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WORK TITLE: LIttle Stranger
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1980
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1980.
EDUCATION:Rhode Island School of Design, B.F.A., 2002; has also studied at University of Southern California.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, illustrator, and comic book artist. Quimby’s, Chicago, IL, on staff. Chicago Alternative Comics Expo cofounder, 2011.
AWARDS:Ignatz Award, 2011, for outstanding graphic novel, for Gaylord Phoenix; Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists; Critical Fierceness Grant, Chances Dances, for queer art.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies; contributor to the Book by Its Cover blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Edie Fake is a writer, illustrator, and comic book artist. A native and long-time resident of the Greater Chicago Area, his work has been exhibited internationally. Fake studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design and was awarded Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists.
In an article in Los Angeles Review of Books, Fake talked with Joshua Michael Demaree about his comics. He confessed that “one of the most important things about what I’ve been doing is sharing it in person with people…. I love book fairs and getting to digest other people’s ideas. I think that’s really why I make stuff. It’s a call-and-response.”
Fake talked about his creative process in an interview in the Rumpus, where both story idea and image idea take their turns first. “Whenever I’d start a new issue of Gaylord it’d come into my head as a few key visual scenes, and I’d make teeny-tiny drawings of them, like one-inch-by-half-an-inch, just to keep the idea in mind.” Fake continued: “Then I’d draw out about forty of these tiny little boxes (one for each page) and I’d start trying to place where the first key images would go and what language would work. Once I had about the first ten thumbnail pages of written language mapped out something would happen, mostly all the other images and language, would gush out and snap into place and I’d have my plan.”
In the reverse, Fake explained in the Rumpus interview that “a few times though, the opposite would occur–I’d get ten pages of planning deep and everything would seem wrong, the language would be empty and not funny and the plot would seem contrived, so I’d scrap everything and wait for a new round of visual directions to lead me somewhere new. Ouch. Mostly it would happen fast and small, though, and then this little plan could be stretched and rearranged pretty easily. That smallness kept everything a little less than perfectly planned and let me be flexible with the story as I was drawing out the actual pages.”
Gaylord Phoenix
Fake published Gaylord Phoenix in 2010, which won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. A genderless being called Gaylord Phoenix explores its self and sexual identity while traversing a field of emotions, ranging from loneliness and fear to lust and forgiveness. Gaylord’s journey is one of coming to terms with oneself and then embracing that understanding.
In the Los Angeles Review of Books article, Fake recalled: “One of the questions I get a lot is: ‘Are you the Gaylord?’ It’s like a ‘Yes, sort of, kind of,’ thing…. I don’t really have an interest in drawing autobiographical comics, but I do have a huge interest in drawing trans bodies in space and making that an integral part of the story. That’s part of the universe I walk around in every day so it’s become a huge part of my comics,”
Writing in Xpress Reviews, Julia Cox said that the book is “recommended for adult readers.” Cox noted that “this mythic vision of the transgender experience balances intensity and playfulness.” Reviewing the book in Lambda Literary, Cathy Camper stated: “A tale told in two colors, readers will fantasize many more, as paisley swirls the page, as a dark magic of feathers transforms into oceans of tears, as sphinxes and ribbons festoon the court of the Gaylord risen up into the clouds.”
Memory Palaces and Little Stranger
In 2014 Fake published Memory Palaces. The account looks at both real and imagined spaces and places in Chicago’s queer landscape across time. Each building serves as a memorial to what could have been and who has fallen by the wayside. Yet each space is full of life and detail at the same time.
Fake talked about the importance of place and space in the Los Angeles Review of Books article. He explained that “autonomy complicates the definitions of things and the rules about things—especially about gender and sexuality…. I think that knowing who you are, finding out who you are, and claiming who you are can be like the trans 13-year-old who plays baseball but doesn’t have an organized sports teams to join. It’s about an all-is-one kind of thing, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be nuance.”
Writing in Chicago Reader, Noah Berlatsky observed that “Fake’s work … has always dealt with the malleability and interpenetrability of gender, and Memory Palaces, with its focus on queer spaces, is no exception.” Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Demaree noted that “in Memory Palaces, Fake gives a second life to institutional spaces that no longer exist in any form—each now devoid of a real space—providing them a historical security and queer readers a mythological origin story of their own.”
Fake published the short comics and drawings collection Little Stranger in 2018. This compilation of recently published drawings and short comics explores gender and sex with minimal text and a large amount of symbolism. A contributor to Publishers Weekly claimed that “this provocative graphic collection pushes boundaries, and then breaks them open.” The same reviewer also called it “striking.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Chicago, January 11, 2013, Jason Foumberg, “Drinking with … Edie Fake.”
Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2018, review of Little Stranger, p. 62.
Xpress Reviews, June 10, 2011, Julia Cox, review of Gaylord Phoenix.
ONLINE
Architects Newspaper, https://archpaper.com/ (June 1, 2018), “Fake Explores Gender Identity and Sexuality through Architectural Drawings.”
Artnet, https://news.artnet.com/ (June 8, 2015), Brian Boucher, “USC7 Dropout and Transgender Artist Edie Fake’s Mesmerizing Drawings Explore Queer Geometries.”
Artspace, https://www.artspace.com/ (August 24, 2018), author profile.
Chicago Reader, https://www.chicagoreader.com/ (July 25, 2018), Noah Berlatsky, review of Memory Palaces.
Hyperallergic, https://hyperallergic.com/ (January 11, 2013), Alicia Eler, review of Memory Palaces.
Lambda Literary, https://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (March 10, 2011), Cathy Camper, review of Gaylord Phoenix.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (July 17, 2014), Joshua Michael Demaree, review of Gaylord Phoenix and Memory Palaces.
Lumpen, http://www.lumpenmagazine.org/ (November 19, 2015), author profile.
Nothing Major, http://nothingmajor.com/ (April 18, 2013), Matt Putrino, “The Chicago Artist Talks Queer History Research, Snacking, and Living Like a Nomad in Grease-powered Buses.”
Outline, https://theoutline.com/ (July 10, 2018), Ann-Derrick Gaillot, “Edie Fake’s ‘Little Stranger’ Is the Most Delightfully Weird, Touching Comic You’ll Read This Year.”
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (May 17, 2011), Zach Dodson, author interview.
Shandaken, http://www.shandakenprojects.org/ (August 24, 2018), author profile.
