What’s black and white and red all over? I don’t know, but it’s 50ish pages long, funny, and drawn by Adrian Norvid.
By Adrian Norvid
It’s noon on Tuesday in Fake Lake and the smell of the Tire Stack (still smoldering after thirty years) is wafting through the window of the Greasy Spoon Diner. Inside the radio’s tuned to YFUK―Fake Lake’s own Talk Dirty Radio. Mayor Dundoing is tucking into a rasher of surreal back bacon while perusing the Bottom Feeder’s Crassified Ads―there’s a used cemetery plot and a fat-bum door knocker for sale, a hide-a-bed has gone missing, and Mistress Grind wishes to reduce someone to a mere nub.
The town of Fake Lake is a sludge pit of goings-on and the Bottom Feeder (the local paper) has been kept busy chronicling what amounts to a mild apocalypse―collapsing bridges, a gap in the street that swallows the high school band, an awful bacterial business at the hot springs, and a great blowout at the Fakeola bottling plant. Seeing souls ripe for the picking, Lucifer (ever a prominent presence in Fake Lake) has even taken out a paid advertising supplement―Writhing Bodies Herbal Tea Mix, anyone?
Revel in the oddities of Adrian Norvid’s large-format drawings with the bizarre and terribly funny Fake Lake. There’s a seat for you in the Polished by Bums Tavern and it looks like someone’s signed you up for the Midnight Churchyard Dig.
Fake Lake is a parody of an editor’s draft of a local newspaper, covering a horrible little parody of small town America. At the start it looks like an extended Mad Magazine riff, filled with bad jokes, dad-level jokes, and puns. After reading it a few times (which is quick, it’s a short comic), it became more than a parody to me, it became its own creation describing some actual shitty town that I’ve come to believe I actually visited.
The full name of the newspaper is the “Fake Lake Bottom Feeder,” and it’s written (ostensibly) by reporters who don’t care about their jobs anymore. They casually write about the least appealing parts of their little world. Even the surreal disappointments are disappointing. There’s a tire fire that never stops burning, but the newspaper suspects someone keeps relighting it, and there’s a chasm for tourists, but tourists are disappointed because it’s really more of a crack.
The “reporters” stopped caring about representing the town in its best light. Instead they are writing with relentless honesty about the ugly physical and social reality of the town of Fake Lake..
The city of Fake Lake is in shambles. Everything. The buildings, the social fabric, the daily life, the humanity of its citizens. The town is still standing, but It has been falling apart for years, tipping over but never quite toppling.
The “Fake Lake Bottom Feeder” ends with a two page spread sponsored by Satan. But even that is a misfire, as the newspaper editor managed to screw up Satan’s simple order of using only red ink, and the pages have little sticky notes from the dark lord calling out the mistakes. That’s how little the editors care, and that amount of care is representative of how the town feels about itself.
In all of this I’m treating Fake Lake and it’s newspaper like it’s worthy of a deep reading, but I don’t know that’s the right way to read this comic. It’s a silly, punny, sketchy parody. Trying to read too deeply into this is like looking for the American dream in a National Lampoon movie: possible, but a humorless way to spend time with a very funny thing.
So are we supposed to read into the reality of this town? Are we supposed to grok the psyche of the reporters and editors? There is a consistency to the writing, and to the world building. The reporters are brutal, honest, and inured to the absurdities around them.
It’s hard to review this comic. I feel like a square reporting on someone else’s okay drug trip. There’s something’s fantastic going on, and I’m just circling the edges and peering in.
But few will read Fake Lake, it’s a weird piece even for Drawn & Quarterly standards. Even fewer will read this review. I can talk about how I’ve secretly been using Indian spices in my lasagna, and no one will ever know. Admitted that would make as much sense as anything I can say about Fake Lake.
Continued belowAdrian Norvid created every page by cutting-and-pasting (I believe). The art, the captions, the lines of text. I zoomed in far enough on one page that I could see the edges. It’s an indy sketchy style, in black, white, and red. The red is used for spot coloring, blood in the art, actual blood splatted on the newspaper, editorial notes, Satan, and, often, ongoing jokes from previous pages.
Speaking of ongoing jokes, one of the few things that helps this comic make any semblance of sense is that none of the ongoing jokes go backwards through the pages. So at least we know that this comic is meant to be read linearly and forward. You can’t always count on that small fact in these types of books.
(Except for Confucius. He sneaks in a couple pages before his joke.)
I don’t know what to compare this to. I’ve mentioned Mad Magazine, but lets talk about Dahlgren, the 1975 magic realism novel by Chip Delany. It’s a schizophrenic and surreal book about the bombed out city of Bellona, located in the middle of America. It’s also a city that somehow just keeps existing, timelessly frozen in a post-apocalyptic state. It also has a fire that never ends. “Fake Lake Bottom Feeder” may as well be its newspaper.
Fake Lake is short at somewhere around 50 pages. (It’s listed at 48 pages, but the covers are just as much a part of the story as the interior pages, putting it at 52 pages. So 50 is a nice middle ground.) but it’s so dense that I see something new every time I read it. Sometimes I see an entire page I can’t believe I forgot about. I like to assume that my mind so knocked back on the last’s page’s parody that it couldn’t take anymore, and my mind just took some time off while I flipped pages.
Maybe I’m just forgetful.
