This contest is closed, and the results were declared at the David Sassoon Library Garden on the 10th February, 2007. You can view the winning entries here, and the complete scoresheets here.

This contest melds the art of flash fiction with a visual treatment. It is more than a comic strip or a cartoon, but shorter than your conventional graphic fiction story. The challenge is to tell a story in words and pictures, one that has a beginning, middle and end, a conflict and resolution, a credible protagonist.. but do so in just one page.

Theme

Hero

How to enter

[Entries to this contest are now closed. We hope to see you next year.]

Important note on submissions (added on 29th January, 2007): Please do not put any personally identifying information in the body of your entry. By this we mean no byline, signature, credit line, copyright notice or symbol. If you have filled out the fields for name, email address and phone number, never fear, your entry is linked to that data by the system. The body of your entry is all our jury will see, and all that they want to see. Entries that ignore this will be seen to be trying to influence the jury, and will be disqualified.

Deadline

Midnight (Indian Standard Time), 4th February, 2007.

Rules and Conditions

The contest is open to anyone, anywhere, with the exception of the jury.

Entries must be hosted on your own server, or on a free webspace that permits hotlinking. (eg: Flickr.com, Photobucket.com)

Entries must be an image file in jpeg format, of a size not exceeding a width of 800 pixels and a height of 600 pixels.

How you use those 480000 pixels is up to you. You figure out how you can tell your story lucidly and creatively: single illustration or broken up into multiple panels; colour or black & white or duotone; speech bubbles, captions, commentary, sound effects or no text at all; photographs, original computer-aided illustrations, line drawings, cartoons or scanned images.

Entries must be your own, original work, and previously unpublished anywhere, in print or online. (We interpret “published” to mean that there was some form of editorial or jury selection and/or payment involved. So work that appeared on a personal blog or unmoderated forum is okay, but something that won you a prize somewhere is not. Something that may have been selected to be printed in a newspaper is published, whether you got paid for it or not.)

Please ensure that you own the rights to the images you use, or that they are in the public domain, or that your use falls within accepted Fair Use practice. You may want to look at Wikipedia’s excellent list of Public Domain Image Rescources

Mutliple entries are permitted.

Collaborations are permitted. Please be sure to mention the names of all collaborators in the web form. However, please enter only one email address in the submissin form. All communication will be to that email address. If a collaboration wins a prize, it is up to the team to decide how to divide the winnings amongst them.

There is no entry fee.

Stories submitted remain the intellectual property of the creators, but by submitting an entry, you give the Organisers and Sponsors permission to use your entry, with no payment to you, in the Festival Blog, and as part of Press Releases (where they may be reproduced by media organisations), and in a possible special booklet featuring the best of the Festival.

The decisions of the jury are final and binding, and no correspondence will be entertained regarding the jury’s decisions

Jury

Caferati’s editors will screen the initial entries to keep the long list to a reasonable number. In the second round of judging, they will be joined by:

Sarnath Banerjee wrote and illustrated the acclaimed graphic novel Corridor. He has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships and residencies. He has illustrated and written comic strips, columns and even film reviews in comic form, has had formal exhibitions of his art around the world, has made films from shorts and animation projects to full length features. He has just launched his new book, Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (Penuin). More about Sarnath here.

Samit Basu is in the middle of writing his third novel, currently called The Unwaba Revelations. He also writes comics, and has worked as a journalist and columnist. He has spent the last week playing video games, and is feeling very guilty. A writer’s life is hard.

Devangshu Datta’s lifelong fondness for graphic stories started with him falling in love with the Goolie Goolie Witch who lived in the Misty Mountains of Denkali. When he was told to read the Gita, he chanted Green Lantern’s Mantra instead. As a result, he is educationally challenged and incapable of understanding anything more complicated than a thought bubble. And, he can’t draw for toffee either. His only attempt at a graphic novel was an involuntarily cubist, pornographic epic called “It Thing” set in Castle Grayskull. So why is he a judge at this contest? No one aside from the Masters of Xamballa know.

Manjula Padmanabhan (b. 1953), is a writer and artist. Her books include Hot Death, Cold Soup (Kali for Women, 1996), Getting There (Picador UK, 1999) and Kleptomania (Penguin India, 2004). Her fifth play, Harvest (Kali for Women, 1998; three separate international anthologies), won the 1997 Onassis Award for Theatre. Her comic strips appeared weekly in the Sunday Observer (Bombay, 1982-86) and daily in the Pioneer (New Delhi, 1991-97). Manjula has illustrated twenty-four books for children including her own two novels for children, Mouse Attack and Mouse Invaders (Macmillan Children’s Books, UK, 2003, 2004).

Prizes

Prizes worth approximately Rs 3000, Rs 2000, and Rs 1000 to be won, sponsored by [to be announced].

Winners will be announced on the evening of 10th February, 2007, at the David Sasson Library Garden. Exact time will be confirmed.

Winning entries will be featured on the Festival Blog.

Updates

All updates via the Caferati Contests newsgroup. Please make sure you’re subscribed.