Western Exhibitions, http://westernexhibitions.com/ (August 24, 2018), author profile.
The Rumpus Interview with Edie Fake
By Zach Dodson
May 17th, 2011
Edie Fake is on the verge. His first book, Gaylord Phoenix (Secret Acres), is a collection of comics about a gay bird-man which have appeared in tantalizing little chapbooks for the past seven years. Fake has lived all over: Providence, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore. He returned to hometown Chicago last year after the bus he lived on broke down and joined the staff at the venerable Quimby’s bookstore. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists, and recently received a Critical Fierceness Grant from Chances Dances for his next big project, a gay history scroll of Chicago.
***
The Rumpus: Gaylord Phoenix isn’t easy to describe. If you had to give an elevator pitch, what would you say?
Edie Fake: “Oh, well, you see…” I’d say, “…it’s all about this young, wandering Gaylord being reborn as a bird-man. His journey is an epic magical roller coaster ride through a psychedelic microcosm of homoerotic smut and gender meltdown and, the whole way through, he’s recovering and reconciling the violent, painful parts of his past with his powerful present self. Then there’s a great orgy scene at the end.”
Rumpus: Sold! Hollywood loves an orgy! Sex is obviously a big deal in this book. A lot of the Gaylord’s exploits directly involve it or result from it. How do you see this story relating to sexuality and gender?
Fake: I wanted the comic to be set in a queer world, where sex, sexuality and gender were all messy, surreal and fluid. It’s important to me that those things don’t have to look like I’ve been told they should look like–because that’s not how I’ve ever seen them. Pinning erotic stuff down tends to strip its meaning away, but I think being playful and weird can revive it. Gaylord’s exploits are, in large part, about not being afraid: to be a sex freak, to have a freaky body, to want a freaky experience. I wanted very much to keep the story sex-positive and still talk about violence, rage and sadness, while maintaining a vision of overwhelming queer ecstasies.
Rumpus: Speaking of Gay Utopia: Can you speak a bit about community and the Fingers tour, and how that has fed into your work?
Fake: An idea of community and kinship (much love to Lee Relvas for bringing this word into my life) has fueled the comics I make and almost all the work I do. Hopefully, not in the sense that I just want to preach to the choir, but more like I want to do my part to help build a queer world–with the preacher, the choir and everybody else.
The Fingers tour was part of this period of time that I owned and lived on a giant grease powered school bus–I’ve tried recently to talk coherently about it, and I always fail miserably at describing all the bliss and mayhem. I would say that touring has done the amazing thing of making a “social network” feel really, really real, not just like some internet game. There’s some physical power in that, to meet humans (and animals!) to share things with even in places you seldom go. It’s so nourishing, and its often so flexible. To have things to share with people is a really important exchange. For me, it’s usually comics, prints or performances making up for my lack of practical skills. I’m drawn to self-publishing–the world of zines and comics mostly, because I am always thrilled by bartering, seeing what other people are up to in a way where our ideas are physical, accessible and can be traded easily. It’s a way of sharing resources, I think, and that feels like such a rich place to build things from.
Rumpus: Gaylord Phoenix employs a visual language that’s all your own. Comic book conventions (panels, speech bubbles, narrative sequences) are replaced with your own clever devices. Were you purposefully eschewing those conventions? Or was it more instinctual, just form following function?
Fake: I started drawing Gaylord while I was thinking about ideas for an animated film. I had just gotten my own Bolex camera at the time, and I’m schooled in handiwork animation–I love it. I think a lot of the visual language for the Gaylord, especially the way speech and vision are projected, comes from film, and I like what it connotes.
I flat-out have a lot of trouble thinking in panels, especially with the way I want the story to move through a page, so I prefer a page where the characters can reoccur in the same scene. That makes their place in space and in their bodies more flexible and vibrant. At the core though, the layout and pacing have always been almost exclusively from the gut, where I won’t start a new page until the one I’m working on pushes things forward.
Rumpus: So… Where can I get a nose cone that projects my thoughts?
Fake: In terms of nose cones you are going to need an empty toilet paper roll, some paint, a piece of string, tape or glue and one of those laser pointers that does laser shapes.
Rumpus: What’s your process like? Did you write first, or did it begin with the visual?
Fake: There’s a funny sort of planning behind it. Whenever I’d start a new issue of Gaylord it’d come into my head as a few key visual scenes, and I’d make teeny-tiny drawings of them, like one-inch-by-half-an-inch, just to keep the idea in mind. Then I’d draw out about forty of these tiny little boxes (one for each page) and I’d start trying to place where the first key images would go and what language would work. Once I had about the first ten thumbnail pages of written language mapped out something would happen, mostly all the other images and language, would gush out and snap into place and I’d have my plan. A few times though, the opposite would occur–I’d get ten pages of planning deep and everything would seem wrong, the language would be empty and not funny and the plot would seem contrived, so I’d scrap everything and wait for a new round of visual directions to lead me somewhere new. Ouch. Mostly it would happen fast and small, though, and then this little plan could be stretched and rearranged pretty easily. That smallness kept everything a little less than perfectly planned and let me be flexible with the story as I was drawing out the actual pages.
Rumpus: A really enjoyable thing for me, as a reader, was puzzling out the meanings and effects of various things/creatures/magics in the book. It would be a crime to decode it, so I won’t ask what the crystal claw is, or how the whispy deep magic of the lower phoenix works, but maybe you could us me one little key to something in the book?
Fake: Something that maybe isn’t part of the plot but informs the story is the ways the book tries to handle the codes of the Tarot. Its something I’m always trying to learn more about and definitely tried to stay aware of while I was drawing. There are a couple pages that are direct mimicry of certain cards, but perhaps with complicated meanings, like the spread of the Chariot card drawn with the spectacle of a drag ball. There are a few pages that are like the “Aces” of the deck, points that things wildly spring forth form, and other elements, implements and numbers that I tried to line up. I’m not an authority on the Tarot, but I do love dealing directly with the symbolic meanings in numbers, symbols and patterns. Water is the emotional element, cups are water. Air is tied to intellect, ideas, swords/knives and, in the case of Gaylord Phoenix, memory. Earth is linked to physical concerns and the body, so it makes sense that’s where the book concludes. The four wizards are this four-posted structure of stable-but-shallow solutions, the Gaylord can and has to go deeper. With Tarot-oriented symbols, I tried to choose things carefully, and yet not get bogged down or bog things down with a system I am just beginning to learn.
