It was seventh time lucky for Rebecca Jones in this year’s Observer/Faber award for emerging cartoonists with her story of three girls camping out in a suburban garden
- Read winner Rebecca Jones’s Midnight Feast here
- Read runner-up Michael Lightfoot’s Autumn 2014 here
- Read runner-up Ed Firth’s The Lift here
When Rebecca Jones sent off her entry for this year’s Observer/Faber graphic short story prize, it was more in hope than in expectation: this was her seventh attempt at a win. But context is often all, and in a year when many of the almost 200 entries were distinctly downbeat and anxious – a delayed effect, perhaps, of the pandemic lockdown – her story worked like a charm on the judges. Midnight Feast has a sweetness that appealed to all of us. If this tale of three girls who camp out for the night in a suburban garden is at moments melancholic, it’s also quietly funny. We liked her characters’ expressive faces, and her sure way with bathos; it also chimed with experiences we all remembered having ourselves.
“I’m so thrilled to win,” she says, still sounding a bit amazed. “It’s honestly a dream come true. To have such a platform, to be published in a national newspaper. It’s the biggest break I could have. I was in a state of shock when I got the call. When I first started getting into comics at university, Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine [one of the judges for this year’s prize] was about the third book I read, so to know that he liked my story really means something.” It was, she tells me, agony keeping her victory a secret when she attended the Thought Bubble festival in Yorkshire last week. But how sweet to know that the news would soon be out. Her hope now is that her win will help her eventually to find a home for Boomerang, the semi-autobiographical graphic novel she has been publishing in instalments for several years.
