World TB Cup: Comic Book Competition

Posted on behalf of Vittorio Cammarota of the World Health Organization:

The Stop TB Partnership is producing a 16-page educational comic book that will provide key information about tuberculosis. The comic book will feature Mr. Figo as the main character and will target an audience of children and young adults. The objective is to reach these audiences through a reputable and appealing voice.

The educational comic book will be available in the six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) plus Portuguese for distribution around the world. Plans are that famous writers or other personalities will write the adaptations in these languages. The educational comic book will be distributed in collaboration with other United Nations organizations and partners.

The Stop TB Partnership — with the support of [international] Partners [listed at the website] — is conducting an international competition to design images for the educational comic book on tuberculosis featuring Luis Figo.

Interested artists should visit this website for the competition's official rules and scripts in all seven languages. This looks like a worthy cause, and a great use of comics.

Graphic Short Story Prize Winners Announced

The winners of the Observer's Graphic Short Story Prize were announced today. (See our earlier post on the contest.) Congratulations to first-place winner Catherine Brighton, second-place finisher Stuart Kolakovic, and the third-place team of Finn Dean and Sam Green. For more information on the contest and the winners, see the Observer's story by Robert McCrum and Rachel Cooke.

Update (10/16/07): You can download PDFs of all three prize-winning stories near the bottom of another column by Robert McCrum. I think all three stories are very well-done, with the pieces by Brighton and Kolakovic holding their own with some of the best very short pieces I've read in some time. Brighton's two-pager, "Away in a Manger" (warning: 4MB pdf!), manages the hat-trick of being simultaneously cute, mysterious, and wistful, with artwork reminiscent of a ligne-claire Maurice Sendak. Kolakovic's tale of innocence and necessary deception, "The Box," benefits from its subdued pallet and its elegant visual metaphor - a real treat. I can see how Dean and Green's "The Waitress" "provoked so much debate among the judges" - it's more than a bit elliptical, but it still reveals nice artistic chops as well as the ability to convey a good bit of character within a two-page, often mute, tale. I'd certainly like to see more of these contests - and, of course, more new-talent winners.

Graphic Short Story Prize (U.K.: 3 September 2007)

Received from Random House UK: A great opportunity for cartoonists who reside in the UK or the Republic of Ireland, offering a chance at publication and prizes. The Graphic Short Story Prize is sponsored by The Observer, Jonathan Cape, and the Comica Festival. The judges are first-rate, so the results should be well-worth the attention of cartooning fans. Here's the official announcement:

Are you an aspiring graphic novelist? Do you have an imaginative and original story to tell?

Take this opportunity to get your work read by industry experts. The judges are:

Nick Hornby
Posy Simmonds
Rachel Cooke (The Observer)
Dan Franklin (Publisher, Jonathan Cape)
Paul Gravett (Comica Festival Director)
Suzanne Dean (Random House Creative Director)

The overall winner will receive a prize of £1000 and their graphic short story will be printed across a whole page of The Observer

The runner-up will receive £250

Deadline for entries: Monday 3rd September 2007

The winner will be printed in The Observer on 14th October and the prize will be awarded at Comica Festival at the ICA in London on 20th October

Click here for the official website; click here for the entry form (31KB PDF file).

[Note that an alternate version of the entry form includes a slightly different wording for section (e) of the Entry Specifications: "printed on no larger than A4-sized sheets and submitted as flat work (i.e. not as a booklet) with a view to printing in a newspaper/publishing online and displaying at Comica."]

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