Hunt Emerson’s Firkin is a cat who, for nearly forty years in the pages of the UK-based Fiesta magazine, offered a humorous, anarchic, no-holds-barred commentary on the weirdness of human sexuality in all its tastelessness. Firkin’s adventures often involved absurd situations, satirical takes on sex and relationships, and playful jabs at societal norms. The strip blends traditional cartooning with adult content, risqué and irreverent. Firkin became one of Emerson's best-known characters, and the strip contributed to his reputation as one of the UK’s top underground cartoonists.

In a 2022 interview in The Comics Journal with Tasha Lowe, which you can read in full here, Hunt Emerson talked about his relationship with Firkin:

One of the great things about Firkin is that sex is generally so unglamorous in it. I go back and read them and I find myself roaring with laughter to be honest. I don’t know how Tym Manly managed to write them all, all those years. Tym was originally an editor of the magazine, but that was back in about 1968. He was a freelance writer for most of his life. He edited a mountain biking magazine and somehow or other he found himself writing Firkin. He doesn’t write any other comics. But just as I’ve done all those years, forty years of them, he was writing them. Incredible. I mean drawing them is basically sitting down and getting on with it. But writing them you have to come up with the ideas as well. God help us.
     Sadly Firkin’s finished now. They closed down. Nothing to do with Brexit or the pandemic or anything, Fiesta just basically closed the business in 2019. The last Fiesta magazine was published in January of 2020. So I stopped drawing them at the end of 2019. I mean, you know, it was a sex magazine business, who the hell was buying the things? I have no idea who reads those magazines? It was a few months before it would have been forty years. Fortieth anniversary. It’s a shame. It would have been nice to make forty years. But we didn’t quite. Firkin’s gone now.

In 2002 Knockabout published an anthology of Firkin stories, from which we’ve selected fourteen typical double-page examples – if you want more you’ll have to go and buy the book (if you can find it). It was the intention that it should just be Volume 1, but whether there will ever be further volumes only Firkin knows.

As Firkin might say, ’Sex? Furkin hell!’

A prophetic sequence from a Firkin cartoon from the 1990s