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? 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 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. 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!

We Wanted this to Be a Fast-Paced, Funny Adventure”– Rob Williams and Pye Parr on ‘Petrol Head’, Their “Fast & the Robo-Furious” Sci-Fi Series from Image Comics September 22, 2023 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… 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.

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Ep 138 is out! This is the drink we drank and the recipe is how you can make it if you wanna make it, and The Accidental is the book we read and talked about, along with many others. Listen, wherever you listen to such things! . Dooley first gained recognition when he won the Cape/Comica/Observer graphic short story prize in 2016, with another dairy related tale of a man Colin Turnball and his ambition to win Lancashire’s Tallest Milkman competition. When he’s not busy crafting comic tales, Dooley works at the House of Commons in education. Here’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. Wuster, Tracy, “Scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures”: Some Thoughts on “Mere” Humor, Entertainment, and Pleasure, Studies in American Humor, 4.2, 2018, pp. 160-170.

Dooley’s comments about his aspirations for the novel emphasise that it’s not ‘“some great allegory for big capitalist companies coming in and taking over the little man … or… about being an entrepreneur or anything like that. It’s not. It was an opportunity to make up some ice-creams, which was quite fun”’ (Lewis). It’s worth taking this seemingly self-deprecatory statement at face value and seeing it as a sincere articulation of the importance of frivolity; one that requires a re-examination of the cultural values that celebrate the serious or substantial and denigrate the frivolous. This hierarchy and the ‘divergence between “mere” and “serious”’ which it is predicated upon, ensures that we often try to justify humour by seeking its social or political purpose, which ‘causes us to devalue central elements of the experience of humor, namely, entertainment and pleasure’ (Wuster 162). In Dooley’s attachment to seemingly ‘superficial’ fun – ice-creams, crosswords, pub quizzes, crazy golf, puns – is a determination instead to value such pleasures, which, after all, are often such a crucial part of everyday happiness. DOOLEY: It is very straightforward. I pencil and ink on paper, then scan and add colour, word balloons and letters on Photoshop. 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’. 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.’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… 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.)

Dooley, the 21st winner of the Wodehouse prize, said he was “surprised, overwhelmed and elated” to take this year’s award. His winnings include a jeroboam of Bollinger and a set of Wodehouse books.Unfortunately, Howard’s finances are dwindling and this summer’s seen a downturn which Howard at first dismisses as one of the vagaries of his seasonal trade. It’s not. It heralds the North-West English Ice Cream Wars. Vans had for generations peacefully patrolled their family territories but now sly Tony Augustus has emerged, seemingly from nowhere, and his entente ain’t so cordiale. Tony was born of one of the Families, but not into it, and this has given him quite the chip on his fishy shoulder. His vans have begun encroaching on others’ routes, swallowing them whole like some Great White Shark of the suburban seas. And there’s a reason why he wants Howard’s more than anyone else’s. AO: How much of a game-changer for you was winning the 2016 Cape/Observer/Comica Short Story Prize for ‘Colin Turnbull: A Tall Story’ (above)?

The banality of British small town life is captured to perfection in this graphic novel under the guise of 'ice cream van turf wars'. I loved it all. The drawing style and inking really brings home the story even more and I can 100% see why it won an award!!When a book opens with a man standing on top of an ice cream van slowly being submerged into the sea, the man seemingly accepting his fate, you're probably not expecting a book that is so absolutely brimming with the warmth and humour that this book absolutely was.