LDCOMICS ONLINE COMICS FAIR 2025! A few years back at Broken Frontier, as part of our coverage of the online incarnation of the Hackney Comic + Zine Fair, I covered artist Yu-Ching Chiu’s very different perspective on pandemic comics with the charming canine adventure Lulu’s Flight. Four years later and the artist is again exhibiting at another online fair, this time the LDComics digital event, giving us the opportunity to put a spotlight on another excellent piece of wordless visual storytelling in the pages of The Wall and the Uncharted Land.
This is a metaphorical piece about creative block with the wall of the title being the mental barrier to a realm that lies beyond it. Chiu’s protagonist – a small rabbit – lives in a world of anthropomorphised animals and has reached a moment in their process where they can move forward no further. Everywhere they look they see the wall that is obstructing them from progress – it’s reflected in the bath, on their television screen, and on every sign they see. With the help of friends and professionals can they finally break through and be free?
Ironically perhaps, for a short comic that seeks to explore the stifling of imagination this is a story bursting with visual ideas. Of course we have those allegorical parallels about the loneliness and the struggle inherent in the main character’s ordeal but there’s also so much clever formal playfulness here that impresses. The initial tightly panelled pages embody a kind of reflective claustrophobia as the rabbit’s mental state is affected, for example. But when the story breaks out from its initial The Wall section to its the Uncharted Land sequence Chiu completely shifts gear, giving us eight one-panel pages that invite us to dwell longer on each image and soak in the surrealism of a sequence that speaks to us of relief, epiphany and the fertility of creativity.
The Wall and the Uncharted Land isn’t simply one of the best short comics I am going to review from this year’s LDComics Fair. I suspect it’s likely to be one of the very best short comics I review this entire year at Broken Frontier. And that, my friends, is high praise indeed. An absolute must-buy.
Yu-Ching Chiu • LDComics Online Fair, £5.00
Review by Andy Oliver
The LDComics Online Comics Fair runs across the month of July. Read all our coverage of the comics on offer here at BF.
