During the recruitment process, we discussed issues of diversity and representation. Our concerns led to two questions: “Was the Committee representative of the British public?” and “Could the public feel confident that they were being represented by the Committee?”

The answer to the first question was always going to be no. It is difficult to represent all the nationalities and identities of the people of Britain within a Committee of 10 people – though we have made every effort to put together a diverse, qualified and knowledgeable committee who have specific and unique areas of expertise within the world of comics.

The answer to the second question was less straight forward. We hope that most of the public would say yes, they do feel represented and their tastes and opinions about British comics are being considered by the wide range of people on the Committee. Again, due to the impossibility of representing every type of person, there is always going to be someone who could say no, they do not feel they are being represented. The question then became “What more could we do to ensure more of the public feel represented?”

Our answer came from looking at the way we recruited Committee members, i.e. by recommending people we knew of (though, in some cases, had never met or spoke to) who we felt were well qualified for the role. This approach has been effective so far but we could see the limitations in the long term. Our solution was to encourage people to come to us, so people from all backgrounds can apply to be a part of the British Comic Awards.

So, as part of our continuing work to develop the BCA we will be opening the Committee and Judging Panel to a process of application in future years. Developing equality policies and application materials to enable this to happen is a work in progress for the current Committee. This is a large job and couldn’t be put into practice this year without seriously hampering the other responsibilities of the Committee.

We want people from all walks of life to be able to enjoy all the work selected for the Awards each year and feel connected to the people deciding the shortlists and picking the winners.

After the first successful year of the British Comic Awards we are confident this is a project that should continue and we are working hard to ensure that the Awards are fully representative of the comics community. Rooted in passion for the medium, we are driven by an urge to see it have an increasing profile in the UK. We believe the Awards are well placed to offer a space to celebrate and publicise sequential art.

We welcome any thoughts and comments you may have on this topic. Please leave a comment on this blog post, send us a message on Facebook, or email us at committee@britishcomicawards.com

Plans for the 2nd Annual British Comic Awards are well underway and we’re more excited than ever about comics in the UK.

Nominations for this year’s Awards have been open for over a month now but we haven’t mentioned it on this blog until now. Soooo, you can Nominate titles for consideration by the Committee via our Nomination Form or on our home page.

What has been your favourite British comic or graphic novel since last September? What treats have you bought at a comic show or received for Christmas? What work have you made that you’re especially proud of? Let us know!

Any title by British creators published between 1st September 2012 and 31st August 2013 are eligible as long as the rights remain in the UK. Please check the Qualifying Work page for further info. Please note this isn’t a most-votes-win process, this is a nomination process, you only need to nominate a title once and creators and publishers can nominate their own work too. You can send us numerous (different) suggestions from now until the 31st August.

The Committee for 2013 has been assorted and confirmed and we can finally reveal who they are! The 2013 Committee is made up of:

Zainab Akhtar, Clark Burscough, Richard Bruton, Dr. Mel Gibson, Dr. Ian Hague, Tom Humberstone, David Monteith, Vicky Stonebridge, Stacey Whittle and Lisa Wood.

BCA Founder Adam Cadwell is taking the role of Committee Chair.

(Short bios and flattering photos of the whole Committee can be found on the Committee page.)

There was some public discussion following last year’s Awards about gender balance on the Committee and Judging Panel. An even split of men and women was intended last year but wasn’t possible when trying to convince people to dedicate their free time to an idea. Now we’ve established the Awards we are glad to say we have 5 men and 5 women on the Committee for 2013.

Throughout the early stages of organising this year’s Awards issues of representation and diversity have been forefront in our thinking. A full blog post detailing these issues, how the Committee has been selected and how we plan to select Committee members and Judges in the future, will appear here in the coming days.

Oh, and we have finally joined Facebook! Go ahead and Like us to get BCA news, photos, videos and comics on your FB news feed.

Here’s to another year of incredible British comics!

We are very proud to present this short film about the British Comic Awards made by the wonderful filmmaker Anne Hollowday.

Anne not only filmed the ceremony and interviewed us but also filmed the Young People’s Comic Award ceremony on the Friday and edited together a short summary of the day (with even more interviews) in time to be shown at the BCA ceremony the next day. Anne, you’re a star! Thanks to Lisa Wood and Stacey Whittle too for taking the time out from a very busy weekend to be interviewed.

You can see more of Anne’s films, including one about Thought Bubble last year, on her Vimeo page.

Also, committee member Richard Bruton reports on the ceremony on the Forbidden Planet blog including photos and other heckles from the young Decie.

