Kilkenny-based artist Stephen Morton (“Sea of Cortez”) was awarded Ireland’s first Graphic Short Story Prize today at the Dublin Comic Arts Festival. He received the prize for “Sunshine,” a comic chronicling the difficult journey home for a hungover man. The runner-up was “Echoes,” a comic by writer Dara T Higgins and artist Eoin Whelehan that explores a couple’s grief over a lost child.
The Prize itself was run by The Comics Lab and The Irish Times to reward excellent sequential storytelling. The Prize received almost 100 submissions, which were judged by award-winning authors Lisa McInerney (The Glorious Heresies) and Kevin Barry (City of Bohane), and cartoonist Dan Berry (“The Three Rooms in Valerie’s Head”).
The Dublin Comic Arts Festival is an ongoing series of quarterly comic-book events held by small presses. Today’s event took place at the Chocolate Factory in Dublin.
The Comics Lab was founded in 2015 as a monthly meet-up by cartoonists Debbie Jenkinson and Sarah Bowie. The group aims to promote and explore sequential storytelling to create a platform for Irish comics. The group organizes the Dublin Comic Arts Festival with artist Matthew Melis each quarter, bringing drawing activities, book swaps, live readings and guest speakers.
All ten of the shortlisted works have been collected and released in an anthology, “Slice,” at the Dublin Comic Arts Festival. You can read Morton’s “Sunshine” here, with the Higgins and Whelehan’s “Echoes” available to read here.
