THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2025! I am probably breaking some unspoken rule of reviewing by writing about R. E. Burke’s Diary of a Detainee given that I am, of course, personally invested in the events it depicts. Or perhaps that gives me an added perspective. Whatever. It is hard to imagine that any regular Broken Frontier visitor will be unaware of the story behind this comic. In February of this year our former Broken Frontier teammate Rebecca Burke found herself unjustly detained by ICE in a detention centre, after being refused entry into Canada while on a backpacking holiday. It was a horrific incident that I know from my conversations within the community contributed to the reticence of many British creators to continue appearing at US cons, and it gained mass press attention in both the UK and worldwide.
Diary of a Detainee is a sample of a much longer work-in-progress graphic memoir and, as such, covers only the immediacy of the initial events of Burke’s ordeal. In a powerful and moving introduction she expands on what the eventual book will cover and the importance of telling the stories of the women she met while incarcerated. It’s by turns a beautiful, poignant, bleak and devastating piece of writing that speaks of a book that will no doubt be essential reading on its eventual release. For now, though, we have this Diary of a Detainee sneak peak which acts as a deeply affecting prologue for what is to come.
This sampler starts with the re-creation of an Instagram post where Burke tells her followers about why she is making her trip to the US and Canada. It’s full of hope, excitement and eager anticipation for a holiday she believes will be life-changing in scope; a journey of self-discovery and new beginnings. A social media update that now seems horribly ominous in retrospect. We follow through with images depicting joyful scenes from that trip in four-panel grids. And then, suddenly, that same page structure abruptly becomes sequential, showing a handcuffed Becky being transported to the detention centre.
This blunt shift in tone is as stark and brutal in pacing as the events that are to come. Burke inserts actual ephemera or re-creations of them into the pages of Diary of a Detainee to remind us of the bleak reality of what she endured. A document listing her belongings when she arrives at the centre or the rules/instructions for using the payphones for example. When we do get to the sequentials they are heartbreaking in the extreme. A phone call home where we only hear Becky’s side of the conversation, left to imagine the parallel sense of distress at the family home on the other side. Or those scenes where Burke uses no dialogue or forms of narration and just lets images of confinement and solitude to speak more eloquently and potently for their silence.
Burke’s art style uses a faux naivety to bring us so much closely into her experiences, and a carefully chosen colour scheme that seems to echo the claustrophobic conditions she finds herself in. This is clearly the beginning of a project that is not just vitally important as another record of the ongoing collapse of society and democracy in the United States but also a fiercely articulate piece of comics practice. We’re talking a lot about must-buy comics from Thought Bubble this year but nowhere does that term apply more forcibly than with Diary of a Detainee.
R. E. Burke (W/A) • Self-published
Review by Andy Oliver
Visit R. E. Burke’s website here
R. E. Burke will be at Table F3a in the Bubbleboy Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2025 runs from November 1oth-16th with the convention weekend taking place on the 15th-16th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2025 coverage so far in one place here.
Poster by Ng Yin Shian
