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 Matthew Dooley will be awarded a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année, and a complete set of the Everyman’s Library P.G. Wodehouse collection. With the current situation not allowing for a physical pig at Hay Festival this year, Dooley has drawn his own humorous interpretation, with himself sat on the pig, bottle of Bollinger in hand. He’ll be joining a long line of witty winners from the past two decades, including Helen Fielding, Ian McEwan, Terry Pratchett and Nina Stibbe. 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. In Flake, Dooley’s ability to place the abruptly incongruous within the banal and the unremarkable proves once again to be the greatest strength of his comedic approach. He takes a traditional narrative structure as a starting point and then peppers it with anecdotal sidesteps about the residents and history of Howard’s home town Dobbiston that allow him to exercise the more extravagant parts of his imagination.

In the small seaside town of Dobbiston, Howard sells ice creams from his van, just like his father before him. But when he notices a downturn in trade, he soon realises its cause: Tony Augustus, Howard’s half-brother, whose ice-cream empire is expanding all over the North-West… 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? Thematically, it gels together well too: Howard and Tony’s rivalry is fueled in no small part by the fact Tony only exists because Howard’s father was bored by his life. The book seems to be telling us, when you live in a town where there’s barely anything to do, it can feel like you have nothing to lose, and be easy to overlook who you have in your life. The shadow of Howard’s dad, and everything wrong he represented with working class fathers of that era, looms large in the protagonist’s life. 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! This graphic novel is so darn inspiring and exactly the feel-good read I needed. I went in blind and had no idea it would be about ice cream, but enjoyed seeing all the creative business names and cool flavours. Not only is the artwork cute, I also loved both the layout and storytelling.Starlit Lovers – Lor Phoenix and KitsuneArt’s Touching “Sapphic Slice-of-Life Romance” Debuts at Thought Bubble October 30, 2023 Flake – Matthew Dooley’s Tale of Warring Ice Cream Men is a Perfect Blend of Absurdism and Humanity ANDY OLIVER: So let’s start with a congratulations for your much deserved Eisner Awards nomination. As someone who is no stranger to awards/competition recognition how did this latest accolade feel? Everyman’s Library and Champagne Bollinger today, 1 July, announce Flake by Matthew Dooley (Vintage, Jonathan Cape) as the winner of the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. The colors are desaturated, veering towards gray tones, and the large amount of panels greatly reduces the pacing, building the sense of stillness (and perhaps loneliness) one may experience up north. The unhurried pacing lends the narration the sense of a documentary speaker, slowly remarking on the quirky stories of the inhabitants of Dobbiston, which gives every unexpected gag time to land. (You can almost imagine Emma Thompson or Stephen Fry doing the audiobook version, since the script has that quietly bemused tone.)

Matthew Dooley won the Observer Graphic Short Story Prize and his debut FLAKE, published by Cape in 2020, went on to win the Wodehouse Bollinger Prize, the first time for a graphic novel. It was also a Guardian Book of the Year. Matthew Dooley won the Observer’s short graphic story award in 2016 but had his first graphic novel, Flake, published by Jonathan Cape earlier this year. DOOLEY: Alongside the Cape competition, anthologies were the other thing to get me going. I need a deadline otherwise I won’t do anything, so having a date by which to submit something is a useful motivator. I’d been scratching around doing bits and pieces, not really getting anywhere, wondering if there was much point to bothering with comics. I then saw that Dirty Rotten Comics were taking submissions for a new book and took a punt sending them a silly comic about someone with a balloon for a head. They took it and that was the first of a number of comics they published in subsequent DRCs. MATTHEW DOOLEY: This came as a huge surprise… particularly as I found out via a WhatsApp group I’m in with some other comic creators! Obviously when making Flake I didn’t set out with the intention of being nominated for any awards but it is enormously gratifying to have your work recognised in that way. Next Next post: Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance – The Quest for the Dual Glaive Follow UsHere’s an example of Matthew Dooley’s sense of humour. A while ago, the 35-year-old graphic novelist realised that Mervyn King, the erstwhile governor of the Bank of England, shared his name not only with the world’s fourth-best darts player but also a high-ranking lawn and indoor bowler, whose day job was as a pest controller. It Was Wonderful to Connect with Others Who Are in My Place”– Rachael Smith Talks New Motherhood and ‘Nap Comix’ October 30, 2023

