Thought Bubble

It's about time I do some Thought Bubble coverage here. It's by far my favourite comic con around. Unlike most which are stuffed full of stands selling Funko Pops and Naruto plushies with only a small artist alley celebrating artists, Thought Bubble does things differently. It's primarily about the independent comic writers and artists. There are huge halls full of them. It's a melting pot of creativity and pretty things and I love it to bits.

Sadly I missed out on the event last year due to being tied up with a trip down to London, but I wasn't going to miss it again. So in November, me and one of my old school friends descended upon the con once again. 

This year had some incredible talent coming to the event. Firstly it saw Tom Siddell, Kate Ashwin, and John Allison coming to another event I'm at which is always fantastic. John I've covered here but I'll talk about the other two in a minute. It also saw Adam Vian and Amanda Elanor Tribble in attendance, both of whom I met at Camcon a year or two back. By surprise I also found a few old faces I had no idea were attending. John Paul Bove and Andrew Wildman, both at the coolest end of Transformers artists were there, along with Jon Lock, the genius behind Afterlife Inc. Vivian also met one of her heroes, the awesome Kate Beaton of Hark A Vagrant!

Whilst there I also met a whole host of amazing new artists. Chief among these is Will Kirkby, whose art is so genuinely amazing it's a wonder I'd never seen him before. Also I found Dungeons and Drawings, an awesome pair of artists who have made some truly awesome redesigns of D&D characters as well as some rather neat comics. I'll probably remember more as I continue this article.

As I've already covered John Allison from LCAF, I'll start off with Tom Siddell, artist and author of Gunnerkrigg Court. Officially holding the title of Jonny's favourite webcomic for a good few years now, Gunnerkrigg is essentially a tick-box list of everything I love in comics. The recurring cast is filled with a whole host of wonderful characters, and one of the most impressive things is how the characters have developed over the course of the comic. Being set in a school, characters age and progress in near-real-time. It's also incredibly well written. Whilst the dialogue and characterising is always fresh and interesting, the true strength of the comic lies in how it can flick around all kinds of different storylines and issues, both whimsical and serious without ever feeling forced. It's just a beautifully crafted comic. Artwise it's also pretty extraordinary. Once Tom hit his stride, the art has become one of the best parts of the reading experience. The characters are drawn in a really nice stylised way that has just enough parts of realism to work, whilst some of the school environments and especially the robot characters get a beautifully detailed art style applied to them.  Later in the comic as Coyote appears, the comic also flicks into a different style, heavily inspired by tribal painting and it works astonishingly well. But to conclude, Gunnerkrigg is brilliant.

Next up is Kate Ashwin of Widdershins. Widdershins is a really important comic to me, as it properly started the webcomic binge I've been on for the last few years, and really set me on my path of loving comic books. Whilst it wasn't the first webcomic I've read (Homestuck and Sandra and Woo got  in there first), it was the first one that opened me up to the sheer variety of webcomics that are out there and started the massive streak of webcomics I've read. Widdershins is an adventure comic set in pre-victorian England, in a fictional town called Widdershins. It features a rotating cast of characters and is broken up into seven different stories as of the moment. It's a really light-hearted comic to read and is really fun with it's use of magic. As with most of my favourite comics, it really works thanks to the character dynamics that steer each adventure around.

Jon Lock created Afterlife Inc so automatically is one of my favourite human beings. I'm serious, Afterlife Inc is so good and perfectly captures my worldview to a scary degree. It's set in a version of the afterlife where plucky businessman Jack Fortune runs the place along with his partners, associates, and archangels. It's bonkers in all of the best ways. Jon does the writing whilst a series of different artists tackle each story. Each of the three volumes so far features  a bunch of different stories. Some feature all the central cast, whilst a couple feature none of them at all. From a world-building perspective it's one of the coolest things I've ever read, and has had a big effect on the way I write and create characters. The captain Cool reboot would be very different if it weren't for this.

The final artist I'm covering in detail is Will Kirkby, the complete unknown for me. In fact he was the last artist I found at the con, and I was so desperate to buy his sketchbook I had to run out and get even more cash out. I spent a lot of money that day. But back on topic, Will Kirkby has this really stunning art style. Like me, he does really detailed drawings, but his have a more grunge-y aesthetic to them. There's a sort of jagged effect with the way he draws people and I am seriously into it. He tends to do a lot of fantasy art, and is really into RPG games such as D&D and Dark heresy. I've recently been looking through his back-catalogue and found some really amazing stuff. He's also done some short-form comic work with some incredible artwork too. This one is really one to watch.

Wrapping up the best of the rest, Adam Vian is an artist and game designer who created the Long Lost Lempi comics and has a really interesting drawing style. It's such an odd one to describe, focussing very heavily on form, and is super interesting to look at. Amanda Elanor Tribble is one of those artists that I have trouble explaining exactly why I like them. There's just a certain something in her art style I really like. She writes a lot of mini-comics and is currently finishing an illustration degree.

John Paul Bove is a pretty long-serving Transformers artist and writer. Despite colouring Regeneration One and Empire Of Stone, I mostly know JPB as the awesome guy who does the retro posters that saved MCM for me. Seriously, MCM is a bad con. Queues for hours and basically no art. But yeah, his posters are ace. He also coloured the Transformers MTMTE breakfast club poster which I simply adore (and have on my wall). He's a good 'un. The other half of the Regeneration One art team was also in attendance. I don't know Andrew Wildman's art so well, but it was really cool meeting both parts of the team together.

And finally, Dungeons and Drawings, an awesome character designing duo. They focus on making redesigned versions of D&D monsters and do come really cool stuff by boiling the characters down to their most core characteristics and working around them. So much great stuff there.

But yeah, that was Thought Bubble. Best comic event of the year. Bring on 2016! Next time they have most of the ex-Batgirl team as well as Marc Ellerby and a bunch of other amazing people. It's going to be good.