In the unlikely event that Alan Bennett, playwright and national treasure, and Chris Ware, comic artist extraordinaire, were to collaborate – I suppose there’s still time – the result might turn out a bit like the winner of the 2016 Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica graphic short story prize. Colin Turnbull: A Tall Story, the charming and rather plangent tale of a man who longs only to win Lancashire’s Tallest Milkman competition, took its creator, Matthew Dooley, only two weeks to draw. But you’d never know it. Look beyond its slightly surreal humour – it pokes fun at the silly, overblown language of sport – and you’ll see that it also pays quiet tribute to the now rapidly diminishing army of men (and women) who continue, against the financial odds, to deliver a daily pint to doorsteps everywhere. Even as it makes the reader laugh, then, it has the quality of an elegy, which is perhaps why it won this year in spite of some exceptionally tough competition.
Dooley, who works for the parliamentary education service at the Palace of Westminster, doesn’t have a background in art: he studied classics at university, and laughs that it might be “pushing it” to suggest the friezes on classical Greek buildings can be seen as an early form of cartoon strip. Nevertheless, he has been trying to win the Observer/Cape/Comica competition for a while. This is, in fact, his fifth attempt. “I drew incessantly as a child,” he says. “And I read Asterix, Tintin and 2000AD. But when I was about 15 or 16, I stopped. I didn’t come back to comics or to drawing until my 20s when – I don’t suppose this is an unusual story – I discovered Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware. After that, I started dabbling again, which was difficult at first because I was so out of practice. The first proper comic I ever drew was the first one I put in for in the Observer competition, which I’ve entered four times before. But that worked for me: I need some kind of external pressure to get going.”
Is he thrilled to have won at last? “Oh, yes. I’m pleased. But I’m also very surprised.”
His idea wasn’t a new one. “Years ago, me and my friend, Chris, were knocking about ideas for sketches, and I had one for a milkman who was obsessed with being tall. I found it in an old notebook, and revived it: the combination of the mundane and the obsessive seemed like it would be just right for a comic. I set it in Lancashire, in a place like the one I grew up in: Ormskirk, which was quite bland and suburban… extraordinarily normal, I suppose you’d say. I’m a sports obsessive. I tend to live vicariously through the achievements of various sports people. But I do see that sport is inherently ridiculous, too.”
What about his drawings? The influence of Chris Ware seems obvious. “Oh, I wouldn’t dispute that, except my hands must be a lot more wiggly than his. I really like Chris Ware, but I’m not deliberately trying to be like him. I think I’m still looking for my own style. Finding one that’s completely my own is a work in progress.” Dooley hopes that winning the competition will open doors for him, though he has already begun contributing to small-press anthologies. “I’d love to have a go at something longer, and I’m very aware of past winners like Isabel Greenberg and Stephen Collins [both bagged publishing deals with Jonathan Cape after winning], who are truly, truly brilliant.” He also, of course, takes home £1,000.
This is the ninth year of the prize and the standard was as high as ever; among the stories’ themes were the housing crisis and mass tourism on Mount Everest. The judges – our regular panel was joined this time by the cartoonist Steve Bell, and the novelist Sebastian Faulks – felt that half a dozen entries could ultimately have gone on to win, and certainly to be a runner-up. In the end, though, we gave the second prize to Of Ice and Men, a multilayered tale of global warming that comes with a ghastly (and topical) twist – the work of “Doulos Nezblanc”, better known as David Ross, a Zimbabwean-born former lawyer who now works in a London cinema. Exquisitely beautiful and thought-provoking, too, its final frame provoked explosive guffaws all around the judging table.
An exhibition of the stories shortlisted for this year’s competition can be seen at Orbital Comics, 8 Great Newport Street, London WC2, until 17 November