Fake: It should also be noted, while I was drawing this Gaylord series a bunch of amazers in Portland and the West Coast published the Collective Tarot Deck, which is just a mind-blowing powerful project. The traditional suits are reimagined in this queer, feminist, radical way that is still faithful to the traditional intent of the cards. A super-inspiring force to see come together at the same time I was dropping little crumbs about this kind of thing throughout the Gaylord comics.
Rumpus: The collected work reveals your evolution as an artist and story-maker in a really intriguing way. When you started putting out mini-comics years ago, was there an end in sight?
Fake: It totally took seven years to get this all together, but I’ve got some good excuses for the amount of time, and I’m really glad it took so long. When I first began, I’d put out a 40-page segment every year and it was totally open-ended, with no idea as to how, or if, it would conclude. After I had done four issues like that, I started a tattoo apprenticeship and that ate up all my time and pretty drastically changed my drawing style. When I came back to Gaylord after a three-year hiatus, my patience for drawing had finally caught up to the visions I had for filling a page. When I look through the book, the point where the Gaylord reopens his leg wound is the point where the drawings take a notable turn towards the extravagant. It’s really satisfying to me, and it was tempting to re-do everything with some newfound “chops”. However, I think the cruder-style at the beginning is specific for the way the story is told at first. To redraw it seemed sort of futile, like it would just end up overworked and there’d be nothing to figure out in the drawings. I am so happy I let the old material be–I really like watching the plot grow up and into itself.
Rumpus: How did the tattoo work change your style?
Fake: Tattooing made me a real uptighty about shapes and visual clarity and smooth linework. It also had me drawing all the time, stuff I would never in a million years think about drawing, so it was constantly about problem solving and visual innovation. There’s also the vast history of tattoo art, and I found a lot of drawing answers I’d been looking for in classic American tattoo flash.
Rumpus: What else do you count in the influences department? Paisley, RISD, the Maya?
Fake: That about sums it all up! I love looking at textiles, especially ones with unusual dye jobs or ones where the pattern is in the weave of the fabric. Also: cellular diagrams, acupressure charts (any kind of diagram or cross section, really), desert lifeforms, caves and caverns, Carol Rama, heraldry, hand painted signage, surrealist collage, conspiracy magazines, Ernst Haeckel, Emory Douglas, Emma Kunz, fungus and mold, novelty architecture and rolling homes.
Rumpus: A terrible last question, but I think I just have to know: What’s next?
Fake: The project I always say is “next” and what I realize is going to be “next” for a while, is to draw scroll that acts as a sort of beautiful map of gay history in Chicago. It’s going super slow and it’s daunting, there’s a lot of research which I am learning about how to approach, but I’m taking it on. I’ve been continually working on a related series of drawings to this idea which are vibrant imagined facades of former LGBTIQ(etc….) establishments in Chicago. The idea of these fantasy buildings based on real spaces is to portray the energy and beauty of intentional gay space.
Immediately right now, I am getting back into screen printing at the Spudnik Press here in Chicago and that feels like such a healthy thing to do. I love the mechanics of staying up all night printing. I’m going to be doing some design work for a herbal first aid project local permaculturalist Nance Klehm is developing. Also, I am starting to draw looser and goofier comics, which are mostly about a bunch of clowns.
***
For more visit EdieFake.com.
Zach Dodson has launched such experiments as Featherproof Books, Bleached Whale Design, and The Show ’n Tell Show. His writing has appeared in Monsters & Dust, ACM, Take the Handle, and Proximity Magazine. He is currently working on his second novel, a sci-fi/historical southwestern adventure romance about bats. More from this author →
Edie Fake
b. 1980, Chicagoland
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Nowhere Fast 2017, gouache, ink and acrylic on panel, 24 x 36 inches
Edie Fake’s colorful architectural paintings and drawings depict manifestations of queer spaces and explore their meaning, blurring lines between connection and solitude, architecture and body. Architectural elements are used as visual metaphors for the ways in which definition and validation elude trans identities. These structures come together to map what Fake considers to be a liminal landscape of self-definition. The imagery depicted — imagined architecture, stages, parade floats and art deco buildings — combines parts of Fake’s family history with aspects of queer history and a sort of psychic geography of trans people in society. Fake is dealing with the construction and corruption of queer and trans identities and states, “It’s a lot of heavy stuff, but also not without an ecstatic aspect, even to its more sinister moments.”
Edie Fake’s drawings, comics books and publications have been written about it in artforum, ArtNews, The Comics Journal, Art 21, The Guardian, Hyperallergic and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a solo shows at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY and Marlborough Contemporary, NYC, and in group shows at the Museum of Art and Design, NYC and the Institute of Art at VCU in Richmond, VA. Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980 and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. Fake is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and he currently lives and works in Joshua Tree, California.
Edie Fake Follow
Born
1980
Hometown
Chicago, IL
Lives and Works
Chicago, IL
Education
BFA Film, Rhode Island School of Design, 2002
Artist Website
The act of “fighting for a Gay Utopia” is at the center of Edie Fake’s art practice, which includes books, zines, comics, drawings, and tattoos as well as video, installation, and performance. His graphic drawings re-imagine queer and feminist spaces through mythologies and complex architectural forms. “All of my drawings start with a cycle of gathering found objects–scraps, charms, trash, old books, sketches of architectural ornamentation, fabric, and historical anecdotes. I basically assemble a nest of source material around me as I work–I like the alchemy that can happen inside a big, physical mess,” explains the artist.
Began in 2002, his ongoing micocomic series Gaylord Phoenix follows a sexualy nonbinary hero on an epic journey to create an identity uninfluenced by expectation. Despite approaching deeply personal questions, the tone is playful–full of fantastical creatures and whimsical diagrammatic shapes. Fake eschews the linear narrative of traditional comics in favor of a series of illustrations.
Fake’s work has been exhibited both locally and internationally and his drawings have been included in Hot and Cold, LTTR, Creative Time Comics, and the anthology, Gay Genius. He’s received a Critical Fierceness Grant for queer art and was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists. The artist’s first collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, received the 2011 Ignatz award for Outstanding Graphic Novel.
USC7 Dropout and Transgender Artist Edie Fake’s Mesmerizing Drawings Explore Queer Geometries
The maniacal detail evokes Outsider art.
