THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2026! Welcome to our celebration of all things TB for 2026! (Yes I’m aware that sentence can be interpreted somewhat differently based on those two initials…) This is the biggest event of the year at BF and, as ever, our small team will be working incredibly hard to make this as special an occasion as previous years. Last year, for example, we managed an incredible 75 reviews, interviews and features in the run-up to Thought Bubble and you can read them all in one place here. It was an incredible effort by our small team and one of the highlights of 2025 at BF.
Every weekday from now until the Friday before we all reconvene at the Harrogate Convention Centre we will be bringing you articles on the exhibitors, guests and events of this year’s Thought Bubble. The usual e-mail went out several weeks ago from both ourselves and our chums on the TB team but there’s still time to submit for potential review. You can read the guidelines for that process here. And don’t forget that we’re also looking for your memories of Thought Bubbles past as part of our focus on 20 years of the festival. All are welcome to contribute and you can find out more about how to do that here.
Poster art by Núria Tamarit
Now the usual exercise in expectations-managing. We’ve had coverage requests in three figures already and that’s going to increase significantly in the weeks to come. There’s an interesting pattern to this every year. International exhibitors get their requests in almost immediately after the initial call-out and then we enter the figurative eye of the storm (in its correct meteorological meaning rather than its misapplied metaphorical one). The strangely but misleadingly calm moments before chaos descends again as UK creators have their debut books ready for print and the second wave of PDFs hit us. As ever, we will be doing our best to give as many of you some space on the site as possible but it will be a relatively smaller fraction of you in terms of demand.
And please remember that October 30th is the realistic deadline for Thought Bubble reviews submission. You’re welcome to send comics after that, of course, but the longer you leave it the less the likelihood. Don’t be that guy who once e-mailed me for a review on the Friday before TB when I was literally travelling up on the train to Leeds…
Special thanks to BF’s Lydia Turner, Swati Nair and Gary Usher who are going to be joining me as the core Thought Bubble coverage team on the site over the next four weeks. (And to the rest of the BF crew for taking up the slack elsewhere.) And, of course, thanks to the Thought Bubble team for once again working so closely with us to make sure this coverage event is a success. In the meantime keep our Thought Bubble Month 2026 tag bookmarked because as October and November progress this is where you will be able to discover a dedicated list of all our TB coverage. And, my goodness, there’s fantastic comics work about to get a deserved spotlight.
One final reminder – many of these comics will not be available until the con so you may need to check store links after if you are not going. Also we won’t necessarily know prices in advance, and it’s also very possible that being there in person may be the only way to get hold of some of the comics featured. Particularly from international creators.
Last year I described Thought Bubble as “an intoxicating comics brew of styles, approaches, subject matter and presentation.” There’s nothing quite like it in terms of scope as an indie comics marketplace and I can’t wait to catch up with you all in a month or so’s time. First pint’s on you…
Let the games begin!
Andy Oliver
Broken Frontier Editor-in-Chief
