Congratulations To Lesley Imgart & Elly Bazigos, Winner & Runner-up In The 2024 Observer/Faber Graphic Short Story Prize

The latest Observer/Faber graphic short story prize was announced – with Witch Way? by Lesley Imgart taking this years award.

The Observer/Faver/Comica prize has been running going for many years now, run by The Observer newspaper, Faber books, and Comica, a competition where artists send in their four-page entries and hope to get the nod, with the winner often going on to get published. Prizes are publication in The Observer in print and online and £1,000 for the winner, £250 and online publication for the runner-up, but it’s really the subsequent publicity and the doors it opens at Faber and other publishers that are really the big prize for winners and runners-up.

And it’s certainly got an impressive list of winners and runners-up, including Isabel Greenberg, whose new book, Young Hag, came out in November; Joff Winterhart, whose Days of the Bagnold Summer started off here as a winning graphic short in 2009, before eventually finding success as a graphic novel and then movie. Then there are the successes of recent years – Paul Rainey, Anna Readman, Rebecca Jones, Ed Firth, Astrid Goldsmith – so much talent, all still there to view on The Guardian site.

This year, the judging panel consisted of Rachel Cooke for The Observer; Angus Cargill, publishing director at Faber; Paul Gravett, director of Comica; and Tom Oldham of Gosh! comic shop in London; plus two guest judges for this year, author-artists Luke Healy and Posy Simmonds.

The winner for 2024 was Lesley Imgart’s Witch Way? with Elly Bazigos’s LANSA Flight 508 as runner-up.

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You can read both stories in full at The Observer website – Imgart’s Witch Way? here, Bazigos’s LANSA Flight 508 here. And Imgart is interviewed about the win here.

In Rachel Cooke’s Observer piece, she talks of Imgart’s strip quickly becoming a favourite and frontrunner of the shortlist of six. She also tells us of the obvious influence of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper on some younger entrants – not a bad thing particularly, but it does sound, perhaps, as though the influences were sometimes way too obvious. Her second comment is that, annoyingly, worryingly, frustratingly for an award focused on creativity and the comic medium, there was, as she puts it, ‘possible (even probable) deployment of AI by some artists. We frowned on this, and will be vigilant about its use in future years.’Again, anyone using AI to create art is doing it wrong. AI art is theft of existing artists work and should never be tolerated.

Back to the winner and runner-up – both are great little strips, packed with the sort of talent you want to see from awards such as this. They’re also wonderfully different. Imgart’s Witch Way? is described by her in the interview as ‘a parody of the self-indulgent comics of my 20s, all those coming-of-age struggles,’ follows a young witch in something that’s somewhat autobiographical, in that Imgart’s post-student days, like so many of us, mirror the world of this witch, the indecision with what to do with life post-study.

There’s a lightness of line and style all the way through it, as we follow the witch through school and into magical university to do Contemporary Magic Practice BA (Hons). As you can see from the little bit I’ll show you here, it’s got a ridiculous bent, but there’s also a melancholy beneath the laughs, perfectly capturing something of that young life drifting. It’s a very fine intro to Imgart’s work, which hopefully we’ll be seeing plenty more of.

Elly Bazigos’s second-placed entry, LANSA Flight 508, is completely different. A lush, colourful, detailed bit of comic work, inspired by the plane crash of 1971, where only one passenger made it out alive, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke surviving for 11 days in the Peruvian jungle before her rescue.

There’s a gorgeous look to it, very reminiscent to the watercolour wash effects you’ll see in Dan Berry‘s great works. The colours pop, there are so many details hidden amongst the jungle scenery to pick out, all within pages packed with art, all the better to get over the claustrophobic feel of the jungle and the desperation and grief felt by this one young woman.

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Congratulations to both Imgart and Bazigos for their win/second place. A good year for the Observer/Faber/Comica prize.