It wasn’t an easy choice for the Committee to choose the very first entrant into the Hall of Fame. From over a 100 years of history, of all the well known names and obscure talents, the masters and the auteurs, those who influenced the current generation and those who influenced them, who should we pick?

In the end we went with someone who is familiar to us all yet we rarely praise as an important figure in the history of British comics. Someone whose work is a timeless treasure we all fondly remember discovering for the first time.

Our first inductee to the British Comic Awards Hall of Fame is… Mr. Raymond Briggs.

Photograph by Liz Finlayson from the guardian.co.uk.

On hearing the news Mr. Briggs kindly sent us this email:

Ye Gods! Wizard prang! Top Hole! Bang On! etcetera. A great honour. Thank you very much indeed.

In 1949 when I applied to go to Wimbledon Art School, at the age of 15, at the interview the principal said: Tell me now, why do you want to come to my art school?
Well, sir – I said – I want to learn how to draw in order to become a cartoonist.
He went crimson in the face, stood up and roared at me: Good God, boy! Is that ALL you want to do?

Best Wishes,
Raymond Briggs.

Photograph by Felix Clay from the guardian.co.uk.

Briggs has had much success in his career, millions of children have loved his work, he has received many awards for his books and almost all of his work has been translated into many different languages and adapted into other mediums. Yet when we think of great British comic artists, his name is rarely the first to spring to mind, perhaps due to his affiliation with children’s picture books or the popularity of the animated adaptations of his work.

Raymond Redvers Briggs was born in Wimbledon, London in 1934 to Ethel and Ernest Briggs. He pursued cartooning from an early age, and after 2 years national service as a draughtsman he continued his studies and soon began work as a children’s book illustrator in 1958, age 24. He worked mainly in fairytale and nursery rhyme books and in 1966 started a long running relationship with British publishers Hamish Hamilton working on The Mother Goose Treasury providing nearly 900 colour illustrations for which he won his first Kate Greenaway Medal, an annual distinction for distinguished illustrations in a book for children.

In 1973, Briggs wrote and drew the comic, Father Christmas, published by Hamilton for which he won his second Kate Greenaway Medal.

Briggs’ rather British, working class Father Christmas was curmudgeonly rather than jolly, and the comedy came from his constant grumbling about all around him, especially the “bloomin’ snow”.

Two years later in 1975, Brigg’s produced a sequel Father Christmas Goes On Holiday following old Saint Nic as he travels the world looking for the perfect place to relax moving on each time he is recognised by local children.

In 1991 both Father Christmas books were jointly adapted as animated film.

In 1977 Brigg’s created Fungus the Bogeyman, again published by Hamilton, featuring a day in the life of a working class Bogeyman with the mundane job of scaring human beings. 24 years before Monsters Inc. Full of playful, gross out humour, it was a hit with children the world over. Sadly, the book inspired the 1980 song ‘Bogey Music‘ by Paul McCartney.

A year later in 1978, Briggs created perhaps his most enduring creation The Snowman. A beautiful silent comic about a boy who builds a snowman who comes to life and flies him to the north pole to party with snowmen from around the world and Father Christmas himself. The ending, like much of Briggs work, is a sad and inevitable one, but he leaves us with a message of acceptance and embracing new experiences, and how not to forget them.

The book was illustrated with only pencil crayons and Briggs said it was partly inspired by his previous book:

For two years I worked on Fungus, buried amongst muck, slime and words, so… I wanted to do something which was clean, pleasant, fresh and wordless and quick.

Briggs was a Highly Commended runner up for his third Kate Greenaway Medal; no one has won three.

In 1982 Channel 4 adapted The Snowman into an animated film which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. It has been shown every single year on British TV since.

Following the phenomenal success of The Snowman, Briggs started to write more adult stories starting with Gentlemen Jim in 1980, about toilet cleaner Jim Bloggs whose childlike dreams of changing his job to something more exciting start to get him in trouble with the law. Jim’s daydreaming gave Briggs the perfect opportunity to let his artwork flourish on the page and Gentlemen Jim remains one of the exemplary early graphic novels.

In 1982, Briggs gave us the absolutely heartbreaking When The Wind Blows in which he brings a nuclear war down on the now retired Jim and Hilda Bloggs, based very closely on Briggs’ own parents. At first their confusion is a source of light comedy but darker and more serious messages prevail as it becomes clear that the Government warnings are woefully inadequate and the elderly couple look after each other as they suffer from radiation sickness. The dense format of the page was inspired by a Swiss publisher’s miniature version of Father Christmas.

