Flake

"Flake is… I mean, it’s beautiful, but it’s also a really great narrative story about warring ice cream vans. So it’s already funny. I used to work with this theatre director called Ken Campbell, and he used to say that the secret of comedy is silly-plus-sensible equals ‘funny’, while silly-plus-silly equals ‘stupid’. Flake , for me, is the ultimate silly-plus-sensible equals ‘funny’. Because it’s ice cream trucks warring about whose space is whose, who should be selling ice cream on what land, that kind of stuff. Territory war, essentially. There’s so much heart in it. You really feel for the main character, Howard. And the way that Dooley manages to get across feeling, with those little expressions on their faces, it’s incredible. Also, in most of the pictures, there’s an extra joke. Right. But there’s also… beautiful heart. Something that can be funny and have heart at the same time is really very powerful, I think. Speaking to what I said earlier, this is definitely escapism. You’re in the world of ice cream trucks. Unless you’re an ice cream van driver—not a job I’ve done—you’re really whisked into this other world. You do think, gosh, maybe it is like this in ice cream van land. Maybe they do have territory wars. In fact, there were the 1980s ice cream wars in Glasgow, weren’t there? Turf wars over ice cream vans, although Flake is much more innocent than that story— which involved drug distribution and murder . So, there’s a truth in there. I suppose the job of a full text, rather than a graphic novel, is to paint those pictures in your mind. All of the books on the shortlist are ones that created a picture; thinking visually, you create the world, and then you zoom in on the world. I think in the best novels, you can see everything as it is, and then it hones in. So I could imagine some people thinking, ‘that’s not fair,’ when it comes to graphic novels. ‘They’ve done all the work with pictures.’ To that, I would say: ‘Well, yeah. They’ve done the work with pictures, but it’s still a lot of work.’"