But the good thing is that we all have a chance to look at them for ourselves. Maybe small recompense compared to £1,000 - but there y’go!

I’ll add you to my list in the main post.

IMO, yours was the best, followed by the runner-up (2nd) :)

-A “bloke” from the US.

BTW, don’t forget to add your strip to the Flickr pool mentioned above, if you feel so inclined.

I’m looking forward to spending time here picking my way through the entries. Fantastic that folk are posting them. I hope everyone who entered gets to post. Nosey, judgemental f*cker that I am.

I’d like to ask ernestly about folks feelings regarding A: The sex of the winning entry. -as wonderful as it is, and B: The links the winning entrant has with the Royal College. Is this a coincidence?, and was the judging panel too upper middle class?, -and does this matter?

At the risk of just sounding bitter, I take nothing away from the winning entry. I’d just like to maybe provoke some debate, -if there’s one to be had that is.

Enough of my shit. Here’s my entry. A cartoon strip masquerading as a graphic story.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1624951004&size=l

Many thanks for this forum Myfanwy!

Wishing you all every success. Don’t ever give up!

As for your questions, I did not know of any links with the Royal College. However, there was no rule to stipulate that entrants mustn’t be professional illustrators or artists of any kind, only that this particular strip shouldn’t have been published before. I suppose that under those rules, Raymond Briggs or Alan Moore could have won. Which complicates the issue a little bit: I mean, I don’t think it’s possible to judge such a diverse field of entries completely straightforwardly. What are you going to do - give extra points for self-taught artists and penalise the pros? Perhaps this was a failing in the competition: if there had been a theme for the cartoonists to respond to, then one criterion would be how well they did that. By leaving the theme completely open, what are they judging? Technical ability? Ability to tell a story? Ability to do so within the confines of sequential art? Ability to break through those confines? It has to boil down to the personal preferences of the judges (and perhaps what Random House and Jonathan Cape consider marketable - for let us not forget, the stated aim of the competition was to find new graphic arts talent for potential publication. The involvement of the Observer was really only to ensure this quest was publicised, and that they jumped on board with a pompous puff piece is unfortunate but not pertinent to the central aim, I think).

As for your question about the sex of the winner, I am assuming you mean that she is a woman? And perhaps that she was unfairly promoted because they wanted to be seen to select someone from an under-represented sector of the comic arts?

I might be the wrong person to ask about this, since I’m one of that minority myself.:)

As for bitter - I think we all are! Dear me.

Any thoughts on the class of the judges? -The Royal College and St Martins does cater for the apparent elite of the art world. In my paranoid mind I see at least one of the judges having connections with those schools.

Maybe I’m ignorant, but I see it as being a bit like a special upper-middle class club. Maybe like the Masons or something. -Anyone care to enlighten me?

On the other hand, let’s not forget how brilliant it is that a competition like this even exists: a full colour page in a respected national sunday broadsheet, plus all the related column inches. You really do have to give them credit, however clumsily they may have approached it (and even here, I feel most people are being overly harsh), for making the effort in the first place. Hopefully it will be run again next year, and now we’ve all seen the quality of the competition (thanks to Myfanwy) we know that all of us bitter losers have to up our game next time. And that can only be a good thing, can’t it?

Anyway, as I tried to say above, I’m pretty sure the Observer is only the platform for the contest; Comica was probably pulled in as a worthy sponsor. Posy Simmonds and Nick Hornby must have been approached as suitable judges due to their connection with the publishing house. It’s Random House/Jonathan Cape that instigated it.

I don’t work well with short stories, I like time to tell a tale, and I realised after reading the judges comments that I approached this all wrong. By their definition, mine is very much a comic strip not a graphic story!

As for the judges’ definition of a strip/story - I’m still in complete confusion over that.

Here’s my strip, anyway. Not as good as i thought since seeing all these others!

http://lordhurk.blogspot.com

Also, I think we all felt that way when we saw the others. But each definitely has its own strengths, yours included.

http://www.acibox.blogspot.com

Any comments here or on the blog are welcome.

Regarding the winners: I still don’t understand the introduction of a third prize for an entry which (is very nice but) fails to meet the brief, ie. to fit one page of the observer. The Waitress is four pages. Did anyone else think this a little odd?

On the other hand, it’s my opinion that the Waitress was not superior, in its ability to tell a story, to a few of the entrants above. The artwork was good, the story poor (and the lettering, well).

May I just comment that I think your strip is clever and I like that it demands a little attention from the reader to figure out quite what is going on; moreover, that you tell the story without words is quite an achievement. Also it avoids the lettering issue!

I think it’s the responsibility of the artist to get these things right, or seek clarification like yourself, but all the information necessary seems to be there to me.

The brief as such was never to be a one page story, but a story that fits on one page. I always like to make my art bigger than the print area so it sizes down and prints well, but I guess you can do anything within the right proportions. And with the size being roundabout equal to the size of four traditionally sized down comics pages, you can construct one large-ish page or have four that fit together.

I was considering doing this for a while, four different A3 pages (I only did two in the end), each with a different day that would size down in to one nice oversized page. Four short strips that come together and cross over to tell one over-arching story. The Waitress seems surprising in that it doesn’t really use the format perhaps, but would just be presenting a four page story on one page in a way that wouldn’t really benefit the layout or the story in any way. I think it would have been nicer to see presented as one page, but made from four different pages stitched together.

It’s all about interpretation of the brief, I reckon.

It’s interesting, because I’ve now reached a different conclusion from you (perhaps with the benefit of hindsight): having seen this small section of the field, it now seems inevitable that the first and second places should have gone to those they did - although personally, I think I’d have reversed the places, and I still do not understand the creation of the third place for what I feel is a well-drawn but poorly written strip.

But I agree with much of what you say, not least that artist/illustrators need to follow their own style, not imitate the mainstream. Hopefully, those with ambitions to get published will find that this pays off better in the end, even if the major publishing houses are playing by their own rules. After all, I’d rather stick to developing my own style and create something completely new than imitate other people and feel like a fraud.

The main thing I’ve got from this competition (and from looking at everyone else’s strips) is a desire to raise my game! I’m proud of my work on it, but the hindsight tells me I perhaps should have spent a bit of time on colour (despite favouring the look of black and white) and maybe gone for a different kind of story - more adrian tomine/dan clowes than jeffrey brown/liz prince. But in then end, there was no telling who the judges would go for in what is inherently a subjective medium. So bollocks to it!

If anyone wants a look at my entry, here it is:

http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m212/art_of_waugh/BLACKCLOUDA4jpeg.jpg

Andy

Sorry for the delay in publishing out your comment: for some reason the notification went into my spam folder :(
I shall add your cartoon to the list this evening, but am just flying out of the door at work.

http://mindlube.freepgs.com/localhumour.jpg

Great idea to compile all these…