Broken Frontier

ARC FESTIVAL 2026! Swedish artist Linnea Sterte has been stunning us with the most visually eloquent linework since their breakout work Stages of Rot nearly a decade ago. From alien ecosystems forming around the corpse of a whale to frogs on a quest, through to epic world-building fantasy involving mysterious deities, Sterte has established a place as one of the most exciting talents in comics in recent years.

ARC FESTIVAL 2026! Last year at Broken Frontier I was so taken by artist Shri Gunasekara’s experimental, landscape format comic Runner that I just knew she had to be a part of this year’s Broken Frontier ‘Six Small Press Creators to Watch’ number. Built for Love, Gunasekara’s most recent offering, is much shorter in page count but shares many of its predecessor’s form-pushing and presentational aspects.

ARC FESTIVAL 2026! In terms of themes or genre you never know quite what you’re going to get from a Joe Stone comic. Sometimes you are treated to the kind of slapstick absurdity of his James Bond parody in the pages of Spite. On other occasions you will be privy to the inner turmoil and sadness of something like his heartbreaking autobio in Five Months on Earth.

ARC FESTIVAL 2026! The Colossive Press Colossive Cartographies series is one of those absolute gems of UK small press publishing that will hopefully be finding an entire new audience of readers at ARC Festival this month. If you’re coming to the range for the first time via our event coverage these foldout zines come from a wide range of creatives, encompassing not just comics but practitioners from other areas of the visual arts too.

So… the very briefest of Andytorials this month because we are soooooooo busy at Broken Frontier Towers right now. Events on the site and events off the site have precedence. A quick mention too that there was no edition last month simply because my intro to our Pride Month coverage at BF covered everything I would have said anyway.

ARC FESTIVAL! It’s been a while since we gave time to the Underground Kingdom Comix crew so it seems fitting that we give some space to their most recent, bumper-sized anthology as part of our coverage of the upcoming ARC Festival. Each of the collective’s collections work around a specific theme which creators interpret in their own ways. A couple of years back, for example, we looked at the Horror edition.

ARC FESTIVAL! Earlier this year at Broken Frontier I took a look at A. T. Pratt’s tribute to New York iconography in Big Apple Matinee; a remarkable pop-up comic that I described as a “foldout, tactile delight”. The upcoming ARC Festival gives me an opportunity to revisit Pratt’s practice, and a further example of his work that could only ever exist in print.

LICAF have announced a major new initiative for the festival this year. Full details below on ‘Belgian Comics Now’.

One of the many things that make comic books great is how they can be used to explore existential questions. This may be because visual metaphors are always great for understanding abstract philosophical topics, but also because comic artists look at the world a little differently in the first place. They don’t shy away from topics that are harder to discuss in prose and, by embracing the notion of open-endedness, they can create work that is interesting as well as multi-layered.

PRIDE MONTH 2026! As we wind up Pride Month 2026 at Broken Frontier just a little reminder that you can read all our coverage for this annual BF event in one tagged place here on the site. Of course queer comics coverage is an all-year round thing in these parts but Pride does always give us an opportunity to push the boat out and really centre LGBTQIA+ stories every June. My aim this year was to emphasise non-fiction in the form of graphic memoir and biography over genre narrative.