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Cartoon Museum reveals this year’s The Alison Brown Young Comics Maestro Award winner

By John Freeman on 18 October 2026 • ( 0 )

The team at London’s Cartoon Museum have revealed the overall winner of The Alison Brown Young Comics Maestro Award for 2026, 12 year-old comic artist Esther Harrison.

*Alison Brown. Image: The Cartoon Museum*

The Comics Maestro Award celebrates Cartoon Museum staff member Alison Brown, who passed away from Covid in 2021 at the age of just 39. Entrants submitted an original comic strip of up to three pages long (or a three-page section of a story). Each of the winners receives prize money and a certificate, and, in previous years, are then collected into a digital e-comic. (You can view the winners of last year’s competition here).

Open to anyone aged 18 or under, Museum staffers have selected one overall winner and two runners-up after sifting through plenty of entries to this year’s challenge.

This year’s Overall Winner is 12 year-old Esther Harrison with “Spirits of Yonder Forest”, the museum’s Learning Officer & Comic Art Curator, Steve Marchant describing her entry as “funny, nicely drawn, an amazing meta-panel on page two, and the scariest forest I’ve ever seen.”

Mark Stafford, illustrator, graphic novelist, and cartoonist in residence at Cartoon Museum was among the judges who selected the winners, describing the task as “time well spent, one of the best years so far.

“The number of incomprehensible/unreadable entries seem to be shrinking, everybody’s using the panel space more creatively and there was a lot of visual ambition,” he observes. “Even the seven to nine year olds, whose work was frankly baffling, tended to be baffling in a delightful way.”

“The kids are alright.”*

Head downthetubes for…

• The Cartoon Museum is online at cartoonmuseum.org and at 63 Wells St, London, W1A 3AE

• Follow Mark Stafford on BlueSky| Etsy | Facebook | Instagram

• * “The Kids are Alright” | The Who Official Page

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.