Flake

Product Information

In the midst of some challenging reading ranging from the atrocities of war to abusive relationships and mental disintegration comes this, quite charming, quintessentially English and humorous graphic novel from Matthew Dooley. The highlight of his day is doing the crosswords for a couple of hours before work begins or chatting with local museum worker Jasper, a failed TV quiz show contestant and ardent campaigner to have the local downgraded hill reclassified as a mountain.

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. It’s also a very delicately realised tale about friendship, support and the people we surround ourselves with.

Set in the small seaside town of Dobbiston, Howard sells ice creams from his van, just like his father before him. 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. Jasper’s overriding priorities, however, are his pet peeves, each as irrelevant to any sane human being as they are uncompromisingly and passionately pursued.

My particular circumstances have meant I was very lucky so I am loathe to feel sorry for myself about not having a launch party.I really enjoyed the premise of an underdog fighting to make ends meet and preserve his dad's legacy, as well as how everyone in the community rallied together to help one other achieve their dreams. That, coupled with the faded coloring, makes a moment when Howard confronts Tony (and his cronies) in the pub, all the more amusing: the book’s signature color, pink, turns incredibly vivid, and the panels resemble the close-ups from a Leone Western — it’s like a scene from a lurid ’70s crime thriller. 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. There are some clear parallels between the two works: both Colin and Howard are doing jobs that their fathers did before them (and perhaps even their grandfathers before that). David Campbell, judge and publisher of Everyman’s Library, comments: ‘This year’s shortlist was especially strong with a number of very credible potential winners.

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. It is, indeed, a very funny book, but it’s also a somber reflection on the mundanity of working class life in the north of England. DOOLEY: I read comics as a kid – stuff like Asterix, 2000 AD, Tintin, Sonic the Comic– as well as drawing constantly. The absurdist slice-of-life humour of those collections where the incongruous is embedded into the everyday gives them a very distinctive flavour.

Raymond Briggs and Alan Bennett are both reflected in the cast, their environment and their quotidian observations about their parochial environment: pride in local history, the surprising complexities buried within family history, and the absurdities which can come to dominate any life; the traps therein. Dooley has always been a subtle visual storyteller, the inherent sophistication in his use of the form easier to miss for his prioritisation of craft over ostentation.

The whole premise of an ice cream man finding himself confronted by another one, who essentially behaves like a racketeer, seems rooted in the desire to have something actually interesting happen in a small northern town. It’s an affectionate and very funny portrait of Howard, an ice cream man who rather half-heartedly mans the same patch as his father before him, as he struggles with his domineering half-brother, Tony, a rival seller. 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. For example, he spent six months in a French prison for trying to convert continental road signs from metric to imperial then painting his results on their signposts. We’re also both sharing resources and more good places for donations from our individual accounts but we wanted to let y’all know that we’re standing with you, as individuals AND as a show.The colors are desaturated, veering towards gray tones, and the large amount of panels greatly reduces the pacing, building the sense of stillness (and perhaps loneliness) one may experience up north.