Brian Boucher, June 8, 2015
Edie Fake, Sugar in the Tank, 2015, ink and gouache on paper. Courtesy Western Exhibitions, Chicago.
An artist who dropped out of a top MFA program in protest is opening a ravishing solo show of maniacally detailed drawings this month in Chicago.
Edie Fake, a transgender artist who left the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art along with all six of his classmates in protest last month (see The USC Roski Fiasco Points to the Corrosion of Art Education Nationwide), creates visually riveting drawings, some depicting architecture, some pure abstractions.
A new show, “Grey Area,” takes place at Chicago’s Western Exhibitions (June 19–July 18), during LGBT Pride Month. It’s hard to read the title as dealing with anything but a realm free of gender binaries.
Edie Fake, Just a Stage, 2015, ink and gouache on hand-dyed paper.
Courtesy Western Exhibitions, Chicago.
Just as the transgender movement is reaching a new level of visibility with Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover (see Annie Leibovitz Shoots First Portraits of Caitlyn Jenner), ironically, Fake’s work often deals with euphemism and coded language. Titles like Sugar in the Tank and The Friends of Dorothy, two drawings in the upcoming show, refer to old slang terms for homosexuals.
Sugar in the Tank turns such derisive slang into a joyous geometric visual riot, with interlocking shapes in bright hues. While Fake’s work has often been compared to Islamic tilework and quilt patterns, it also recalls the obsessive character of much Outsider art, perhaps an even more apt considering that the LGBTQ population is so often marginalized.
Gender Changer uses a more staid palette to depict a hulking brick building whose symmetry is inspired by male and female duality. In focusing on a façade, it recalls Fake’s 2013 solo “Memory Palaces,” at Chicago’s Thomas Robertello Gallery, in which he showed drawings depicting the façades of historical Chicago gay bars. Even when they’re abstract, the new drawings’ dense patterning evokes colonnades, domes and arches.
Edie Fake, Sue, 2015, ink, enamel and gouache on hand-dyed paper.
Courtesy Western Exhibitions, Chicago.
Fake, born in 1980 just outside of Chicago, got a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002, and since then been busy creating zines like the widely beloved Gaylord Phoenix. In a video interview, Fake described an image of the main character in that serial zine stabbing his leg, saying it echoed his own ritual of injecting testosterone into his thigh. He also revved up a vegetable oil-fueled bus for “The FINGERS Tour,” a five-week queer art and performance expedition he co-organized with L.A. artist/musician Lee Relvas in 2009.
Then, a year ago, Fake left Chicago for California. “I’m going to USC for straight-up art,” he told the Los Angeles Review of Books. That chapter in Fake’s life ended last month after a year of what the former students call a “bait and switch,” in which the school retracted various promises (see Entire 2016 MFA Class Drops Out of USC’s Roski School of Art and Design).
The USC7, as they’ve been dubbed, say they plan to stay in the Los Angeles area and undertake projects collectively. If Fake’s ecstatically colorful and emotionally rich drawings are any indication, we’re looking forward to more shows by these brave souls.
Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980. He graduated from the RISD in 2002 and has since clocked time in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Baltimore. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. In 2011 he helped found the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) and writes reviews for the blog Book By Its Cover.
Fake explores gender identity and sexuality through architectural drawings
By The Editors • June 1, 2018
Architecture Art East In Pictures
Artist Edie Fake explores gender identity and sexuality through architectural drawings. Blazing Star and Killer Dyke, 2012. (Edie Fake)
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Chicago-based illustrator Edie Fake’s colorful architectural drawings explore the concept of queer spaces. In his work, identity, gender, and sexuality are metaphorically depicted through architectural elements, both real and imagined. This series is currently on display at the Museum of Arts and Design as part of the Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro exhibition, on view through September 9.
This weeks Comic is by mega-talented artist/magician Edie Fake and is an installment of Edie’s comic series “clowns” which was exquisitely produced for Lumpen over the past several years. Edie is a queer artist and zinemaker living in Los Angeles. He was awarded one of Printed Matter’s first Awards for Artists and his book Gaylord Phoenix won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. His most recent publication, Memory Palaces, showcases drawings of brightly re-imagined building facades depicting vanished queer and feminist spaces from Chicago’s past as resources for the present. Edie recently spoke as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Comic Artist of the Week: Edie Fake
by lumpenmagazine · November 19, 2015
Edie Fake
The Chicago artist talks queer history research snacking and living like a nomad in grease-powered buses.
Interview By Matt Putrino, April 18, 2013
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Just a small sample of the work Edie Fake has completed in the last few years gives you an idea of his recent bio: a food fetish zine called Foie Gras (based on some unintentionally lewd images in Joy of Cooking), a queer-mytho-log comic of Chicago named Gaylord Phoenix, and enough T-shirts and tattooed bodies to fill the grease-conversion school bus in which he toured a variety show called "Fingers" around the US.
His latest (and much more stationary) project, "Memory Palaces," recreates doors, entryways, and buildings, each significant to Chicago's queer history using geometric patterns, gouache, and ballpoint pen. We caught up with Fake on the phone from his Chicago studio.
You did a performance tour called “Fingers” in a converted vegetable oil bus. How did you find a bus like that?
When I got the bus it was living at this place called the Flower Shop in San Francisco, a lot of the folks there had done really innovative grease conversions on large vehicles. It’s a super squirrely, non-science science. A lot of kids who were part of that scene were buying old buses and doing amazing grease conversions. The person I bought the bus from did a really amazing switchover.
Then you had to scour for vegetable oil?
Yeah, sometimes it was legitimate and sometimes it was barely legal. I had a pair of coveralls and I was like, “This is my mechanic costume!” I’m really small of build and they were oversized, so I felt like a mechanic clown. And being like, “I have this bus I need to fill with your old grease, can I do it?” It was a total learning process. The first time I was on the bus and getting grease myself we found this dumpster with grease, but it was rancid desert grease. It was disgusting, it had dead fish in it. I was like, “Well I guess this will work...we’ll filter it a couple of times.” It was like headache-vomit. Learning that there’s more out there than just awfulness was important.
What kind of places were you guys performing? Were they proper venues or book stores and house shows?
