The time has come again for our Broken Frontier Six to Watch announcement. This is our most anticipated and well-read article of the year and let me say straight out that this year was the hardest year ever to bring the longlist down to just six names. Every year it gets tougher and tougher to choose just half a dozen artists, underlining just how healthy our indie scene is in the UK.
But before we introduce you to the six creators we will be following on the site across the year let’s assume that not everyone is familiar with this initiative. So here’s the usual cut-and-paste from previous years blurb. Skip this paragraph if it seems too familiar! Every year since 2015 we have given a spotlight to half a dozen UK-based creative voices. We look to provide regular review, interview and feature coverage of what they work on during that time, as well as mentoring should they request it, and opportunities to be part of BF events, panels and festival appearances. There’s also a ‘Six to Watch’ Discord server where artists from all eleven intakes can check out news about relevant events, anthologies/publishers looking for submissions, competitions to apply to, and get advice and support from BF and their predecessors on the programme.
Last year saw the tenth intake/year of the Six to Watch and this year is the tenth anniversary of the first intake. Maths is wonderful isn’t it? We get to celebrate a decade of this initiative twice! Last year saw anniversary events including a Six to Watch BF exhibition of work in London, a panel, and that wonderful and unforgettable ‘10 Years of the Six to Watch’ party and signing night at London’s Gosh! Comics. These are the things that comics memories are made of and this year we have something planned for our Six to Watch-ers that is undeniably the most ambitious thing we have attempted since I took ownership of the site in 2017.
What else? Well it’s always good to update the list of publishers that BF Six to Watch artists have gone on to be picked up by. Lots of fine micopublishers also push their work but let’s define publisher here as those entities with distribution and/or ISBNs (I will undoubtedly forget someone). Here goes: 2000 AD/Rebellion, Avery Hill Publishing, BOOM! Studios, Dark Horse Comics, DSTLRY, Faber, Fantagraphics, Graphic Universe, Icon Books, Image Comics, Jonathan Cape, Koguchi Press, kus! comics, Myriad Editions, SelfMadeHero, Seven Stories Press, Street Noise Books, Titan Books, Unbound and Z2 Comics.
Is anyone out there better than BF at predicting tomorrow’s comic stars today?
As to the six below, some have indeed featured on the site before. Some haven’t. Some may be names you were hoping would be included for 2025. Others you may not be familiar with. We have genre fiction, we have autobio, we have experimental practice, we have slice-of-life, we have comics to delight and enchant, and we have comics to reflect and meditate on. As ever, though, the reason they have been chosen for this year’s mentorship programme is that first and foremost they are fluent and eloquent in the language of comics. Championing their work this year will be both a pleasure and privilege.
Say hello, then, to the Broken Frontier Six to Watch 2025. This is our future, folks, and it’s an incredibly exciting one.
Beatrijs Brouwer AKA Beastly Worlds
Broken Frontier is a team as much as a website so inevitably we introduce each other to new work all the time. My BF colleague Lydia Turner, for example, brought the work of Beatrijs Brouwer AKA Beastly Worlds to my attention last year when she reviewed her short fantasy comic Fox Flight Market Night here, rather presciently remarking that Beatrijs was “certainly a small press creator to watch out for.” Lydia also interviewed Beastly Worlds at Broken Frontier as part of our Thought Bubble Month 2024 coverage.
Fox Flight Market Night (above) is beautifully composed work with a gorgeous use of colour to enhance and expand visual storytelling, atmosphere and theme, and panels crammed with detail to revisit. It’s this line of magical worldbuilding that immediately pulls you in. A single image in a print like her Jiufen Mushroom one below creates a whole mythical realm in the space of one illustration. It’s heady, exhilarating stuff.
Her work has also appeared in former BF-er R.E. Burke’s Over-Inkers anthology (below) and Beatrijs is currently working on a new single comic for the LDComics digital fair, and a new longer series of comics that have been in development for a while. Lots to look forward to from this direction in 2025.
You can visit the Beastly Worlds website and store here. Follow her on Instagram here.
Cara Brown
Cara Brown has already built up an impressive back catalogue of small press comics including Awake in a Nightmare, Umbrella Boy, Escape Game and Everything’s Fine. The latter, her short autobiographical comic about finding your place in the world explored themes of mental health awareness and was reviewed here at BF last year. I said of it then “What really impresses here are the key beats where Brown shows a profound understanding of the storytelling tools available to her to intensify these deep emotional moments.” For those breaking into indie comics in the UK we always advise getting involved in the wider community to build up working relationships and create opportunities. Something Cara is already doing with her work also on show in the Leeds Comics Collective’s Cryptids of Leeds anthology, while Everything’s Fine was listed in our annual ’10 UK Small Press Comics You Need to Own!’ round-up for 2024.
What drew me to Cara’s work is that there’s a maturity and confidence to her storytelling choices that is rare in someone at the beginning of their comics journey. The page above from Everything’s Fine, for example, which in isolation here is perhaps shorn of context but within the body of the work is powerful and harrowing. That she’s at home in multiple genres and styles of comics is an added bonus.
