her illustrations; to create atmospheres, landscapes and characters. A lot of her subject matter is often a little strange; it has a definite thread of dark humour running through it. She creates her own self-published, hand-bound, illustrated books and zines.

Halloween Parade
by Robert Wells
Robert Wells has been writing, drawing and occasionally self-publishing comics since the early-1990s. His comics include Crisp Biscuit, Crisp, The Devil’s Daughter, Colin Comix, and Crisp Biscuit Comics. He doesn’t particularly like crisps and rarely eats biscuits.

The Wolf
written by Alex du Cros and drawn by William Grill
William Grill is currently in his third year at University College Falmouth studying Illustration BA. He has a keen interest in the natural world and enjoys working in traditional media such as crayons, gouache and linocuts. Alex du Cros is 21 years old and is a philosophy student at the University of York. He met William Grill in school and they both developed a love of comics. After years of talk and false starts their passion for comics finally resulted in a creative partnership. Alex wishes to use comics to explore moral and political issues.

A free e-comic Shorties: The Best Of The Graphic Short Story Prize 2007-11 is now available to read online in which competition judge and graphic novelist extraordinaire, Bryan Talbot, selects his favourite entries from 5 years of the prize.