When I interviewed Ed Firth last year about his queer comics series Horny & High he gave me an editor’s dream pull quote for the article title: “One friend said to me I’d written a Daily Mail-reading homophobe’s nightmare”. Since then the cartoonist’s profile has been steadily building with a joint runner-up placing in the Observer/Faber Short Story Competition and his inclusion as one of Broken Frontier’s ‘Six Small Press Creators to Watch’ for 2023.
This second issue of Horny & High pushes out the shorter anthology stories for a 70-plus page chapter in the ongoing ‘Chillout’ story. Firth’s focus on gay chemsex culture continues with protagonist Stu’s world slowly crashing around him as he alienates both family and friends. As Firth said in that aforementioned interview he’s looking to explore what he terms as “a big and largely unacknowledged problem in queer culture” here and this story contrasts Stu’s deteriorating life with the release he may or may not find in his drug-supplemented group encounters.
In that respect Firth gives us a main player whose prospects are grim; no job, near to losing his home, and reduced to acts of implied petty amorality to find the money for the next fix. The main focus of the issue is another chemsex gathering at which time’s passage becomes indistinct and mutable, but by the end of which days could have gone by. Bookended by two shorter sequences that spotlight both Stu’s choices and their consequences it’s a difficult and harrowing read but one that is compelling in its bleakness.
Horny & High Volume 2 is at its most creative when depicting the more intense periods of the the partying. Scenes where time appears to splinter as couples’ intoxicated encounters seem to chronologically fracture, or a particularly clever meta moment where a new high slowly strips back the creative process as characters are stripped back to layouts in a minimalist representation of their delirium.
This is one of the greatest strengths of this second issue as tightly choregraphed panel-to-panel storytelling moments of conversational interaction and/or the cast having to deal with the consequences of events (an awkward attempt to get an overdosing friend to the safety of an ambulance without being spotted themselves, for example) are interspersed with more immediate and unconventional page structures to portray the frenetic and the unrestrained.
Firth has a strong ear for dialogue and his characterisation skills ensure that each cast member feels like a fully rounded individual rather a plot device to serve the protagonist. Each character’s reasons for being a part of this culture indicate their own relationship with sex and the role it plays within their lives; some seemingly more in control of their desires while others, like Stu, being controlled by them. But it’s that ability to communicate their moods and reactions to their environments, however extreme, that really shines through here. Stu’s post-party journey home as he slips into a paranoid state is brilliantly realised not simply through his self-doubting hallucinations but by the way Firth uses lettering and speech balloon effects to emphasise his state of mind.
Again, this is a very explicit piece of comics. But if it weren’t it wouldn’t be able to explore the themes it does. Already there’s a marked development in Firth’s visual storytelling between issues. Quietly powerful work from a creator on the ascendancy.
Ed Firth (W/A) • Self-published, £10.00
Review by Andy Oliver
