A Book Report from Thought Bubble 2023

This past November I managed for the third time to venture out to that most United of Kingdoms, the land of exports such as “tea (derogatory)” and “Bleeding Cool,” for Harrogate’s Thought Bubble Comic Convention. As an attempt to make the four kilograms of excess luggage and related back strain worth it, and to prove to my accountant that I am not in fact lying about the dozens of books I brought back being 'work expenses,' I thought that I would do well to spotlight some releases on offer at the show. It was a particularly bountiful year, a testament to both the curation of the festival and the ever-escalating momentum of both the UK scene and ‘global comics’ (at least as global as they can be labeled within English-language circulation), so this is, as ever, hardly a comprehensive panorama.

What was perhaps the most impressive work offered at the 2023 convention is also among the most disturbing, or at least the most overtly assaultive. I would like to say that the self-published collected edition of Erika Price’s Disorder, originally released in three perfect-bound volumes between 2019 and 2023, now exists in the all-in-one format that it deserves, but the truth is that this is a book deserving of far wider distribution, and a brighter spotlight.

Narration and internal monologue are perhaps the main motivator of Price's craft; her work revels in verbal description, intent as it is on articulating the exact point where pain is profound enough for words to fail. The 15 pieces that comprise Disorder are indeed 'pieces' more than they are 'stories'; they come across as emphatic monologues, vignettes of tone poetry that eschew any one reading, any one goal or target.

Price's artwork bears a jaggedness to it that feels, for lack of a better term, counterintuitive; there is a forcefulness in its self-expression that goes beyond the messaging, a struggle that begins within the artist. It is for this exact reason that Price's work feels so outré, so devoid of artistic lineage; sure, I could invoke the moody grime of a Morgan Vogel, or compare the design and physicality of Price's 'demonic doctor' to Stray Toasters-era Bill Sienkiewicz, but this feels futile. Price's work is a testament to the reality of artistic practice: it is not the result of genetics, but of alchemy.

Within Price’s work, the romance of Matthew 26:41’s weak flesh housing the willing spirit is limited; no matter the willingness, the pain of the flesh is nonetheless unbearable, explosive. This contrast is not presented as the ultimate triumph of the latter over the former, but rather as coexistence, and a constant struggle at that.

It is in this way that a source of the book's core pain, and a contextualizing factor therefor, is made clear as the collection progresses. In the third volume in particular, Price puts a greater focus on the ongoing campaign against the humanity of trans people rampant in her native United Kingdom (though certainly reaching outside of Britain); the pain in her work, she thus stresses, is no abstract, no hypothetical, and it is likewise not infernal in the otherworldly sense. It is alarmingly, disarmingly real, and it is done by people, to people. This is not a battle of ideas; this is a campaign as material as any.

The final chapter of Disorder is a crash, almost; a thin sound of silence compared to those that came before. Over eight splash pages, a huddled, seemingly infinite mass of only-barely-human forms appears to lose—or, perhaps more aptly, be deprived of—what is left of their humanity, stretching into a pained incoherence. It is an arresting, overwhelming image of suffering, and a fitting finish for a viscerally confrontational book. Is this pain incoherent, Price asks, or were you never willing to engage in the first place?

Thought Bubble also saw the print appearance of the latest outing by British cartoonist Peony Gent, by now a well-established practitioner of comics-as-poetry. Originally published digitally in ShortBox's 2022 digital comics fair, in a plum: a walk through thought benefits from a printed, two-page-at-a-time display, as Gent operates a spatial dichotomy between the left- and right-hand pages: the left-hand side is reserved for the writings of others (poetry, quotes on poetry, low-res Ben-Day blotched screenshots from films or interviews, evaluation guidelines), while the right-hand side presents her own 'contributions,' her own fragments of thought.

It's a cluttered back-and-forth between old and new, all of it by design; "the past is not just a platform on which the present sits," Gent writes, "the boundaries are much more porous." in a plum is a fundamentally discursive work, and less essayistic than rhizomatic at that; it is propelled less by a core argument and more by its underlying components. Gent makes this clear by employing a handy visual infrastructure, designing the panels crowding her left-hand pages to look like online browser windows. While she is certainly not the first to employ this choice of design, it's a particularly fitting one here, demonstrating both a connectivity and simultaneity that readily feed into her core theme of exegesis.

Gent's own artwork is representational in a simplified manner, with an almost Warren Craghead type of geometry and often childlike properties (note the way she draws hands, making a point of drawing the fingers in that repeated swooping up-then-down motion, ignoring function and component for a simplified likeness); her warm colors don't stay exclusively within the lines. It's a free-roaming feeling, reflected in the writing as well: throughout it all, the overwhelming sense is a preoccupation with communication, in art and in life, as something that comes alive specifically in its impermanence and fluidity.

If in a plum is indeed a walk through thought, it is a more a dérive than a journey with a destination in mind; it satisfies precisely because it resists the compulsion to make any grand romantic statements on art and the artist. Gent is visibly enamored of the very idea of poetry—and art by extension—but her work demonstrates an even greater enthusiasm for zooming out to show her own exchange with peers and predecessors. It is this humility that I find appealing; in placing herself quite literally alongside those that came before her, the cartoonist implicitly recognizes the inverse, which is to say that she too will be succeeded. You can try all you like to have the last word, but some words just don't exist yet to be said.