David Campbell, judge and publisher of Everyman’s Library, comments: ‘This year’s shortlist was especially strong with a number of very credible potential winners. We had none of us, I think, expected a graphic novel to win, but we were all captivated by Flake.’ Matthew Dooley’s debut graphic novel Flake is a joy ... If it was a film, you could see Bill Forsyth directing it. If it was on TV, you’d file it next to your Detectorists box set. But as it’s a graphic novel, think of Joff Winterhart with a cone and a squirt of strawberry sauce.' Herald Scotland But Howard’s rivalry with Tony has a more personal element. Because this predatory purveyor of frozen taste sensations, who is determined to put him out of business and claim Howard’s father’s patch for his own, is also secretly his half-brother… A stunning first graphic novel by a Cape/Comica/Observer graphic short story competition winner – a tale of a skirmish in the ice-cream wars that is worthy of Alan Bennett 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”.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". Matthew Dooley has an off-centre, idiosyncratic, and often bleakly humorous view of the world; something that has been a constant on the UK indie scene since his work first started appearing in such influential anthologies as Dirty Rotten Comics and Off Life. His short strips have been seen in collections like Meanderings. The Practical Implications of Immortality and Catastrophising, and in 2016 he won the 2016 Cape/Observer/Comica Short Story Prize for ‘Colin Turnbull: A Tall Story’. If Alan Bennett made graphic novels, they might look like this... But Dooley deserves to be recognised for his own talents and they are all on display in this fine, funny graphic novel that is full of sly humour and facial hair, set against a world of pub quizzes, crazy golf and crosswords. His flat drawing style has a deadpan comedy all its own, but it's the world he conjures up that stays with you. Lovely. Teddy Jamieson, Herald Scotland *50 best books to give at Christmas* Flake tells the story of two rival ice-cream men: Howard, who is meek and happiest hiding in his van doing the crossword; and Tony Augustus – Howard’s half-brother, as it happens – who is intent on building an empire across the region. It is set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Dobbiston, though Dooley admits that it shares much in common with Ormskirk, Lancashire, where he grew up. NORD – Martin Simpson’s Norse Epic is a Stunningly Illustrated Tale of Mortality and Lineage October 31, 2023

Feeling Part of the Community is a Big Reason I Make Comics”– Matthew Dooley on the UK Indie Scene and His Eisner Award-Nominated Graphic Novel ‘Flake’ There’s overt optimism at work in the narrative – in Howard’s quietly contented marriage, in his small kindnesses, and his friendships, and in the series of events that lead to the happy ending. From the group of friends gathering together to support him after Tony’s machinations turn nasty – prompting scenes of collective endeavour so recognisable from romcoms – to the growing success of his new ice cream (‘It didn’t take long for word to spread..’), these are unabashedly ‘feelgood’ tropes.

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DOOLEY: There are definitely some eccentric characters in flake, but I don’t think they are too far removed from reality. I hope people will recognise character traits of their own. Many of us, me included, are a bit strange and I think much of life is lived in that space between the weird and the boring. I’ve lost count of the days, months, years I’ve given over to quietly pottering around doing something or other that will never amount to much. I think the humanity comes from the fact that we are all caught up in our own small world, it seems massive to us but is all rather inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Dooley is deft at employing a Chris Ware-like sense of ennui... Flake is principally comedic, comedic in the way that Magnus Mills is comedic or Wallace and Gromit... We will watch to see what he does next with baited breath. * Bookmunch * Full of irresistible puns... A meld of Alan Bennett and the American comic-book artist Chris Ware... and also Tom Gauld. -- Tim Lewis * Observer * Since 2014, the guiding light of So Many Damn Books has been to feature books that were good to read, drinks that are nice to drink, and people who are interesting to talk to. It opens to deserted sands of a northern British seaside resort, its former proud glories now lost, and its outdated attempts to hold on to relevance seeming pitiful and futile. Howard “Captain Cone” Grayling in middle age has similarly stagnated, bound by family tradition to a dying business model of an ice cream van with few prospects beyond a slow and steady decline.