Thought Bubble

Thoughts

I went to 'Thought Bubble' today and have mixed feelings. The magnitude of the event was impressive however, once entering I found that there actually weren't many stalls which were appealing to me personally. It was interesting to walk around and see so many different things but most of the stuff on display there seemed to be sort of naff superhero/ fantasy comics. In fact, most of the work I really liked on display was all part of the same stall, published by the same publishers - http://www.breakdownpress.com/. I sort of expected that to be the case but maybe not to the extent that it was. I definitely do not think it was worth the ticket price of £18 (£16 pre booked). It seems incredibly pricey to me, especially as one actually buys things there as well. 

I think next year I would like to plan it a little better and figure out specific events, talks etc. I might be interested in as maybe then it would make the ticket price worth it. As it stands, I was a bit underwhelmed.

Highlights and things I bought

I did find a few illustrators/ stalls I really liked in amongst all the crap and even bought some things on top of the monstrous ticket price. Korean artist Kim Jung Ji was doing some live drawing and whilst I am not a big fan of his style, he can draw unbelievably well without any reference material or even penciling first so it was interesting to watch him do some drawing and marvel at his technical prowess.   

There was a stall there from the publisher's 'Breakdown Press' (as I mentioned before) which had loads of really great stuff for sale. I could have happily bought everything on that stall, most notably the "Window Pane" series by Joe Kessler, the "Treasure Island" series by Connor Willumsen and "Ding Dong Circus", a collection of work by Japanese cartoonist Sasaki Maki, spanning the period from 1967 to '74,  which I bought.

 

I also bought a smaller comic by Stathis Tsemberlidis called 'Neptune's Fungi'. It's a fairly abstract sort of sci-fi themed work with nice minimal drawings and no text. It came a stall put up by http://www.decadencecomics.com/ which is the combined effort of Tsemberlidis and someone else called Lando.