Emily Haworth-Booth's comic Colonic has won top honors in the United Kingdom's Observer/Cape/Comica short story competition. The contest, which is co-sponsored by the Comica Festival, the publisher Jonathan Cape, and the newspaper The Observer, offers a £1,000 (about $1,600 U.S.) cash prize to the creator of the best four-page short story.
Haworth-Booth's comic is a slightly fictionalized account of her colonic irrigation, one of the many treatments she sought for chronic fatigue syndrome. As she told Rachel Cooke of The Guardian, "The experience wasn't quite as awful as I've made out, and I've edited, exaggerated and added to it, but I hope I've got to the emotional truth of the experience: how powerless you can feel during medical procedures and how surreal it is to be in such intimate contact with a complete stranger." Haworth-Booth was the runner-up in the 2008 competition, and after that she "knuckled down," in her own words. She is now developing her diary comics in to a graphic novel.
The runner-up in the competition is Michael Parkin's "Lines," a playful little comic with echoing shapes and panels. You can read both comics in their entirety below.
Colonic by Emily Haworth-Booth