Subtitled The Pirate of Love, I'll admit I picked this up because of the adults only warning on the cover supplemented by a list of transgressive acts depicted within. Whatever I imagined didn't seem like the sort of thing Ed Pinsent would have drawn and so I was naturally curious. Thankfully Henrietta isn't like anything I imagined and the adults only tag seems mainly precautionary, given our living in an age of persons deeply traumatised by exposure to anything they didn't want to see. Rather than following in the lineage of Oh Wicked Wanda!, the book's more potentially contentious elements are probably closer to the spirit of Rabelais and are, in any case, details rather than the driving force of the enterprise.
Just as aspects of quantum mechanics appear to crumble under the weight of their own description, I feel Ed Pinsent's strips work best as read because attempts to describe what he does will usually unwittingly hammer the narrative into a shape which is mostly in the eye of the beholder, so I'll keep this minimal: Henrietta is a tempestuously libidinous redheaded woman who visits a certain bull in his dreams and who additionally spends time as the captain of a pirate ship. At one point she has sex with an octopus, which is conducted with more charm than anything else you're likely to find at the end of such an ill-advised Google search.
Pinsent's art inhabits what may as well be its own cosmology, with tales told therein relating to mainstream equivalents at much the same kind of tangent as did the Residents to the rest of the music industry in the seventies. It isn't weird as such, or at least no more weird than the art of Edwards Ardizzone, Gorey, or Campbell with whom it shares a similarly whispy quality, as though its reality could be carried away on a sharp gust of wind. It could probably be dismissed as streaky marks on paper but for this ephemeral or hallucinatory quality pinned down with surprising gravity by the strength of its own conviction, by its consistency of vision and belief in whatever it happens to be saying; and the effect is even more powerful in full colour, as is Henrietta.
So we have a sort of myth, or something mythic which follows its own logic with an almost classical sensibility informing its prevalently nautical atmosphere. It's funny and often moving without anything reading too much like a performance, and startles with occasional asides which seem like they should break the spell but never do. I felt as though I could hear waves and the sound of someone honking away on an accordion as I read, and was left with a sensation of having learned something touching and profound which probably wouldn't translate into words, hence the pictures; and crucially, I would suggest that this tale couldn't be told in any other way than what you have here, for adaptation would only result in a different animal altogether, which - if you ask me - is the measure of true art.
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