Firebugs

By Andrew Field

There is something unique about the way change is represented in comics, which differs from other art forms and media, like painting, photography, novels, music, or film.  In comics, we experience a stasis-in-motion, or motion-in-stasis, that seems to lend itself to different iterations of fluidity, pause, and passage, where what is seen is constantly being replaced, through the gutter and the panel approaching, by the unseen, the new, the different, the same-ish.  This unique experience of temporality is juxtaposed in comics with a spatiality dependent upon the arrangements of panels, of surfaces: a gestalt of materialization, and therefore an implicit meditation on becoming.  Comics have a larger stake, like film and painting, in what and how much can be communication through surface.  Should we ask what lies behind the surface, like a good Freudian or Platonist, or should we ask what does the surface itself tell us, like a good scholar of painting?

Both of these questions – about ideology and perception – are operative in Nino Bulling’s Firebugs, a quiet, strange, and moving graphic novel published this February 2024 by Drawn & Quarterly.  Firebugs is about the discomfort of change; the pain, solace, and bewilderment of transitioning; as well as the depression and connection that come from an individual’s struggle to become and belong in communities and relationships that both meet and contravene one’s needs.  In Bulling’s expressive black lines, red-outlined panels and dialogue, and large use of white space, we are given a palette and work that convey something subtle, beautiful, haunting, and minimalistic, like reticent dialogue in a good short story.  The graphic novel is about three seasons in the main protagonist, Imgken’s, life, as they move from dance party to conversations with friends, to conversations with their lover and partner, Lily, to sex with Lily, who is transitioning into a female, (Imgken wishes more ambivalently to transition into a male).

Oftentimes what lies behind the surface for Imgken is their discomfort with the rush to transition, or at least with the hurry to idealistically raze everything in the name of a new identity (we can think here of the slang meaning of firebug as a pyromaniac), while at the same time their desire to transition, and their unhappiness with their own body and self.  This felt need to hurry – at one moment Imgken lets Lily know the name Imgken likes, but then Imgken feels uncomfortable being called that name too soon – seems to be triggered by Imgken’s desire to belong within the trans community, even as they view with some skepticism certain practices of that community, like the excessive drug use or the sometime-seeming gratuitous polyamory, as aspects that get in the way of mutual flourishing.  This is what makes Imgken interesting and individual as a character, that, in Walt Whitman’s words, they are “in and out of the game.”

The best moments in Firebugs involve dialogue between Imgken and Lily, where we are given a distinct sense of what their lives are like – everything from the messy arrangement of their bedroom, to what they talk about on a hike, to what they say to each other in the morning.  These moments are often quiet, but they feel real and true, like distinct individuals moving in a world that is both reticent and apocalyptic (at one point during a hike they run into pipes from a giant pipeline; another moment shows us Lily reading about Australian bushfires on her phone).  Bulling is great at capturing discomfort, at awkward moments in conversation, and this is useful, since one of the aims of Firebugs seems to be to give us a moving, unidealized portrait of a trans relationship, which Firebugs succeeds in doing.  There is constantly too much to say in Firebugs, or too little to say – one thinks of the Australian bushfires that Imgken reads about in bed on her phone, and her only response available being to click on a smiley face, or the various wordless panels that capture Imgken’s anxiety and depression in one canny view – and Imgken seems to register this overmuchness and its opposite, a form of trivia, through the depression they feel throughout the book.

If depression and anomie lie behind the surface, the bodies of the protagonists lie in plain sight.  These are represented as sites of immense jouissance as well as immense dissatisfaction, but never as neutral.  What ideology does Imgken feel the need most authentically to resist – the straight ideology that make them feel less seen?  Aspects of the trans ideology that makes them feel pressured to snort cocaine or fall in love immediately with a stranger?  Parts of a feminist ideology that makes Imgken guilty for not loving their body more?  And what lies beyond ideology?  Sex?  Conversation?  Who is Imgken, especially in a world where nature and culture are so confusingly intertwined; and by implication, who are we?

Bulling attempts to answer this question at times through the juxtaposition of images from the natural world – leaves, aphids, lice, mushrooms, cacti, fireflies – with people having conversations, and the effect is interesting, as it contextualizes the conversations in Darwinian ways, and thereby gets the reader thinking about adaptation and change at the level of the living organism.  We are stranger than we think, Bulling seems to be saying, and the title, in its allusion to both desire and the natural world, seems to echo this hybrid strangeness.  For we see change-patterns that are quite overlapping and distinct: we hear about a performance involving the Phoenix; sit in on Lily explaining about her own experience transitioning at a young age; and accompany Imgken to the doctor’s office to inquire about a double mastectomy.  Bolling is great at showing us the recursiveness, stubbornness, and inevitability of change; and this ability to show us honest and ambivalent searching through the endless flux feels effortless, poignant, and, in the context of an un-idealized representation of a trans relationship, important.  Because Imgken is so individual, they are also so recognizable.  With all the blaring hype on the news about transness, Firebugs is a quiet and powerful repartee.

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Andrew Field is a mostly cartoonist and sometime singer-songwriter who often writes and draws about mental health.  He recently finished two short graphic novels about schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses, both of which can be read at https://www.andrewfield48.com/shortbooks.