Results of First Manisa International Cartoon Contest-Turkey 2009
MESIR CARTOON CONTEST

The final result:
1st Prize : Rumen Dragostinov-Bulgaria,
3rd Prize : Jaksa Vlahovic- Serbia,
2nd Prize is cancelled by the jury.
Jury Members:
 Tonguc Yasar-Turkey, Natasa S. Kostovska-Macedonia, Grzegorz Szumowski-Poland, Javad Alizadeh-Iran, Eray Ozbek-Turkey, Cem Koc-Turkey.

The declaration and final decision of the jury:

Dear Cartoonists,
Unfortunately our short list was not formed of completely fresh works.
During the selection, some cartoons with excellent graphics did not get points from the majority of the jury members, because of their very abstract ideas.
Some works with good contents were eliminated because of their insufficient techniques.
In the end, some works even with their successful graphics and ideas, couldn't get any award, because of their pessimistic messages.

The 13th paragraph of the rules of the contest was as below:
"Jury will meet on February 9th, 2009 and on the same day; the winner cartoons will be declared and will be published on the Internet. The results will become definite on the 20th of February 2008. Other objections to decisions of the jury will not be accepted."
The aim of this article is to state that the jury can cancel a prize if there are serious denunciations of similarities with some previous works.
Because of this article, we waited until today to answer the discussions about the results of our contest. This decision is definite.
After the first announcement of the results, we have received some warnings by the internet with the examples. We thank all the people who have helped us.
Our members have followed the process, have checked the examples and after the correspondences, they come to this decision:
"1- For the cartoon which was selected the third, although the elements of the cartoon are similar to another cartoon, the events and the messages are clearly different. In the other cartoon, a malicious child is playing happily, but in our candidate cartoon the child's occupation is in vain.
2- Whereas, the cartoon which was selected the second, is seriously similar to the other example.The sign @ has been transformed by both of the artists into a wall which is the only and the common humor material of the two cartoons. (Even though in the wall the actions of each cartoon are different.)
Because of this, our jury decided to cancel the second prize. This cancellation is neither an accusation of plagiarism nor should be perceived as a punishment.
We understood later that the idea of this cartoon was not a new invention; we must show respect to the spirit of the contests and to the rights of priority. This decision is the result of unwanted chancy similarity in cartoons.
We are sure and that Mr. Sergey Sichenko had no bad intentions and he will understand this situation. We thank him for taking part in our contest."

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