The Tartan Bucket Prize Competition

The Dundee Comics Day has been running since 2007 and in 2008 became part of the Dundee Literary Festival at Dundee University. The fifth comics day is due to be held in October and the University has announced that this year the Comics Day, in partnership with DC Thomson, will be running a comics creation competition for the new Tartan Bucket Prize.

The competition is to create a new character and a short story in the form of a comic that will be published by DC Thomson either in print or on their website. The prize will be for a humorous story of no more than two pages designed to be read by a young audience and would be in keeping with the kinds of stories DC Thomson publishes in comics like The Beano and The Dandy.

The Tartan Bucket first prize will be £1,000 plus publication of the story and there will also be four runner-up prizes of £250 each. In addition the winners and runner-ups will be invited to attend the Comics Day and there will also be an exhibition of the artwork from the competition during the Literary Festival. The competition will be judged by a panel consisting of comic professionals and scholars including Comics Day organiser Dr Chris Murray of the university's School of Humanities.

The aim of the prize is to nurture comics talent in comics and as such anyone can enter the competition. The submission can be in any style, in black and white or colour, but must be original, unpublished and a complete story effectively ready to be printed. The deadline for completed submissions is 1st July 2011 and the Dundee Literary Festival will take place from 27 to 30 October 2011.

There are more details including the full rules and guidelines of the Tartan Bucket competition on the University of Dundee website.

There are more details of the Dundee Literary Festival at their website.

The downthetubes reviews of the Dundee Comics Day are here - 2008 review, 2009 review and 2010 review.