It was a totally mixed bag. We did a show at the sculpture center in Queens, but also we’d play house shows and just spaces, a variety of spaces where experimenting with, where performing, could happen. There were nine people on the tour minimum, and we just had some big Google-clusterfuck in terms of organizing it. People were like, “I can get this city, and this city,” so it was through different peoples’ connections.
It’s interesting to take a show like that on the road. A lot of artists and authors just do hometown stuff and one-off shows. What was the impulse to do a proper tour?
Well, the fact that I lived on a bus. I crash landed in Baltimore for a season, which was winter, and not the smartest thing to do. But it was fun. By the time spring rolled around, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I live on a bus. I need to drive it.” The reason I lived on the bus was to be very nomadic and take everything with me, have that be a resource. It was because I had a bus: the vehicle was there and the will was there.
To change gears from the tour, you work at Quimby’s book store in Chicago during the day.
I do. I’m the comics sommelier.
Does that mean most of your studio time happens late at night?
Totally. I’m pretty nocturnal at this point. I usually run the late shift at the book store and do studio hours until about four or five every night.
Did you always work so late?
I’ve always leaned toward the lateness. I like how quiet it is at night. There are no distractions. I couldn’t like, go to the bakery. I could go get an all-night taco, but it’s not like during the day where I can be like, “I have to go run this errand, that’s more important than drawing this thing.” At night it’s like, “No, it’s time to do it.”
You've described screen printing as a healthy thing to do. That reminded me of your tattoo work in a way because they’re both kind of physically demanding mediums.
I think spiritually, being involved in the physical production transfers into the energy of the object but, also in terms of my commitment to making something, being totally hands-on feels very healthy to me. Sending something off to the printer still seems really weird as an idea. When it’s like, “But I could learn how to use this finicky equipment instead.” Whether I'm drawing or silk screening, it’s the long way around. I work very slow, that’s how I like it.
So how long have you been doing tattoos?
I don’t tattoo anymore. I still design tattoos for people. I did a year and half apprenticeship, and then another little while doing tattoos in San Francisco. In terms of making me commit to drawing, it really did the trick. You have to draw things you wouldn’t normally. It was like boot camp or something. Putting them on people was casual, but it was also, like, blood ceremony. Like a casual blood ceremony!
How much back and forth is there with the people you’re tattooing?
Sometimes the person is very involved in the process, sometimes people are just like, “Fill in everything black, I’m going to sit back and take the pain.” I was lucky to have a lot of scrappy friends who were like, “Totally do an apprentice tattoo on me.”
I developed a design sense drawing specific things. People would be like, “Draw a cat...but how you draw it.” Then I draw a cat and they’re like, “No, more like how you draw it!”
How do you approach designing something wearable like a T-shirt or a tattoo as opposed to drawing a comic?
I think tattooing is a special kind of illustration work and design work. And you have to think about the element of a gift, and developing something that’s appropriate to a cause outside of yourself. So for tattoos I would think about it like choosing the perfect gift for someone.
How did you first get involved with Secret Acres?
It’s a really clowny story. They had contacted me when they were first starting their press, but I was living in New York and working on the west coast at the time in this film job. So they sent me a letter that I didn’t get because I hadn’t been home in four months. Then I ran into them at a comics show, and I still didn’t know they had contacted me, and they casually asked me if I’d ever been interested in publishing. I thought they were fans of the zine, I didn’t think they had any interest. When I got back to New York I got their letter, and we had a dinner meeting and it was like, “Oh! You guys are the guys from San Francisco who were really cute!” It kind of almost didn’t happen.
I’m curious about your research process. A lot of your work is about imagined histories and actual historical events. Where do you start?
I guess it’s a mix of personal sources and things that I read up on. For this last series of drawings I was reading up on gay history, almost in a casual way because I didn’t know a lot about the queer history in Chicago. So any time a name really struck me I would make a note of it to delve deeper into that realm. Through the project I came to realize I’m not a great researcher: I’m a research snacker. It’s the potential of the past I’m after, not the nostalgia for it. It’s a combination of knowing that something happened, and then “What if it was realized like this?”
Your website has this unmarked stream of images that you pulled from zines that could be hard to track down now. The site reads like an auxiliary project to the zines themselves. How did you choose which images to digitize and which to keep in the printed zines?
My website hasn’t been touched in a little while, but I think about what looks good cascading after things. The website was me half-assedly teaching myselfing HTML. I was like, “You know what looks best, the prettiest images from the zines on a white background.” My Tumblr is a wet dream for me. I don’t post things that often, but that is my preferred way of looking at the Internet. Beautiful images just endlessly cascading.
Edie Fake’s drawings, comics books and publications have been written about in Artforum, ArtNews, The Comics Journal, Art 21, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a solo show at Marlborough Chelsea and group shows at Andrew Edlin in New York, Kavi Gupta in Chicago, John Connelly Presents in NYC, the Nikolaj Museum in Copenhagen, LACE in Los Angeles, and threewalls in Chicago. Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980 and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. Fake is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and he currently lives and works in Joshua Tree, California.
Edie Fake’s ‘Little Stranger’ is the most delightfully weird, touching comic you’ll read this year
An interview with the artist, whose dazzling new collection challenges readers to rethink comic and societal conventions.
Edie Fake / Courtesy of Secret Acres - Excerpt from "Anal Sex For Perverts".
Ann-Derrick Gaillot
Jul—10—2018 09:13AM EST
In the opening comic of the book Little Stranger, a fanged balloon-like creature with a tail made of the alphabet zips through a maze of bold lines until it reaches a forest of tree-like bodies, enters one, dances, and zips off to a dollar store on what looks to be a flying watermelon. The book only gets weirder, and more inventive, from there. Through his stories and zines of beings in search of identity and form (though the subject of some of the pieces included can’t be nailed down so simply), comic artist, zine maker, and painter Edie Fake's stories focus on communicating experience and feeling rather than linear narratives and passages of time. Now, for the first time, over a decade’s worth of Fake’s underground zines have been collected in this new book, Little Stranger, a compendium of unique visual explorations of non-binary bodies and queer community, as well as abstract feelings and experiences much more difficult to sum up in words.
