THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2026! What would Thought Bubble be like without a new Peony Gent comic in print every year? All the poorer is the easy and immediate answer as new graphic poetry from her direction has become a convention tradition in Harrogate. Down Walworth Road has a simple premise. It depicts a walk in London from Elephant & Castle tube station, down the Walworth Road of the title, and through Burgess Park. But this being a Gent offering it’s far more eloquent than that brief precis may suggest, once again finding the profound and the extraordinary in the everyday with a lyrically existential flourish.
Set in the overpowering heat of the last summer in the capital, Down Walworth Road is drenched in orange hues that capture the overwhelming and sometimes unbearably oppressive temperatures we lived through in 2026 in the UK. A regular staple of Gent’s work is its sheer humanity and here we experience the hustle and bustle of London street life from different perspectives: Gent’s internal monologue, her conversations, the chatting of passers-by, online commentary sidesteps, and bursts of the fantastic as the local avian life chips in with its thoughts.
Visually it’s prime Gent, busy and impressionistic, capturing the pure essence of the environment she passes through rather than striving for any direct realism and, in the process, giving us something that symbolises it with, perhaps ironically, a greater veracity than any more literal depiction ever could. It’s such a keenly observed piece of comics in that regard, recreating not simply a sense of place but also quietly considering its history, marking its changing face, and musing on gentrification.z
Lives move through lives here, snippets of other people’s stories drifting in and out of the artist’s travels. Another essential Peony Gent comic. Someone please collect all of her poetry comics in a nice hardcover volume!
Peony Gent (W/A) • Self-published, £15.00
Review by Andy Oliver
Peony Gent is at table C19 in the Travelling Man 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
