We’re a little late reporting on this (post-ARC Festival updating hangover) but congratulations to our 2021 Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch‘ artist Mereida Fajardo for her Harvey Award nomination for The Keluarga Cable Ship Company. The long, scrolling digital comic (also nominated for a Broken Frontier Award for 2025) is nominated for Digital Book of the Year.
We have long been telling you whatr an astonishing talent Merida is. Her comics constantly interrogate the possibilities of the form and we’ve described her experimental work at BF in the past as “genuinely convention-defying practice.” You can find all articles involving, including reviews and interviews, tagged in one place here on BF.
The Keluarga Cable Ship Company combines three interconnected narratives and is described in the following terms:
More than 99 percent of intercontinental telecommunications, including internet traffic, is carried by fibre-optic cables running along the bed of the world’s seas. Indeed, this digital comic is likely coming to you through the oceans. This vast and delicate network, the bedrock of modern life and its burgeoning technologies, is maintained by a small fleet of repair ships that keeps the world online.
Past and present collide when a software engineer arrives on one such ship, where his father works. Old wounds are torn open – can this connection be repaired?
We called it “a work of experimental genius” when we reviewed it here at BF last year. You can also read an exclusive creator commentary by Mereida on the comic here. You can buy a copy of The Keluarga Cable Ship Company (alongside more Fajardo comics magic in print) here on her site/store. And you should because it’s excellent. Congrats again, Mereida!
You can read all the Harvey Award nominations here.
Article by Andy Oliver
