Firebugs
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- 17,99 €
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- 17,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Everything is changing–
– but everything is also exactly the same. Ingken can’t ignore it: ice caps stained brown from forest fires, pipeline construction, drought… the whole world somehow persists despite the slow erosion of stability.
After a trip to Paris, Ingken returns home ready for a break from drugs. Their supportive partner, Lily, is flushed, excited about a new connection she’s made. Although Ingken wants to be happy for her, there’s a discomfort they can’t shake. Sleepless nights fill with an endless scroll of images and headlines about climate disaster. A vague dysphoria simmers under their skin; they are able to identify that like Lily, they are changing, but they’re not sure exactly how and at what pace. Everyone keeps telling them to burn themself to the ground and build themself back up but they worry about the kind of debris that fire might leave behind.
Nino Bulling’s artwork is immediately familiar. Like a conversation with a good friend, their story is told as quiet as it can be loud. Crowds and landscapes squiggle in expressive black and white. Red cuts through panels with energy and persistence, bringing life to what might seem dead. In its most intimate moments, Firebugs asks what it means to transition in a transitioning world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Berlin cartoonist Bulling's scintillating English-language debut features a queer couple navigating transitions. Hard-partyer Ingken has just returned from Paris to Berlin, where they share a flat with their girlfriend Lily, an American performance artist. Lily is trans, and Ingken also has come to realize they no longer identify as female. At first Lily is incredibly supportive ("Your pain is real"), but soon Ingken's despondent dithering begins to wear on her ("I get it sometimes I want to give them a good, hard push" she tells a friend). Adding to the tension is the fact that Lily's been casually hooking up with a crush (the couple's relationship is open, but jealousy simmers). This intimate drama unfolds against the backdrop of global climate change, the fear of which feeds into the couple's sense of frustration in an unmoored world. Bulling's script is more meditative than propulsive, but its depiction of melancholia—the way a crisis of identity can feel both significant and infinitesimal in the face of actual apocalypse—is often moving. It's a testament to the subtle storytelling that the volume's abrupt and ambiguous close feels somehow more complete than any more definitive resolution could. The loose-lined art has a touch of the surreal, which adds to the disorientation, though occasionally it can be difficult to tell figures apart. This is a quintessential story of queer millennial malaise.