AO: I first discovered your work in anthologies like Off Life and the much missed Dirty Rotten Comics. How vital were group efforts like that in not just raising your profile and building an audience but in forging links with the wider comics community? Much of the humor is found in how people are clearly trying to find a way to break the boredom in this small town: Howard’s sole friend, Jasper, has loads of obscure interests, and as head of the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue Service, is doing his utmost to undo the local peak getting recategorized as a hill. There’s elaborate digressions on the accidental founding of Dobbiston, and a man who fooled the townsfolk into believing he’d been to the South Pole: Dooley seems to be having his ice cream cake and eating it too, simultaneously sending up the region, while crafting this elaborate love letter to it.

Judge Sindu Vee described the winning graphic novel as "a rare joy: a laugh out loud story with characters you want to meet again and again". DOOLEY: I have a few ideas that are gently percolating. Hopefully one or more of those will end up as another graphic novel. I’m working on something shorter, but hopefully no less interesting, for my first time tabling at Thought Bubble… thank god for a deadline! AO: Throwaway Press published your original solo collections of work in Meanderings and The Practical Implications of Immortality, and you’ve also self-published Catastrophising. The absurdist slice-of-life humour of those collections where the incongruous is embedded into the everyday gives them a very distinctive flavour. What most appeals to you about that kind of fantasy autobio approach? And is there something almost cathartic about the self-deprecating way you present yourself in your strips? We had none of us, I think, expected a graphic novel to win, but we were all captivated by Flake,” said judge and publisher David Campbell, while judge Sindhu Vee called the book “a rare joy: a laugh out loud story with characters you want to meet again and again”. The idea of ice-cream turf wars being led by some sort of Mr Whippy Don is absolutely absurd and yet I was enraptured! Howard meandering his way through life, happy to do his crosswords, run his van on his patch and go home to his wife every day built up this really gentle, relatable character who you couldn't help but root for as his little van struggled to compete as the turf wars heated up. The supporting characters were just lovely, so humourous but with a real bond across them, and I thought this book brought Lancashire to life in such a wonderfully vivid way.The Lost Loiners – Anna Readman Lends an Unlikely Humanity to the Monstrous in Her Troll Illustration Zine When a book opens with a man standing on top of an ice cream van slowly being submerged into the sea, the man seemingly accepting his fate, you're probably not expecting a book that is so absolutely brimming with the warmth and humour that this book absolutely was. Unfortunately, Howard’s finances are dwindling and this summer’s seen a downturn which Howard at first dismisses as one of the vagaries of his seasonal trade. It’s not. It heralds the North-West English Ice Cream Wars. Vans had for generations peacefully patrolled their family territories but now sly Tony Augustus has emerged, seemingly from nowhere, and his entente ain’t so cordiale. Tony was born of one of the Families, but not into it, and this has given him quite the chip on his fishy shoulder. His vans have begun encroaching on others’ routes, swallowing them whole like some Great White Shark of the suburban seas. And there’s a reason why he wants Howard’s more than anyone else’s.

Wales Millennium Centre Responds to the United Condemnation of the Comics Community – Their Upcoming AI Art Graphic Novel “Creation” Course Will Run Regardless October 20, 2023 Howard’s life as an ice cream van owner is a quietly unambitious one. The highlight of his day is doing the crosswords for a couple of hours before work begins or chatting with local museum worker Jasper, a failed TV quiz show contestant and ardent campaigner to have the local downgraded hill reclassified as a mountain. This sedentary lifestyle is about to be disrupted however when rogue ice cream vendor Tony Augustus re-enters his life. The mercenary Augustus has swept through the North West of England, dispatching such industry legends as Professor Scrumptious and Dr. Frisbee’s Ice Creams of Distinction in his wake, and subsuming then into his icy empire. But it’s in the quieter moments of Flake where Dooley reminds us of how nuanced a storyteller he is. Here it is what is left unsaid that ironically speaks the most eloquently about Howard and his struggles; in these gaps in between exposition and dialogue the core emotional truths of his situation hit home. Dooley communicates so much in these interludes about Howard’s existence and his relationship with his immediate environment through a sublime sense of pacing, character expression and body language.Next Next post: Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance – The Quest for the Dual Glaive Follow Us

Flake, Matthew Dooley’s debut graphic novel, tells of how this epic battle turns out, and how Howard – helped by the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue team – overcomes every obstacle and triumphs in the end. Matthew Dooley has won the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with his graphic novel Flake (Jonathan Cape).The shortlist was selected over a lively online judges’ meeting, with the usual glasses of Bollinger champagne. The judging panel includes musical comedian and improviser, Pippa Evans and comedian Sindhu Vee, in their second and third years as judges respectively; and long- standing judges, broadcaster and author James Naughtie; Everyman’s Library publisher, David Campbell; and a Vice President of the Hay Festival and Director of National Trust Wales, Justin Albert.