10 YEARS OF THE BF SIX TO WATCH! Making its festival debut at the ever excellent Silver Sprocket’s Pride in Panels event in San Francisco this Sunday, Ed Firth’s new comics zine NP revisits some of the subject matter of his Horny & High comics, work that seems to consistently sell out wherever it is stocked. As it should, because its explorations of gay chemsex culture have been described here at BF in the past as both breakout work and “a memorable study of human fragility.”
NP consists of ten one-page stories described by Firth as being “improvised from preparatory drawings” for Horny & High. It’s a repurposing of previous work that doesn’t simply recycle. Rather, it reframes and affirms context, creating mini-narratives that range from the wildly experimental to the controlled.
This feels like a supplementary reading experience to Horny & High in that it allows the reader to revisit the themes of that series but in a more freeform way. Experiencing the characters’ perspectives with a fractured immediacy; absorbing their interactions with their environments as much as reading about them.
In some strips characters and events are overlaid upon each other, presumably to represent the blurred and timeless feeling of the chemsex scene as alluded to in Horny & High. In another we observe with stark clarity the delusional and paranoid actions of an intoxicated character as he starts taking apart plug sockets looking for hidden microphones. Ideas of excess, loss and reckless gratification are explored with rapid movements in tone occurring as each page evokes a new emotional reaction in the audience.
Firth makes effective use of lurid, garish colour in NP to emphasise the lives of characters in steadfast denial. Both an Ed Firth primer and an intriguing piece of Horny & High apocrypha, this will no doubt sell out as quickly as his other books consistently do. There’s a reason why Firth was one of our 2023 Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ artists after all, and the ever evolving buzz around his work is much deserved.
Ed Firth (W/A) • Self-published, £7.00/£12.00
Review by Andy Oliver
