Flake by Matthew Dooley is the first graphic novel ever to win the award, which goes to a work “in the spirit” of the Jeeves and Wooster creator PG Wodehouse. Dooley, the 21st winner of the Wodehouse prize, said he was “surprised, overwhelmed and elated” to take this year’s award. Passages of time can be set against each other sequentially, visually intersecting to give us multiple perspectives on scenarios while his muted use of colour is an intrinsic part of the book’s atmosphere, heightening both mood and theme. This means more puns: Dooley is particularly fond of one of Howard’s bestsellers, the Lemony Licker. This sedentary lifestyle is about to be disrupted however when rogue ice cream vendor Tony Augustus re-enters his life.

But the inherent naffness of an ice-cream van, the way it’s painted, it’s the mix of the absurd and the mundane. This follows Howard, a man who loves his routine, in the battle to protect his ice cream van patch from his half brother Tony. It is set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Dobbiston, though Dooley admits that it shares much in common with Ormskirk, Lancashire, where he grew up.

A couple of clues lets us work out it’s the late ’90s or early 2000s, during the optimism of the Blair years, when the grim ’70s and ’80s were well behind the UK — it seems Dooley is asking, if life seemed a little bleak back then, imagine how Howard must be feeling now after a decade of David Cameron et al.

The ending is rather brisk compared to the rest of the book, and consequently feels slightly abrupt, but by that point it has managed to satisfyingly wrap up most of its storylines, and all while bucking what would’ve been the conventional outcome of Howard and Tony’s story. Dodajmy kameralny klimat małych miasteczek ze swoją nudą, ale i urokiem, stałymi bywalcami oraz lokalnymi legendami, a otrzymamy poważnego kandydata do powieści graficznej roku. AO: I really felt for you last year when the pandemic hit just before Flake was published and you missed all the customary book launches and events. I adore this graphic novel it is so perfectly balanced, the pallette the humour the interpersonal drama it's just lovely.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.