Firebugs (graphic novel)

The graphic novel begins in Paris, where Ingken parties at a nightclub but feels uncomfortable and eventually leaves.^[2] Later they return to their apartment in Berlin. They live with their girlfriend Lily, who is a trans American woman.^[3][4]

Ingken tells Lily that they don't think of themselves as a woman or a man, and Lily responds supportively, helping them navigate their gender dysphoria.^[2][4] However, Ingken's anxiety grows over how to define who they are and what they want to change, and over the months that follow, Lily gets increasingly frustrated at Ingken's doubts and hesitations.^[2] News about wildfires and the climate crisis worsen Ingken's anxiety, as well as jealousy over Lily's new lover, who she grows closer to within the bounds of Ingken and Lily's open relationship.^[1][2] Ingken and Lily grow estranged before the novel's ambiguous end.^[1][4]

Firebugs was first developed for part of a 2022 Kassel art exhibition, Documenta fifteen, under the name abfackeln.^[5] Nino Bulling, the graphic novel's creator, described their goals for the work:^[6]

I wanted to write a book with no resolution in which the expectation of a transition story is left unfulfilled. In my experience, the question of gender is never entirely decided or resolved. It presents itself again and again, every day in fact, in many forms, of which a body and its materiality is merely one.

Bulling credited Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy as their primary influence for the development of Firebugs. They said they wanted to use the same sparse dialogue-based narrative style to explore a t4t (trans for trans) relationship. Hayashi evolved this style from the French New Wave film movement. Bulling's portrayal of gender dysphoria and gender dissonance were informed by Andrea Long Chu's Females.^[2]