THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2024! A perennial favourite in the Broken Frontier Awards in the Best Periodical Series category, Strip for Me’s A Pocket Chiller series has produced some truly disquieting one-shot horror stories over the last few years. As the nights draw in it seems most apt that we should give another of these spinetingling tales some coverage time and with Skeleton Hearts, the thirty-first number in the collection, Jenny Robins (Biscuits (assorted)) adds her name to the illustrious roster of UK creators to have lent their names to A Pocket Chiller with a quietly disturbing complete-in-one tale.
Do skeletons have hearts? I was initially intrigued by the social media description of Skeleton Hearts as “a heart chilling and bone warming tale in 24 lovely pages.” A pithy and play description of its contents further teased by the later tagline “The mad woman in the attic escaped again last night”, leaning heavily into a familiar standard of gothic horror conventions. It’s the search for this mysterious fugitive that is the surface-level preoccupation of the comic; a couple hunting around their classically spooky-looking house and its environs for the errant escapee.
But on other layers there are secrets and revelations for the reader to find their own meaning in as the pursuit continues. Seasonal themes of life slumbering and awaiting rebirth, of fractured relationships and unspoken resentment, are tied into a tale that has a near storybook rhythm in delivery and tempo. Interspersed throughout are pages of everyday items that take on a totem-like significance, hinting at secrets, like the scattered remnants of a cabinet of (mundane) curiosities.
Oblique, eerie and enticingly unknowable, Skeleton Hearts is also a fine example of that more experimental visual side to the work of Jenny Robins, with pages often forgoing traditional panel structures and sequentially occasionally being more recognisably in line with her collage practice. The A Pocket Chiller series has had only limited releases in print so take the opportunity to immerse yourself in its otherworldliness with Skeleton Hearts at Thought Bubble this month.
Jenny Robins (W/A) • Strip for Me, £5.50
For more on A Pocket Chiller go here
Review by Andy Oliver
Jenny Robins will be at Table C23a in the Travelling Man 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
