THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2025! I was rather taken by Tia and Guthrie, Chie Hosaka’s LDComics Fair offering, a few months ago when I reviewed it here at Broken Frontier. Affable slice-of-life work, it provided what I called a “delightful character set piece.” Hosaka’s The Waiting Room, debuting at Thought Bubble, is a similar character study which unsurprisingly takes place, as the title suggests, in a hospital waiting room.
The first thing to note about The Waiting Room is its physicality. Four A4 pages that give the tightly panelled pages an added sense of atmosphere with its risographed pages giving Hosaka’s use of colour an extra moody edge. Where Tia and Guthrie followed the two titular characters as students The Waiting Room picks up Tia’s story some years later, as she waits for a hospital appointment with her mother.
Again, this is a character-focussed short drama as Tia’s medical worries are counterpointed by her mother’s endless social media scrolling in the waiting room, inadvertently reminding her daughter how much more successful all of her school friends have become in comparison to her. It’s one of those shorts that picks up on instantly recognisable themes – the overbearing mother whose love for her daughter is simultaneously wrapped in a need to keep pushing her to be better.
In just four pages Hosada manages to provide us with a story that is, in turns, quietly dramatic, comedic and ultimately extremely poignant. One that signals the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship, hinting at a greater storyline to come, and yet providing a satisfying short in and of itself. As a prelude to her graphic-novel-in-progress this is well worth picking up at Thought Bubble this year.
Chie Hosaka (W/A) • Self-published
Review by Andy Oliver
Visit Chie Hosaka’s site and store here
Chie Hosaka will be at Table B17a in the Redshirt 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