Again, When The Wind Blows was made into an animated film in 1986 with a title song by David Bowie.

Between 1982 and 2004 Briggs has produced many more books for adults and children including:

The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984) a scathing denunciation of the Falklands War,

The Bear (1994) about a polar bear who befriends a little girl, which was again made into a animated film by Channel 4 in 1998,

and Ethel and Ernest: A True Story (1998). After the sad demise of the Bloggs couple, Briggs writes openly and affectionately about his parents’ life and their 41 year marriage, from their courtship in the 1920s, through the Great Depression, World War II, the advent of television, the birth of their son and up until their deaths in the early 70s. It could arguably be called Briggs’ masterpiece.

Nick Hornby said in a New York Times review of the book:

Social historians have said much less at much greater length, and with much less warmth and affection.

Ethel and Ernest won the “Best Illustrated Book Of The Year” at the 1999 British Book Awards.

And yes, an animated film is in development.

Briggs is still writing and illustrating today. In 2008 he said he was working:

On a book about old age and death, which is what you tend to think about when you get to 70. I’ve finished the writing. Now I’ve just got about five years of illustrating to do. The donkey work!

So hopefully we’ll see at least one more masterful comic from him, maybe next year.

Photograph by Jonathan Brady from thetimes.co.uk.

Raymond Briggs is an artist who has never been afraid to deal with sadness and death in either his books for adults or children, and he balances these darker aspects with the kindness, sweetness and common decency of his characters.

Whether he is making children howl with laughter at Father Christmas’ bum crack or making adults tear up at the pointless suffering of a lovely old couple, Briggs’ work never fails to have a deep emotional impact that stays with us for the rest of our lives.

He has been an uncompromising, daring, unique and generous cartoonist throughout his entire career and his stories, whether in book form or as animated films, have become treasured favourites of every generation all over Britain and across the globe.

Raymond Briggs is truly one of the greatest cartoonists our country has ever produced and we are very, very lucky indeed to have him.

Adam Cadwell.

BEST BOOK: Nelson – Edited by Rob Davis and Woodrow Phoenix
Published by Blank Slate Books, November 2011.

BEST COMIC: Bad Machinery: The Case of The Fire Inside – John Allison
Published online at scarygoround.com, January to June 2012.

YOUNG PEOPLE’S COMIC AWARD: Hilda and the Midnight Giant – Luke Pearson
Published by NoBrow Press, November 2011.

EMERGING TALENT: Josceline Fenton

HALL OF FAME: Raymond Briggs

Congratulations to all our winners and our nominees, and a big thank you to the Committee, the Judges and to everyone who attended the ceremony. Also, huge thanks to our partners at the Thought Bubble Festival without whom none of this would happened and our sponsors at Awesome Merchandise.

For an in depth look at all of our nominees and winners please visit the 2012 Winners page.

There will be a career retrospective blog post about Raymond Briggs appearing here shortly as well as a short film about the very first BCAs by filmmaker Anne Holiday. The site will be updated over the next week and we’ll be open to suggestions for nominees for 2013 very soon.

It is with great pleasure that we announce the nominees for the very first British Comic Awards. Without further ado…

BEST BOOK

Don Quixote: Volume 1 – Rob Davis
Published by Self Made Hero, September 2011.

Goliath – Tom Gauld
Published by Drawn and Quarterly, February 2012.

Hilda and the Midnight Giant – Luke Pearson
Published by NoBrow Press, November 2011.

Nelson – Various
Published by Blank Slate Books, November 2011.

Science Tales – Darryl Cunningham
Published by Myriad Editions, April 2012.

BEST COMIC

Accidental Salad – Joe Decie
Published by Blank Slate Books (Chalk Marks), October 2011.

Bad Machinery – John Allison
Published online at http://scarygoround.com

Girl & Boy – Andrew Tunney
Self published, November 2011.

Hemlock – Josceline Fenton
Published online at http://hemlock.smackjeeves.com
Volume 3 self published, October 2011.

Tuk Tuk – Will Kirkby
Self published, September 2011.

EMERGING TALENT

Kristyna Baczynski – http://www.kristyna.co.uk
Josceline Fenton – http://www.mildtarantula.com
Will Kirkby – http://chamonkee.livejournal.com
Louis Roskosch – http://www.louisroskosch.com
Jack Teagle - http://jackteagle.co.uk

Congratulations to all those nominated!

The entrant to our final category, the Hall of Fame award, will be announced at the BCA ceremony on 17th November as part of the Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds.

After much reading, discovery and discussion we are very happy to announce our first shortlist of nominees for the Young People’s Comic Awards.

