THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2026! Every Douglas Noble comic we have reviewed here at Broken Frontier over the years has been notable for its experimentation, its manipulation of both the form and the reader, and the usually brooding foundations that underpin it. Amongst even those quietly unsettling titles though are true standouts in Noble’s somewhat sinister oeuvre. The Lies of the Saints, his recent 160-page graphic novel, is one such offering. The kind of book where it’s easy to overlook the craft for the sheer spectacle of the thing.
This is an epic and ambitious saga, beginning in the mid-1600s and following through the stories of the Saint family through dedicated chapters to each member depicted. Each part revolves around an element of mendacity in their existence, sometimes seemingly small, sometimes monstrous, that shapes their lives and the lives of those around them. The nature of these lies can be very different – they can be self-deceptions, mere moments of untruth, or more overt double lives – but their existence is what drives the plot of each story onwards, and their consequences reverberate on down the family line.
It goes without saying, then, that The Lies of the Saints is a book that we can only talk about in broad strokes when it comes to its narrative twists and turns. But this is a story that you will feel drawn to re-reading as soon as you have finished that final page. While it’s largely linear as it follows each member of the family down through the ages (with occasional overlaps between the tales of parents and progeny) it also feels like, as with Noble’s collaboration with Sean Azzopardi in the horror classic Sightings of Wallace Sendek, a collection that could one day be added to. Perhaps there’s another branch of the Saint family line out there whose histories could be interspersed with this one?
Noble’s use of language here is exceptional in delivery and the dramatic tone of the story lends itself to both the horrifying and the bleakly comedic in places. The art is moody and intense, as is to be expected from the subject matter but Noble also teasingly plays with comics’ relationship with the passage of time. Years often going by between each page, leaving the reader to interpret and fill in the gaps in a very different way to the norm. Events happening in significant vignettes rather than being easily explained. A very Noble storytelling standard from a creator never afraid to make his readers work for their answers.
The Lies of the Saints is Noble at his morbidly contemplative best. This is comics at their most eloquent and yet also their most challenging. A masterpiece of the macabre and the melancholic by one of the finest voices in UK indie comics.
Douglas Noble (W/A) • Strip for Me, £15.00
Review by Andy Oliver
Douglas Noble is at table A19 in the 2000 AD Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2026 runs from November 9th-15th with the convention weekend taking place on the 14th-15th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2026 coverage so far in one place here.
Poster art by Núria Tamarit
