COMICA 2007: Graphic Short Story Prize

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	COMICA 2007: GRAPHIC SHORT STORY PRIZE
	THE WINNERS Winner: Catherine Brighton: Away In A Manger Runners-up Stuart Kolakovic: The Box Finn Dean & Sam Green: The Waitress Robert McCrum and Rachel Cooke discuss the short story competition and the winning entries at The Guardian. Links to many of the other entrants to the competition can be found at the Drawanyway blog.
	THE COMPETITION Are you an aspiring graphic novelist? Do you have an imaginative and original story to tell? Take this opportunity to get your work printed in The Observer and win £1,000. Industry experts will select the overall winning entry which will will be printed across a whole page of The Observer on 14th October and the prize will be awarded at the 2007 Comica Festival on 20th October. The runner up will receive £250. The judges are: Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, Fever Pitch) Posy Simmonds (Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe) Rachel Cooke (The Observer) Dan Franklin (Publisher, Jonathan Cape) Paul Gravett (Comica Festival Director) Suzanne Dean (Random House Creative Director) To enter and read all the terms and conditions, please visit Cape Graphic Novels. Deadline for entries: Monday, 3rd September, 2007
Rachel Cooke, journalist	"The graphic novel is at last enjoying a golden age, and this is what makes the Observer/Cape Graphic Novel Competition, launched on these pages last week, so exciting: the genre is currently so muscular and innovative that my fellow judges and I have no way of knowing what exactly it will throw up. As Harvey Pekar, the author of the comic magazine American Splendor, once put it: 'Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.' All the judges do know is that we have every expectation of finding a star of the future. The Observer has a decent record on this score. In the 1950s, the paper held a short story competition. It was won by one Muriel Spark. As I recall, she went on to do rather well."
Dan Franklin, Cape Publisher:	"At Cape we already publish many of the best known authors in the graphic field - Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Posy Simmonds, Raymond Briggs, Dan Clowes. With this competition we are hoping to discover new authors who can combine words and pictures with the same brilliance."
Robert McCrum, Observer literary editor	"This is just the kind of innovative work I used to love as a publisher. The Observer is delighted to be sponsoring a new departure in the 21st century imagination. Already, the response is phenomenal."
Links:	The Observer: I Get The Picture, Comics Can Be Cool The Bookseller : Cape Opens Graphic Prize