That’s something that’s underlined in her upcoming comics projects. the autobiographical short First Contact (above) about self-publishing her first comic from the upcoming anthology Let Us In, edited by Oscar Osorio, and Star (below), centring on the K-Pop industry and themes of abuse. Looking forward to give Cara’s work far more coverage here at BF in due course.
You can find Cara’s linktr.ee here. Follow her on Bluesky here and Instagram here.
Chris King
Every so often someone comes along with a debut comic so fully formed that you could be forgiven for thinking they had been working in the industry for decades. That’s how I felt after reading Chris King’s first comic Cold Chips, described as “a comic about kicking your heels on the North Yorkshire coast, sibling rivalry and……..Wolves!” A Thought Bubble-premiering book in 2024, it is an astonishingly confident debut.
You can see from the sample images just how Chris’s use of colour is an integral part of his storytelling but, further to that, the psychogeographical aspects to this 20-plus page story bring you so readily into a sense of place, time and memory. I would say more but I am waiting for the second printing of this already sold out comic to be available before running a full review.
Chris is currently working on “several new comics both long and short form, all set within the everyday world that has been established in Cold Chips.” Keep a very close eye out on his work in 2025 because when someone’s first steps into comics are this assured what is their work going to be like when they’ve really developed their craft?
You can find Chris’s website and store here. Follow him on Instagram here.
Rein Lee
Getting back to comics events in 2024 for the first time since the pandemic began was a thing of pure joy for me last year. It gave me the opportunity to start discovering new creative voices for myself for the first time in years and you have the wonderful inQ! queer comics fair to thank for me chancing on Rein Lee’s intricately illustrated work.
Rein’s work to date includes My Taxidermy Angel exploring themes of of queerness and religious trauma, the tactile and experimental Tidal Waves detailing a toxic relationship between two women, and the informational zine London Queer Sober Spaces. Practice that plays with the possibilities of the comics page, as all long-term Broken Frontier readers know, is of instant interest to me, and I was particularly impressed by the clever physicality of Tidal Waves. Their often unconventional page layouts also catch the eye.
Rein tells me that as a relative newcomer to the world of comics they “simply want to draw all of the ideas that I have this year!” and have two projects already in mind, including a sci-fi, character-focussed one-shot and a longer-form diary comics project. BF is all about new voices in comics and I am delighted that we will get to follow such a promising one this year.
You can visit Rein’s website and store here. Follow them on Instagram here.
Shuning Ji
When I sampled my first Shuning Ji comic last summer I knew instantly that she was on the Six to Watch list for 2025. She had previously featured briefly at Broken Frontier as part of SelfMadeHero’s Graphic Anthology Programme when I reviewed the anthology Catalyst but her short comic My Mum is a Wolf showed an incredible degree of development in a very short space of time.
Bringing in autobiographical elements My Mum is a Wolf tells the story of a toxic relationship between a mother and daughter. I said in that review: “What so impresses about My Mum is a Wolf is not simply the resonant weight of what it depicts in terms of damaged mother-daughter dynamics. It’s the manner in which Ji embellishes the turmoil at the heart of the story through intense colour choices, constant changes in panel layout styles and page compositions to mirror the urgency of her on-page version’s feelings and reactions, and the application of vulpine visual metaphor that sees her mother’s growing dark moods manifesting themselves as lycanthropic physical changes.”
As part of last year’s Thought Bubble coverage you can read our interview with Shuning here. In it she says of the Graphic Anthology Programme that “it was a defining moment for me, a milestone that allowed me to finally call myself a comic artist. It definitely strengthens my passion and determination for becoming a comic artist.” So we owe a debt of gratitude to SelfMadeHero (whose Emma Hayley was this week inducted into the Broken Frontier Hall of Fame)!
You can visit Shuning’s website and store here. Follow her on Instagram here.
Zen K. AKA Zenab Khan
So here’s more on that Broken Frontier teamwork thing. This year, while I was preparing for our mammoth Thought Bubble Month coverage, our Lydia Turner took on all our ShortBox Comics Fair coverage, getting through an astonishing thirteen reviews in a very short period of time. One of the review requests I forwarded Lydia’s way was from Zen K. for Runaway Mayhem, a science fiction one-off that she covered here at BF calling it “a chilling take on the sci-fi trope of artificial intelligence.”
Nevertheless Zen’s work was on my radar even if I’d had to delegate this particular comic! At Thought Bubble I picked up both Runaway Mayhem and exorcist story The House on 52 Carlton Street from Koguchi Press, those ever excellent purveyors manga-style genre fiction comics. Have I used “language of comics” as a phrase yet in this piece? Ah, yes, up there in the introduction. Well I’m not going to ration myself on a technicality because that’s the term that comes forcefully to mind when looking at the work of Zen K.
Zen’s plans for 2025 include hoping to “put out a self-published book for one of my favourite game franchises” and getting involved with comics anthologies. Again, the latter is always a canny move for small pressers in not just building up a wider audeince but in establishing a supportive network of your peers. We’ll have a new review of Zen K.’s work at BF very soon.
You can visit Zen K.’s website here including links to buy her comics. Or you can go straight to the Koguchi Press webstore Follow Zen on Bluesky here and Instagram here.
Article by Andy Oliver
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