Comics Review: Thought Bubble #1
Image Comics is making its presence known at this years Thought Bubble sequential art festival in Leeds UK (being held on November 14-20). In celebration of the fifth year of this festival, Image comics is helping to produce its first ever anthology, entitled: Thought Bubble.
Anthologies are hard, especially ones that are created to highlight a festival. The most successful anthologies I’ve read are ones that have a common theme. Thought Bubble, with its 24 pages and dozen creators being involved, really doesn’t have the room to fall into making a strong thematic book. What it offers instead is a mixture of stories from season professionals and winners of the Northern Sequential Art competition.
In the preview copy I was presented, I had about 16 pages of the final book, which provided a good taste of what to expect. There was no table of contents, so its hard to figure who was responsible for the uncredited stories, which is a shame as some of them show a lot of promise and I would have liked to mention their names in this review.
This anthology reminded me a lot of the old SPX books that I used to buy in High School. Not every story clicks, but almost every story has something that made me pause and smile at the pure craftsmanship that is displayed. Thought Bubble presents a truly diverse collection of stories ranging from the mini mystery involving time travel that reminded me of the twist endings of O’Henry and Poe, a cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t mess with Leonardo da Vinci to stories about what children imagine when they see their own breath.
Anthologies are hard to curate, and hard to fully enjoy. If I like half a book, consider it a success. With different creators, different styles and different genres often make these books rarely completely click. Being the length of a regular comic, one bad story can have a lot more of a negative impact than a couple in a larger anthology. From what I read, I felt that about 50 to 60% of the stories connect with me. I wish more did, but in terms of what I expect from such a collection, this is about par.
As mentioned before, this book also acts as a preview of some of the artists and different styles that will be at the Leeds festival. As a preview to the festival this book is a tremendous success. This 24-page anthology will retail for $2.99 USD and will be in stores Nov. 9th. Proceeds will go to the charity Banardos, one of the UK’s leading children charities. At this price, and the causes it supports, it is worth picking up if you have the room in your stack.
