ARC FESTIVAL 2026! A new indie micropress is always an exciting development on the UK circuit and when it’s as experimentally focussed as Francis Todd’s Blue Funnel Books all the more so. Fidelia Schlegl’s Smoke is one of the two debut comics from Blue Funnel, making its first appearance at this weekend’s ARC Festival. It’s a bold statement of intent from the small press outfit, underlining their objective to provide form-pushing practice with a distinctively tactile aesthetic.
Smoke is a difficult book to summarise simply because its very existence hinges on different readers bringing their own interpretations to what they find in its pages. Drawn between 2024 and 2026 it’s a comic that, at its loosest definition, is about a woman and her life in a city. We follow her as she interacts with her environment in wordless pages that ask the reader to project their own meaning onto their imagery.
Sometimes sequences have a kind of studied pseudo-realism – the woman scrolling on her phone while lying on a bed for example – but that can easily morph and evolve into something freer and more representational, or even be reduced to crude captures of the moment rendered with a childlike simplicity. Every visual twist and turn potentially changing the way we may perceive events or relate to the central character.
Throughout, a spiralling smoke motif often acts as a catalyst for change, renewal or even a return to the status quo. As she walks through the city the woman becomes both an integral, almost merged part of it and yet also, conversely, something discrete and apart from it. Submerged and yet disparate, interweaved but still distinguishable, as we continue to observe the intricacies of the relationship between individual and surroundings.
Abstract comics are never easy things to review because by definition they are deeply personal in both authorial intent and audience understanding. Work like Smoke, though, is so fascinating for the way in which it asks us not so much to read it as a comic but to react to it instead. A true highlight of the ARC debut books for those visiting the festival this weekend. Smoke will be available through Blue Funnel Books shortly thereafter.
Fidelia Schlegl (W/A) • Blue Funnel Books
Visit the Blue Funnel Books website here
Review by Andy Oliver
ARC Festival comics fair on July 11th-12th. For the full details on everything ARC has to offer check out their website here.
Poster by Lando
