Victoria Carfantan, director of Champagne Bollinger - UK, says: ‘We are very proud of our long-standing relationship supporting the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. It is such an important award celebrating some of the most talented names in the genre and I am delighted to extend my congratulations to Matthew Dooley and his novel, Flake, as this year’s winner.’ Despite his protests, Dooley, who fits his drawing around working in the House of Commons in the education department, does share a sensibility with Ware, Bennett and also Tom Gauld. “My partner said she struggles to tell the difference in my work between something that is funny and something that is sad,” says Dooley. “And that’s true; there are lots of bits that could be taken as either. But no, it is ultimately meant to be funny … I hope.” There’s something of the psychogeographical to the opening of Matthew Dooley’s Flake. Dooley, of course, is a Jonathan Cape/Observer/Comica short story competition winner and a prolific fixture on the UK small press scene in recent years. As Dooley’s debut graphic novel opens we silently view the deserted environs of a British seaside resort, its once proud glories lost to time, and its anachronistic attempts to cling on to relevance seeming pitiful and pointless. It’s a fitting opening to a tale of ice cream man Howard “Captain Cone” Grayling whose life has similarly stagnated, bound by family tradition to a vocation with a dying business model in an overcast Northern town, and no prospects beyond a slow and steady decline. AO: How much of a game-changer for you was winning the 2016 Cape/Observer/Comica Short Story Prize for ‘Colin Turnbull: A Tall Story’ (above)? Set in the fictional small seaside town of Dobbiston, Flake follows the life of ice-cream man Howard, who realises that the downturn in his business is a consequence of his half-brothers’s efforts to build his own ice-cream empire across the north-west.

Matthew Dooley at his London home: ‘I like people or characters who are obsessed by something.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The ObserverThis is not to say the narrative is without sadness: it’s there both in the physical fabric of the rundown town (graffiti, stained walls, broken signs), and the touches of personal unhappiness: Howard’s memories of his father’s brutishness, and a melancholy visit to his mother in her retirement home. But the emotion remains very understated, very British. And just as the greys of the unlovely town are leavened and uplifted by the dreamy pastels of the ice cream vans, so too is the emotion leavened with humour. The trip to the retirement home, for example, is also gently hilarious – as Howard hands out his lollies to the old folks, one elderly lady asks querulously, ‘Do you have one that’s a little warmer?’ For longer-term fans of his work there are a couple of in-jokes that will delight with their implication that Flake takes place in a wider shared “Dooleyverse”. Ultimately though, Flake is proof positive that Matthew Dooley’s comics are the perfect blend of absurdism and humanity. A triumphant debut for one of UK comics’ most underappreciated rising stars. Matthew Dooley has won the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with his graphic novel Flake (Jonathan Cape).

All of which is but the tip of the iceberg which finds our protagonist, at the beginning, standing silently and solitarily on top of his own ice cream van, buffeted by the waves and submerged in the sea.

Matthew Dooley

AO: I first discovered your work in anthologies like Off Life and the much missed Dirty Rotten Comics. How vital were group efforts like that in not just raising your profile and building an audience but in forging links with the wider comics community? In Flake, Dooley’s ability to place the abruptly incongruous within the banal and the unremarkable proves once again to be the greatest strength of his comedic approach. He takes a traditional narrative structure as a starting point and then peppers it with anecdotal sidesteps about the residents and history of Howard’s home town Dobbiston that allow him to exercise the more extravagant parts of his imagination.

Wuster, Tracy, “Scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures”: Some Thoughts on “Mere” Humor, Entertainment, and Pleasure, Studies in American Humor, 4.2, 2018, pp. 160-170.Thematically, it gels together well too: Howard and Tony’s rivalry is fueled in no small part by the fact Tony only exists because Howard’s father was bored by his life. The book seems to be telling us, when you live in a town where there’s barely anything to do, it can feel like you have nothing to lose, and be easy to overlook who you have in your life. The shadow of Howard’s dad, and everything wrong he represented with working class fathers of that era, looms large in the protagonist’s life. The idea of ice-cream turf wars being led by some sort of Mr Whippy Don is absolutely absurd and yet I was enraptured! Howard meandering his way through life, happy to do his crosswords, run his van on his patch and go home to his wife every day built up this really gentle, relatable character who you couldn't help but root for as his little van struggled to compete as the turf wars heated up. The supporting characters were just lovely, so humourous but with a real bond across them, and I thought this book brought Lancashire to life in such a wonderfully vivid way. Matthew Dooley's debut graphic novel Flake is a joy... If it was a film, you could see Bill Forsyth directing it. If it was on TV, you'd file it next to your Detectorists box set. But as it's a graphic novel, think of Joff Winterhart with a cone and a squirt of strawberry sauce. -- Teddy Jamieson * Herald Scotland * AO: Despite all its more eccentric trappings there’s a very human story at the heart of Flake. Do you think that in its own strange way that juxtaposition of the absurd and the pedestrian in your work can draw out the inherent humanity of your stories all the more for its contrast? With his debut, Dooley, who also works in the House of Commons in its education department, beat shortlisted novels including Jenny Offill’s Weather and Oisin Fagan’s Nobber. Having won the Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story prize in 2016 for a comic about a man who longs to win Lancashire’s Tallest Milkman competition, Dooley has been described by the Observer as a meld of Alan Bennett and graphic novelist Chris Ware.