THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2025! Already feeling separation anxiety from Harrogate? Our traditional Thought Bubble report may make that sense of loss linger but I’m sure we can all agree TB 2025 was another incredible year for the UK’s biggest comics-centric festival/con. Firstly a huge thank you to our chums on the Thought Bubble team for continuing to provide such an amazing event every November. It’s one of the absolute highlights of the comics calendar and it always seems to pass by in a flash of comicky goodness.
Tim Bird, Andy Oliver and Donya Todd at the tour of the Avery Hill exhibition
Secondly, thank you to Lydia Turner and Gary Usher from Broken Frontier who joined me on the mini-team for Thought Bubble coverage this year. We managed an astonishing 71 Thought Bubble Month articles (now 72 with this one) and I am not going to be modest here… that’s an outstanding achievement for an operation as small as BF. I hope the reviews, interviews and features pushed you in the direction of some new favourites and led to some extra sales for those behind the tables too. Apologies if we didn’t get to your work. With around three weeks to go we had reached 200 submissions for coverage and that’s when I stopped counting. We really did the very best we could in the circumstances! And we will continue to plough through those submitted comics we made notes on but didn’t quite get up for review pre-TB. So you may well yet see your work reviewed.
Experimental performance comics from Karrie Fransman and the Tales Spinner
This year I seem to have missed more people than any time before (my main focus was on seeing the near 30 Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ artists and I even managed to neglect some of them!). What I couldn’t miss, however, was the sheer quality of the work on offer. Thought Bubble continues to be an intoxicating comics brew of styles, approaches to the form, subject matter and presentation. What a testament to the vibrancy, appeal and sheer energy of the indie comics scene it is. It says so much about curation that someone in my position can walk an event’s halls and be still be finding so many new voices to champion. And the ever present Redshirts ensured there was always a helpful presence if you were looking lost.
2025 Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ artist Cara Brown with BF’s Andy Oliver
Programming, as ever, was excellent and I had the chance to big up the extraordinary work done by the game-changing Avery Hill Publishing when I led the Sunday tour of the Vision & Labour: Making Comics exhibition in the Mercer Gallery. With a couple of minutes to go there were just three people waiting for the tour and then, suddenly, a deluge of people arrived and we ended up with nearly 40 people listening to me wax lyrical about over a decade of AHP books. The exhibition’s structured focus on not just the featured artists but also their creative process gives it an extra layer of insight. It’s an essential spotlight on Avery Hill and let’s hope when it leaves Harrogate in a few months time there’s the possibility of it getting an extra lease of life somewhere else in the country.
2020 Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ artist Shane Melisse/Shanefaced
I want to give one important mention to the work Thought Bubble does in terms of diversity and wider participation, whether that be the micro-bursaries for disabled comic creators, comic creators of colour and trans/non-binary comic creators, or the diversity spotlight maps, or the clear consideration in representative curation. At this point in time, when marginalised groups are being persecuted and victimised to the horrifying extent that they are, we all need to be making a stand. Thought Bubble steps up on that front every year.
2017 Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ artist Peony Gent
Bustling and welcoming, Thought Bubble 2025 was again as much a celebration of community as it was of comics, with big name creators mixing with attendees in informal social surroundings, top names giving up their time for drop-in sessions for newbie artists, and a sense of friendliness and camaraderie across all tiers of the scene. See you for more of the same in 2026.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2025 coverage in one place here.