Over on the American side, cartoonist Tyler Landry has had a fairly prolific year. After the release of Old Caves from Uncivilized comes By the Lingering Light of a Slowly Dying Sun from the smaller Strangers Publishing. By the Lingering Light follows the narrative thread of prolonged life, emphasizing the slow-encroaching realization of the inevitable and quite absolute loss of all direct connections to your environment.

Where many such narratives elect to end on that moment of anagnorisis—typically cast in the tragic light of the curse of impermanence, or of profound, incorrigible loneliness—Landry elects to use this moment as a starting point. He constructs his narrative around Martin, a man 'resurrected' 200 years in the future after participating in a suspended-animation experiment meant to improve longevity toward that utopian eternal life, and the bulk of the story focuses on Martin's dinner with (and de facto introduction to) his last remaining relatives.

Landry's cartooning is, as is usually the case, beautiful. Old Caves sported an all-or-nothing approach to its markmaking and chiaroscuro, a Breccia-like intensity of smothering black-spotting that made any blankness on the page feel almost like a disruption; here he demonstrates a gentler approach, making great use of halftones as a textural enrichment. He likewise has a striking aptitude for forming a tangible sense of spatiality, even with sparing outlines and contours; early on in the story Landry draws his protagonist descending a staircase, but instead of rendering each step he leaves the entire thing blank as a slip 'n slide, allowing just the shadow dropped from the railing to bestow the requisite weight. Geometry is articulated not in isolation, but through context.

Where Landry struggles, somewhat, is in the expression of difference or disparity. The work progresses in a manner akin to a one-act play, with largely minimal tension (and accordantly low expectations for resolution). Martin relatives serve mostly to catch him up after his prolonged absence: here's what's different, here's what's still more or less the same. This is presented mostly by way of explication, and is accepted without much friction. When Martin experiences the world for himself, it is presented as a silent experience: he walks around, he sees the sights. We are left on an ambivalent but ultimately hopeful note, with Martin not quite alone, not quite alien - he has some semblance of family, some circle to get to know. But we are also left feeling like something is missing: we are told that this world is better than the one Martin left "behind," but we cannot tell for ourselves, one way or the other.

Zach Clemente’s Bulgilhan Press, meanwhile, brings forth its latest offering (the publisher’s fifth in total), Far Distant by A Liang Chan, whose previous efforts included Interim for ShortBox and short pieces self-published through ShortBox’s digital fairs in 2021 and 2022. Chan excels in vague liminality, a sense of narrative that lies at the threshold between 'speculative fiction' and its more mythical, primordial roots, and this effort—their longest yet, as far as I'm aware—is a strong development.

It’s a humbly ethereal affair, fitting into the lineage of Le Guin and Jeff VanderMeer, a milieu that underscores the open-endedness and vastness of the unknown. Here Chan focuses on a researcher in a remote outpost who finds themself transfixed by strange readings in their machinery; these readings are not, it appears, the focus of the researcher's work (indeed, it appears that their work above all else is to simply be present), but they bring with them strange dreams or visions. In the absence of much else in the way of excitement—in the way of actual, experiential life—the researcher sinks deeper into these visions, until they are completely consumed.

Part of the great impact of Chan's story stems from the overall texture, or rather anti-texture, of the thing: Chan's linework is a hazy graphite, swaddled in soft, desaturated colors with an almost Riso-like grainy feel to it; the dream sequences (or contact sequences, one might be compelled to call them) are rendered just a bit too dark, by design. The whole sensory plane of reality is itself called into question. The result, rather inevitably, is ecstasy - not in the sense of utter joy, but in the literal sense. On othering of self, a stepping-outside of, or a retreat from, an intrinsic real.

But that's just the thing about gnosis - it cannot be explained or mediated. It is only ever a lonely experience, and on a purely emotional level it may not even be, strictly speaking, "worth it." But that is not for us, mere spectators, to determine. By the end of Far Distant, the researcher appears to have nothing truly left but these visions, and as they speak to the entity at their center, the protagonist appears take the final step into that foreboded, enigmatic beyond. We are left on a darkly-lit sequence of the laboratory, evidently abandoned or lifeless, fading into the haze of the unwitnessed; a Martin Vaughn-James scene of incorrigible stillness. Perhaps there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, but most of us will only ever get to live inside that dream.

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It was extremely hard to choose titles for this piece; not just because I bought a good few books, but because many of them were, in fact, really quite good. Breakdown Press had a great slate: their second Ebisu Yoshikazu collection; a pamphlet of pre-WWII manga; and two books I intend to write about at more length soon, Liam Cobb's What Awaits Them and Breakdown's 2022 release of Yokoyama Yūichi's Baby Boom - can you believe 2022 had two Yokoyama translations? The decadence! Paul Jon Milne, our McKeeveresque voice for the present era of post-ironic maximalism, gave us not one but two caustic delights. It is true that few things are easier than to get me, specifically, to buy books, but Thought Bubble is remarkable at that regard - there's a beautiful range on display, and all you have to do is look around. It really is enough to make you ask yourself that terrible, shudder-to-think question: might comics, in fact, be good?

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