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Picking the winner of the annual Cape/Observer/Comica award for emerging cartoonists was easy this year: Edo Brenes’s gentle tale, based on his Costa Rican grandparents’ lives, instantly won the judges’ hearts• Read winner Edo Brenes’s Memories of Limón here• Read runner-up Jessika Green’s Four Hands here• Read runners-up Dominic Linton and Fred Morris’s The Devil’s Deal here
Save for the odd guffaw or sharp intake of breath, the Observer/Cape graphic novel prize is judged in priestly silence, the panel sitting around a large table, each of us passing the longlisted entries on our pile left-to-right as we finish reading them. At some point, we’ll realise that we’ve gone full circle – everyone has read everything – and then the quiet lifts, and we begin to talk about what we liked, and what we didn’t. The whittling, in other words, begins.
Sometimes, this whittling is tricky. But in this, the 12th year of the prize, picking a winner was easy. (Our regular judges – Dan Franklin, the publisher of Jonathan Cape’s graphic novel list, Suzanne Dean, creative director at Vintage Books, Paul Gravett, who runs the Comica festival, and yours truly – were this year joined by the playwright and director Patrick Marber, and the illustrator and a former winner of the prize Isabel Greenberg: thank you to both of them.) As you’re about to discover, Memories of Limón by Edo Brenes is that perfect thing: a short comic that is both beautifully drawn, and which has a beginning, a middle and an end. Quietly nostalgic, it made us smile, too – not with a loud, jokey punchline, but by capturing a quirk of human behaviour that we all recognised. Continue reading...