Each year the BCA Committee will consist of knowledgeable members of the British comics scene generously giving their time to shortlist the nominations, select the Hall of Fame recipient, select the Judging panel and organise the BCA ceremony in November.
Each year the Thought Bubble Artist in Residence will have a guaranteed place on the Committee should they chose to accept it. Tom Humberstone was Thought Bubble’s Artist in Residence in 2012.
The Committee Chair is responsible for overseeing the responsibilities of the Committee and organising the nominations, the voting and the annual Ceremony. The Chair does not have a casting vote towards the shortlists.
Cadwell began plans for the British Comic Awards in May 2011 to celebrate the great work and talent he could see in the world of comics. He is the creator of such titles as Blood Blokes, The Everyday and The King of Things. He has also contributed to the Eisner-nominated graphic novel anthology Nelson, as well as Solipsistic Pop, Shorties, Paper Science and the Image series Phonogram. In 2012 he and Marc Ellerby set up Great Beast, a publishing group for creator owned comics. As well as cartooning, Cadwell works as an illustrator and storyboard artist.
Zainab Akhtar is currently studying for her Masters in Librarianship, and is developing a dedicated comics collection at Leeds City College. She writes for the Forbidden Planet blog and The Beat, in either sweeping assumptions or impassioned rants. She loves comics almost as much as she loves food. She loves food a lot.
Clark Burscough is a life-long comics fan, whose love of illustrated storytelling was instilled in him from a young age by his father. He studied for his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the University of Leeds, which is where his comics fandom truly came of age. In 2007 he volunteered for the Thought Bubble comics festival, and now works as the organisation’s Assistant Director, a position which he finds extremely rewarding, and which brings him into contact with creators of amazing comics from all walks of life. His favourite comic changes on a near weekly basis, but if pushed for an answer he’d probably have to say Blacksad, or Grant Morrison’s Invisibles.
Dr Ian Hague is the director of Comics Forum, the academic side of Thought Bubble that comprises an annual conference, a website, and one-off events taking place throughout the year. Ian is also an active researcher, whose work focuses on the ways in which comics use all five of the reader’s senses to communicate information. His work has been published in Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts and The Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art, among other places. He is currently working as an associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he teaches on comics as part of the Film and Media Studies course.
David Monteith was a biologist (ask about his Darth Vader claim to fame) and then a social sector practitioner. However he is now primarily an actor, and has acted in Poland and the Czech Republic and is insanely proud of having to deliver Shakespeare in both of those languages. He is also a teacher, director, coach and social network consultant. He is one half of the podcast Geek Syndicate which was established way back in 2006 when British podcasting was in its infancy. He is also one of the Editors in Chief of the Geek Syndicate Network which is a website, a quarterly magazine and a conglomerate of podcasts covering varying aspects of geekdom. His first ever comic was a history of Jamaica and his favourite ever series is Denny O’Neil’s The Question. He likes comics that take him by surprise and play with convention. He is training his daughter to acknowledge the wisdom of Yoda and is pretty sure that his loyal subjects will rescue him from this planet at some point soon.
Stacey Whittle is one half of the Small Press Big Mouth podcast and the other half of the Megacast. She is also AyeSaw Comics which debuted last year with Into The Woods: A Fairytale Anthology with more on the way this year. Periodically the SFX Magazine website are nice enough to let her write blogs for them and she also helps organise The Canny Comic Con, Newcastle’s small but perfectly formed comic convention. She suspects she may be just a little bit geeky.
Richard Bruton started out in comics retail aged 16, with a summer job at Nostalgia & Comics Birmingham that lasted, in one form or another, 19 years. Only moving up to Yorkshire could drag him away.Since 2007 he’s been writing and reviewing at the Forbidden Planet International blog, supporting every aspect of the burgeoning UK comic scene.
Ostensibly employed as a primary school ICT tech, he’s managed to get comics involved by tweaking the job description to become librarian and builder of the best primary age graphic novel library in the country.
Dr. Mel Gibson is an academic based at Northumbria University and also a trainer helping libraries and schools develop collections of graphic novels, comics and manga. She is a National Teaching Fellow and has used that award to sponsor and develop academic events and networks relating to the study of the medium.
Tom Humberstone is an award-winning comic artist and illustrator based in London. He is the regular comic artist for the New Statesman, producing the weekly In The Frame comic. In addition to publishing his own comics, he edits and publishes the critically acclaimed UK comics anthology Solipsistic Pop.
His comics have appeared in the Eisner nominated Nelson, Paper Science, and on Cartoon Movement. Humberstone is currently working on his six-issue comic series Ellipsis and also works as a professional illustrator, storyboard artist and designer.
Vicky Stonebridge is a freelance artist, illustrator, digital colourist, community worker & craft-worker based in Lochcarron. She has 20 years experience of running, organising & delivering a wide range of Arts and Crafts workshops, classes and events, including Hi-Ex’, The Highlands International Comic Expo. She loves Pre-Raphaelite Art, folklore, fairy stories, myth & legend, tribal lore, museums, comics, maps and trees.
“Art is communicating, accessibility is important to me, creating connections, creating community, communicating ideas, bringing people, the past and future together, looking for more fulfilling, sustainable ways of living together in our world. My art, illustration, colouring work, comic books, events I run, community projects, collaborations and cross-cultural work I do are driven by this idealism.”
Lisa Wood is the founder and director of the Thought Bubble Comics Art Festival, an annual series of events that takes place in Leeds and celebrates comics and graphical storytelling in all its myriad forms. Lisa founded Thought Bubble in 2007, and since then has driven its growth from a one day event in Leeds Town Hall basement to a week long festival that attracts thousands of people to the city each year.
Lisa is also a freelance illustrator and 2011 saw her artwork appear in the hit comic Elephantmen, as well as the publication of ‘The Hound’ – a comic strip based on the works of H P Lovecraft with acclaimed writer/director Stuart Gordon – in the inaugural issue of the Thought Bubble Anthology, a comic collection which she also edited. The Thought Bubble Anthology was a joint project with Image Comics which saw a number of professional and amateur comic creators come together to create a globally distributed collection of strips, the profits from sales of which were donated to the Barnardos charity.