Little Stranger by Edie Fake Courtesy of Secret Acres
Having started his career in the Chicago queer and DIY arts communities, Fake moved to California in 2014 to attend the MFA Program at the University of Southern California Roski School of Art. But after he and six other students dropped out to protest rescinded financial support among other depletions of the program, Fake moved to the desert outside of Joshua Tree, where he lives and works today and compiled Little Stranger. The collection has echoes of his 2011 book Gaylord Phoenix, an abstract narrative mythology about a queer creature on a psychedelic journey of self-discovery for which Fake won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. Similar to that work, Little Stranger takes the reader on a fantastical journey warping narrative and comics convention at some times, and doing away with them altogether at others. Made up of Fake’s zines from 2002 to 2017, the pieces in Little Stranger explore a number of drawing styles touching on everything from intricate patterning to vintage advertising, cookbooks, and diagrams. One-off, context-less drawings appear between mini-narratives about approaching the unknown. And while the book doesn’t demand any one story or interpretation, Fake, who is trans, often explores bodies and sexual experience in his zines, embracing the absurdity and fear that surrounds both subjects.
An excerpt from "String of Pearls". Edie Fake / Courtesy of Secret Acres
With its fearless embrace of all things pleasurable, weird, and a little scary, Little Stranger, which will be released July 17, offers a unique, visceral reading experience unlike any other comic, graphic novel, or zine I’ve ever read. Fake spoke to The Outline via phone from his home in California to shed a bit more light on his new book and share some of the intention behind his work.
How did you decide to put your zines together in Little Stranger?
My publisher Secret Acres came to me with the idea. At first I was like, there's not enough material, and also thought that it wouldn't make sense together because there's a bunch of different stuff from a bunch of different times. But I think the book came together really nicely as a collection of short stuff. It's all stuff that came out in small press editions, so it's nice to have it all collected in one place instead of a thousand squirrelier places. It [all] makes sense together as some kind of queer sex liminal fantasy, or something.
How did you decide what you wanted to include and how you wanted to put them together?
The order was the most fun because it was kind of like making a mixtape. It was really nice to take a look at the stuff and be like oh there's like this thing that loosely connects this to this and that makes it blend easily one into the other. When we first started putting it together I was like it's all going to be scrambled eggs, nothing's going to fit. And then there's enough threads throughout that I could make it work.
"Clowns 'Clown Vision'" Edie Fake / Courtesy of Secret Acres
An excerpt from "Rico McTaco". Edie Fake / Courtesy of Secret Acres
Did you discover these different threads as you were going through or did know the recurring themes that come up in your work?
There's some approaches I have to making comics that revolve around a similar theme. There were elements that I knew were entrance points for me to make a comic. Like, I'll base some of the character design on like Halloween decorations because I think it is a funny way to access something that's kind of goofy but referencing something scary, and there are just weird beautiful bodies. [I’m] also trying to get the comics to touch either a strange experience or something that I can't quite remember but feel on an emotional level.
And they're not in any sort of chronological order.
Yeah, not really. The book came together more around scenes than around what goes where on a timeline. That's interesting, too, because I can see my thoughts cycling back onto things.
Instead of looking at your work in this linear way.
Yeah, totally, and being like 2002 was like this, 2003 was like that. There's definitely stuff that's much looser, zines that were little illustrations or no narrative, and I'd say almost all that stuff is earlier. I draw this narrative comic Gaylord Phoenix, and when I was between making issues of that I would try and play around with stuff that was based on a single story and more emotional drawings, for lack of a better word.
Your paintings were recently featured in the Paris Review. In your zines you explore bodies and depiction of bodies more. But in your paintings it seems like you focus more on place making and spaces and architecture. Is that fair?
Yeah, absolutely. And [in] my drawing process, if I have an idea and it's pushing to be something that's more narrative I'll probably approach it in a sequential way like a comic or a zine. The paintings seem like ideas that I have less of a narrative grasp on. Paintings can talk about bodies and history and queer identity in this way that they try to push a lot into a single image. Especially stories about or thinking about bodies and vulnerability and sexuality, my mind has a much more narrative take on that, and so I tend [to approach those in] little books. I also like that zines are more of an intimate format. I try and play it by ear, what my ideas tend more towards, and then follow that star to make what I think best suits the way I'm thinking about things. It goes back and forth, too. It's nice to have different approaches.
An excerpt from "L.A. Silence". Edie Fake / Courtesy of Secret Acres
In some of these zines, there's a you character.
Yeah, [with Gaylord Phoenix] people kept asking if I was the character in that series, and I was like well kind of, of course, but it's also a psychedelic fantasy so also not. But drawing myself in the comic[s] almost started as a thought experiment. What if I really was a blatant character in it? I keep doing it because it seems like it is like a powerful approach to making comics. I don't have a really good grasp on making something that would be straight up autobiographical. But I do feel like I'm really interested in portraying trans bodies in the comics and also trying to work in the way a body feels, a visceral kind of examination of my own body and sexuality. They're almost like horror fantasy or something.
Yeah, there's so much in Gaylord Phoenix that is really playful. Little Stranger has that, too, but there's also more frightening imagery around the change and morphing of bodies.
The scripting of all of these starts out super loose and almost dream-like, and then I try and hone it into something that feels really like a story that seems very honest to me. And yet at the same time, I have a lot of fury, I guess, and also appreciation of things that are a little uncomfortable or scary. There's more and more language and honesty around trans bodies. But I think there's still these huge gaps in talking about them sexually in a way that's non-binary and affirming. And although some of these stories are gruesome stuff, I almost felt like I had to take the most visceral path to get to to something that was driving me or like something I was dealing with. I have a lot of missing memory and trying to sort through that is part of what these comics are, too, to the point where it's almost like I get really uncomfortable reading them, and I wrote them. I can't read them straight through because they're about something for me that I still can't articulate. But I'm trying to.
An excerpt from "Night Taps". Edie Fake / Courtesy of Secret Acres
"Creeper" Edie Fake / Courtesy of Secret Acres
You play a lot with panels. Sometimes they're really defined, sometimes they're just one big page, in one they’re windows. What’s the thought process that goes into using comics conventions like panels?
I really have to force myself to use panels, it doesn't come naturally to me. But I also like doing really corny things with panels, like making them into windows or something. There are comics in this book that almost start off with the premise of me forcing myself to learn how to use panels because I never think about that with the pacing of a comic. I'm more interested in them as creating a spatial thing in the comic rather than necessarily moving the timing along, the pacing along, at a certain rate. I'm much more interested in them being windows or doors or a panel being an entire room than it being a moment in time.
You depict bodies in so many different ways. Is that something you’ve explored for a long time?