The nominees are (in alphabetical order by title):

Bad Machinery: The Case of The Fire Inside by John Allison
Published online at http://scarygoround.com, January 9th – June 28th 2012

Dinopopolous by Nick Edwards
Published by Blank Slate Publishing (Chalk Marks), October 2011

Gum Girl volume 1: Catastrophe Calling by Andi Watson
Published by Walker Books, March 2012

Hilda and the Midnight Giant by Luke Pearson
Published by Nobrow Press, November 2011

The Lost Boy by Kate Brown
Published in ‘The Phoenix’ by David Fickling Books, January 7th – 1st September 2012

Congratulations to all the creators and publishers of the nominated titles. We can’t wait to find out who the young people declare as the winner in November.

The award year for this year’s YPCA is 1st August 2011 to 31st July 2012. We realise that The Lost Boy concluded after this period. In selecting the nominees we, the Committee, have had to refine and define the rules of eligibility as we encountered different titles in different formats. In regards to serialised stories such as The Lost Boy we concluded that:

Serialisations can be nominated in the year the majority of the work was published in.

And also:

The Committee will not be able to shortlist the work as a collected edition if a serialisation was previously nominated.

The Committee discussed at some length the practicalities of nominating online work and work serialised across numerous issues of a weekly anthology title like The Phoenix for an award that will be judged by young people. Whilst it would be easier to send 5 books to each of the dozen participating schools our aim is to celebrate and promote amazing comics regardless of their format.

We’ll work closely with the authors and publishers of the nominated titles and the teachers to ensure that the young people can access and read online comics, or serialised comics presented across a number of issues or as a pdf file, in a way they can enjoy. When necessary we will provide schools with a Teachers Guide too.

We thought there is no guarantee there will be a print collection of The Lost Boy, so does it not deserve a nomination because it was serialised, even if it’s a fantastic story? If and when it is published as a book that very same story will still be considered a BCA Nominee (or possibly winner).

While we may not be able to give the school libraries a book to keep at the end of the process, the benefit will be that young people are discovering new comics and new ways of reading comics. Many of them may catch up with all the Bad Machinery stories online and discover other web comics through it. They may become fans of The Phoenix and discover other great stories in there. And more importantly they may learn that comics can be read anywhere, anyhow. That the world is full of comics in secret places. And they may figure out that if anyone can put a comic on the internet, then they can too.

Adam Cadwell.

See, we’d all implicitly agreed that none of the committee members or judges would have nominated work (it always looks a bit cheeky, to be honest) but we hadn’t ever written it down.

Correcting that was easy. No works created in whole or mainly by a member of the judging panel or committee will be eligible for a BCA nomination.

But what about anthologies?

As an editor of one myself (Paper Science) I’d assumed that it would be ‘my’ work, and would fall under the rule above. But other anthologies published in the past year feature very small stories by creators either on the committee or that we’re approaching to be judges. And when that might mean they’ve contributed 3 pages out of 150 or so, something didn’t seem quite right.

So we’ve settled on another one. No anthologies edited or curated by a member of the judging panel or committee will be eligible for a BCA nomination.

It seems the fairest way to halt any accusations of nepotism while also being open to the huge variety of anthologies produced by our tight-knit comics community here on Blighty.

Obviously we’ll see how that works out as time goes on; the ‘rules’ about nominations will have to evolve over time, as new ways of producing comics develop and surprise us.

We’ll be as open as we can be about that – without spoiling the nominations – right here.

Matthew Sheret.

I’ve worked with clients in the past whose logo requirements had been as vague as ‘make it all whooshy’ or as bizarre as ‘like the Nike logo, only for horses’. The requirements that we decided on as a committee were that ideally the logo would reflect the heritage of comics culture, communicate the idea of an award and be visually fresh and distinctive.

We had a few potential logos that we kicked about until I arrived at an idea. I’d been spending time looking at the 4CP site. If you haven’t seen it, go and have a look. The site has loads of high resolution scans of printed comics that reveal the 4 colour process in action. I don’t know about you but I find this endlessly fascinating.

While I was looking through the site, something occurred to me.

I’d known for a long time that the arrangement of the dots in the four colour process sometimes aligned to form ‘rosettes’.

I know it doesn’t sound like much of an insight, but it had me jumping about the room with joy: ROSETTES! Like for winning AWARDS!

I like simple ideas that neatly fit together.

We worked through a few variations of type and colour and arrived at the final logo;

So that’s where that came from. The design of the logo has a important part to play in the story of the physical awards themselves. That’s another part of the story for another day though.

Dan Berry