THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2025! Experimental comics work is, as all our readers know, a huge part of our coverage remit here at Broken Frontier. As such, work like Shri Gunasekara’s Runner is exactly the kind of practice we like to spotlight on the site. Published by Inky Fruit Co. it is presented in a landscape format and, while this review is via a digital copy, it’s also handcrafted and printed in riso which surely gives it an extra tactile quality for those who savour such things.
Runner follows the story of a girl fleeing the danger that seems to be always just one step behind her. In her flight she carries her younger siblings on her shoulders always keeping just ahead of peril as she follows in her mother’s footsteps. It’s an extended visual metaphor dealing with themes like responsibility, repeating patterns and generational trauma; one that uses the physicality of its presentation and structure to feed into its exploration of those ideas.
There’s a lot here that is, admittedly, left to reader interpretation. By its nature this is a comic that rejects exposition or explicit explanation given its semi-silent nature but asks the reader to make a worthwhile extra connective investment in its pages. Gunasekara makes that interpretive effort a rewarding one though. Runner’s format allows her to create an astonishing sense of motion from the very beginning as we feel ourselves swept along in the slipstream of our speeding protagonist in those first few pages. Each image creating a sensation of rapidly animated, almost choreographed, movement.
The somewhat distorted physicality of the art is also highly effective at capturing the emotional truths of the book; elongated forms and the symbolism of characters’ comparative sizes for example. Colour is also notable in its application to mirror mood and tone, from trauma to eventual hopeful recovery. Runner is one of those comics that is more about our empathetic response to events on the page than it is about strict interpretation and dissection. Challenging and form-pushing work that deserves your attention at Thought Bubble.
Shri Gunasekara (W/A) • Inky Fruit Co., £25.00
Review by Andy Oliver
Shri Gunasekara will be at Table B22-23a in the Comixology Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2025 runs from November 1oth-16th with the convention weekend taking place on the 15th-16th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2025 coverage so far in one place here.
Poster by Ng Yin Shian