I do feel like there things that a drawing loses if I just go in for a totally realistic representation of a body. In order to sprinkle it with the gay magic that I know is there, I lean much more into adding something that's fantastical. I'm not afraid to have bodies that transform really quickly or morph or change into other things or have this kind of cosmic erogenous aspects to them.
An excerpt from "Fois Gras 2". Edie Fake / Courtesy of Secret Acres
Do you ever think about the reader when you're making your comics and zines or is it a completely personal process?
I do think about the reader in the way that I want the comics to be most legible to queer bodies and people. Just like anyone, I want to feel seen in the world. I have a transmasculine, non-binary body. I feel like it's more and more represented in culture, but there’s also a lot of missing language for it, in a way. And so my first thoughts of audience are [that] I want [my work] to help contribute to a conversation of queerness. And then if it's entertaining in a general sense that's great, too. I remember when Gaylord came out, there were a lot of reviews of it that were like this book isn't for everybody and I was like, no book is for everybody. When you say a book is for everybody, I'll probably tell you that I hated it.
So who is Little Stranger for?
As the dedication of the book [says], it's for queer weirdos, Queerdoes, and it's specifically for trans and non-binary people, especially. But, yeah, I'm excited if anyone wants to give it a chance and read it.
Drinking with . . . Edie Fake
The local artist previews his first Chicago solo exhibition—and takes our art critic to a hidden gay dive bar.
By Jason Foumberg
Published Jan. 11, 2013
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Second Story is a gay dive bar that is easy to miss. Tucked behind the gigantic Gap on Ohio and Michigan, Second Story is exactly the type of Chicago venue memorialized in Edie Fake’s drawings, some of which are on view in his first Chicago solo exhibition Memory Palaces at Thomas Robertello Gallery. Fake’s drawings refresh the facades of Chicago’s historic gay and lesbian meeting places—mostly bars and nightclubs—as vibrant, stylized mausoleums.
“The drawings are love letters to queer culture,” says Fake, who met me at Second Story after working the nightshift at Quimby’s. At 10 p.m. on a Wednesday night, Michigan Avenue was empty like some godforsaken place, but Second Story was afire with club music, Christmas lights, and barflies. Fake and I settled in to a corner with gin-and-tonics poured with a (very) heavy hand.
Fake is one of those very rare crossover artists that happily inhabits several genres. His drawings are always highly anticipated in the local art world and he’s also beloved in the comics and ‘zine scene. Fake calls it his “split personality” because he won’t display his screenprinted comics on a gallery wall, nor will he print them in limited editions like fine art objects. Fresh from polishing his new series of drawings for the recently opened exhibition, Fake is now arm deep in co-organizing the second annual Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE), which opens mid-June at the Center on Halsted.
The Chicago native moved around the country a lot and wrote a handful of break-up letters to various cities before finally returning. Lately, Chicago has been incredibly good to Fake—“It’s obscene!” he says in jest of his recent success. At turns Fake trades tongue-in-cheek for thoughtfulness. We chatted about the revival of risograph printing and the future of print media (only books that rise to the level of fetish objects will survive, we agreed), and then lingered on his collection of anthropomorphic hotdogs that he’s readying for a collection to be titled Lil’ Buddies. Fake’s new year’s resolution is to “get back on the Internet,” though with his upcoming stint at the LA Art Book Fair Fake will more likely spend his time screenprinting and drawing than surfing the Web. When the disco ball turned on overhead, Fake joked, “We’ve made it!” and we retreated into the chill night.
Memory Palaces is on view at Thomas Robertello Gallery (27 N. Morgan) through 2/16.
Little Stranger
Publishers Weekly. 265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Little Stranger
Edie Fake. Secret Acres, $21.95 trade paper
(172p) ISBN 978-0-9991935-0-1
Fake (Gaylord Phoenix) presents a striking, occasionally scatological collection of his short comics and drawings from recent years, culled from various zines and underground publications. Employing concise imagery and minimal text, and through symbology and analogy, Fake examines sex and gender with generous amounts of sly, irreverent humor. In the three-part "Foie Gras," Fake substitutes images of food and food preparation for sexual acts and genitalia, while in "LA Silence," a trip to a wellness center brings up post-gender-confirmation surgery issues in an unsettling fashion. In the one-page "Anal Sex for Perverts," a drawing of a shell with a pink opening carries the caption: "Before I ask say yes." Other more cryptic pieces require some work from readers to puzzle out, but that's just part of the fun of Fake's oeuvre: his comics maintain a playfully naughty mystery. (Appropriately, the book is dedicated in part to "the Queerdos out there.") Fake deconstructs gender and human anatomy, sex and desire, then puts them back together again, on his own messy, artful terms. This provocative graphic collection pushes boundaries, and then breaks them open. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Little Stranger." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 62. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099977/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9c36d9e1. Accessed 25 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099977
Fake, Edie. Gaylord Phoenix
Julia Cox
Xpress Reviews. (June 10, 2011):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Fake, Edie.
In its quest to discover its sexual identity, a creature called the Gaylord Phoenix takes the reader on a magical voyage through dreamscapes and "deep magic" as it moves from fear and loneliness through lust, jealousy, betrayal, and loss toward forgiveness and selfdiscovery. The physical and emotional journey is a metaphor for a transgender experience, but the broader themes of sexual searching and individuation invite all readers to connect with the story. Text is limited, and it is the teal and coral art, with its deliberately naive style and borderless, free flow across the page, that carries the reader through. The art has a retro appeal, and the psychedelic-goes-postmodern feel suits the story line's passage from innocence to experience. Unfortunately, elements of both text and art are occasionally cut off by the book's binding, and this lessens the tale's impact.
Verdict This mythic vision of the transgender experience balances intensity and playfulness. While the search for identity--sexual and otherwise--is certainly a teen theme, this treatment is abstract and the sexual content too explicit for most teen collections. Recommended for adult readers.--Julia Cox, Penticton P.L., BC
Cox, Julia
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cox, Julia. "Fake, Edie. Gaylord Phoenix." Xpress Reviews, 10 June 2011. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A259589785/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=91f37037. Accessed 25 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A259589785
Edie Fake's Memory Palaces dazzles
The comic artist reimagines spots from Chicago LGBTQ history in a new book.
