THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2024! One of the privileges of being involved with something like Broken Frontier is the opportunity it provides to comment on how far an artist’s practice has evolved and matured. It’s been a few years since I last reviewed Axe Marnie’s work at BF (the short comic Hoarded Unsorted Unseen here) but their recently successfully crowdfunded minicomic Run Ragged displays a huge leap in storytelling confidence. It’s a deeply personal comic and one that pulls the reader into the message they are communicating in its pages with an intense connectivity.
Run Ragged runs two inter-related, interweaving story strands in parallel. In one we see our protagonist portrayed as a werewolf, running without care or consequence in a nocturnal forest setting. In the other we see the life of a ballerina struggling to keep up with their training and workload. The one scenario acts as visual metaphor for the stark realities of the other, as hints of unspecified personal challenges seep into events and a sense of injustice despite adversity prevails.
This is, it will come as little surprise, a comic infused with autobio elements, echoing its creator’s own struggles with Long Covid. There’s lots more to be read on Run Ragged’s Kickstarter page here where Axe Marnie goes into much greater detail on those circumstances. It’s extra context if you want it but Run Ragged works perfectly well as a commentary on the loss of personal dreams and how inbuilt societal ableism continues to work against the vulnerable.
There are so many clever and inspired choices here to elevate and underpin the comic’s message, particularly in the second half when Run Ragged’s two worlds begin to converge in more obvious ways. Axe Marnie was clearly thinking about how to use every visual tool available to them to convey the emotional range they wanted to communicate, from lettering tricks through to constantly shifting page layouts. It’s an oft repeated observation in comics commentary but this is genuinely one of those offerings that will stay with you long after reading, and the points it makes about how society continues to discard and devalue the disabled, despite what so many continue to go through thanks to the pandemic, are vitally important ones to keep reiterating.
Axe Marnie (W/A) • Self-published
Review by Andy Oliver
Axe Marnie will be at Table D29a in the Redshirt Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2024 runs from November 11th-17th with the convention weekend taking place on the 16th-17th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2024 coverage so far in one place here.
Art by Rocío Arreola Mendoza
