In October of last year, the Belize Tourism Board, along with the Belize Diaspora Network, and a US Comic Book company, Concrete Park, organized a comic book workshop for Belizean artists.
They also set up a comic book competition in which high school artists had 2 months to prepare their comic illustrations which had to incorporate some element of Belizean culture.
They recently chose the 3 winning pieces, and in a ceremony today at the House of Culture, those winners were awarded. 7News attended, and spoke to several of the winners.
Andrea Polanco, Media & PR Manager, BTB
"What the students had to is that they had to do comic that is representative of some aspect of Belize or Belizean culture and so in the comic creations that you will see on the front some of them have depictions of the archaeological sites across Belize and you will see of course the flag. Some of the artwork that they have done is very representative of our culture."
Tiana Twist, 1st Place, Comic Competition
"We start to use all the ethnic groups in Belize and combine them and creating Lady Culturama and she is the preserver of Belize's culture. For example, say there is a culture day and one of the cultural elements are missing, Lady Culturama she will fly there and she will replace that element and make it even more elaborate and making the culture come alive and make the people be happy and grateful."
Peter Kong, 2nd Place
"I just wanted to make a funny story and I just wanted to make people laugh. From a very young age I started to draw comic book, so I am very familiar with comic book and storytelling. I just wanted to present my story to my audience. It is a story about a Mayan priest - the last Mayan priest. The story talks about the last Mayan priest in Belize and there is a treasure hunter who wants to find the Mayan treasure, that's why he came to Belize. The treasure left a grenade and the last Mayan priest thought it was a fruit and he ate it and boom - that's the day of December 21."
First place winner, Tiana Twist, was awarded with a Trip to Washington DC, which was organized by the Belize Diaspora Network.
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