Matthew Dooley’s elegiac tale of a milkman’s quest is our winning graphic short story this year, with a thought-provoking global warming parable as runner-up • Read Matthew Dooley’s winning entry 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.” Continue reading...
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