By Noah Berlatsky @nberlat
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Club LaRay by Edie Fake
Courtesy Secret Acres
Memory Palaces
By Edie Fake (Secret Acres)
Reading Sat 5/17, 7 PM
Quimby's
1854 W. North
773-342-0910
quimbys.com
Edie Fake is a one-person comics locus. He works at Quimby's, the city's alt comics hub, and he's one of the forces behind the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, which holds its second annual convention from May 31 through June 1.
The trans artist's latest project is about community—specifically, the queer community. In the recently released book Memory Palaces, Fake offers a stunning series of illustrated reimaginings of spots from Chicago's LGBTQ history: bars, bathhouses, bookstores, clinics, venues. He turns each into intensely patterned, luminous 2-D facades, some of which Thomas Robertello Gallery exhibited last year for Fake's first solo show in Chicago.
One of the more demure pieces, Blazing Star, which takes its name from an old Chicago lesbian organization, actually looks like a building, with red brickwork, a portcullis window, and the eponymous star on the door. Other images abandon architectural pretense, existing as shimmering designs that invite you not so much into a particular structure as into Fake's brain, as if community and consciousness were inextricable.
Fake's work, like that of the comic artist Gaylord Phoenix, has always dealt with the malleability and interpenetrability of gender, and Memory Palaces, with its focus on queer spaces, is no exception. The bright colors and intricate line work make his images appear computer generated, suggesting the traditionally male sphere of video games. At the same time, the meticulous detail and patterning evoke traditionally female crafts such as quilting. The result isn't ungendered so much as a celebration of how gender can be a part of community in multiple and dazzling ways. Memory Palaces turns the landscape of Chicago into a dream of wonder and love, where everyone is welcome.
Fake Places: The Work of Edie Fake
By Joshua Michael Demaree
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JULY 17, 2014
AN OBSERVER glancing quickly around the Bridgeport coffee shop on Chicago’s South Side where we meet to talk could easily overlook comics artist Edie Fake. He is small in frame, with dark hair and a light complexion, with a perpetual fly-on-the-wall air, more interested in why anyone would want to be the center of attention than in commanding the position himself. As he talks, he doodles or folds a piece of paper, becoming at times very excited and looking up with wide eyes in moments of deep engagement: this is when the real Fake comes out.
“One of the most important things about what I’ve been doing is sharing it in person with people,” Fake muses. “I love book fairs and getting to digest other people’s ideas. I think that’s really why I make stuff. It’s a call-and-response.”
Fake’s initial reserve belies an immense sociability, grounded in kindness and openness. It’s the reason he’s becoming a powerhouse in the American alternative comics scene — an organizer for (and founder of) the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) and employee of the city’s bastion of the underground press, Quimby’s Bookstore. He’s also a flourishing celebrity within queer art circles, with a recent interview with Rad Queers, a video series highlighting the work of queer artists and organizations. “It’s super exciting!” he says of his growing popularity. “I meet people and they say, ‘Oh! You’re Edie!’ They already know my work and I’m like, ‘How did that happen!?’ It’s a huge compliment.”
His unassuming demeanor is more than a mannerism. It’s integral to Fake’s genius: his work appears cute and fun and simplistic on the surface, but quickly reveals a biting intelligence. In his long-running series, Gaylord Phoenix (anthologized by Secret Acres in 2010), he deftly explores deeply personal questions of identity without sacrificing his waggish playfulness. Including work from Fake’s earliest years, it traces the evolution of Fake’s work over time. “The drawings in the beginning are really scrappy and just piles of stuff I was interested in,” he remembers. “Weird diagrams and games and little figures.” The later work reveals a neater, more intentionally designed visual approach paired with metaphoric and nuanced storylines.
The series follows the journey of an eponymous humanoid hero, “the Gaylord Phoenix,” as the nonbinary protagonist traverses epic landscapes and interacts with a variety of fantastical creatures, both helpful and malevolent, in search of personal fulfillment. For most of the series, the Gaylord is unable to save anyone, recoiling from an unnamed, deep emotional trauma. Ancient Greek heroes were men and gods willing to sacrifice themselves to save others through feats of strength or endurance: the Gaylord is on a similarly epic quest to resist the influences of others, to forge an identity free of expectation. In the end, the Gaylord is capable of self-sacrifice in order to be reborn into the genderless form always desired, and not on anyone else’s terms.
“Very early on, after the first three issues, I mentioned to someone that I saw it as a weird kind of queer mythology,” Fake remembers. “That’s how I saw it.”
It is epic: the story follows a meandering, loose narrative that, again like the mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome, connects to real and personal experiences, all told to help a reader make sense of the world. Fake turns the Gaylord’s quest into a mythopoeic origin story for queerness itself, providing fantastical answers to the difficult questions of sexual and gender identity, questions that rarely have tidy answers.
The book’s layout is not reliant on the common comics panel-and-gutter layout, which comes in his case from his DIY roots. “[My first zines] were really immediate, just ballpoint pen on copy paper. I had read a bunch of comics, but I didn’t necessarily understand why panels were the go-to form. I was also coming from a film and animation background,” Fake adds, referring to his undergraduate work in video at the Rhode Island School of Design. Indeed, each page appears more as a series of storyboarding cards or illustrations rather than the linear narrative of more traditional sequential art. Pushing the boundaries of what the general reader might think of as comics, Fake uses this style in much of his work, including his two ongoing series — Sweetmeats and Lil’ Buddies.
“I did this series before called Foie Gras which tries to build a narrative based on illustrations from The Joy of Cooking. It was a formal experiment,” Fake recounts. “Sweetmeats are all just kind of tiny narratives. I was reprinting stories I had put into anthologies.” Lil’ Buddies is part illustration collection and part documentation of our visual culture. In the series, Fake collects and redraws anthropomorphized objects from advertising signs (think of the smiling, dancing tooth on your dentist’s billboard) and runs an accompanying Tumblr (http://lilbuddies.tumblr.com/).
His most recent published work, Memory Palaces, is a collection of paintings first exhibited in the Thomas Robertello Gallery in Chicago in January of 2013, put out by Secret Acres in April. No normal exhibition catalog, the book of intricately drawn and colored ornate facades lacks any introduction or accompanying commentary. It feels more like a zine — including a stapled saddle stitch binding — and each page displays one painting after the next. Indeed, Palaces might not seem to many like comics at all.
This is okay with Fake, who sometimes eschews the label. “When I want to be quick about it, I’ll say, ‘I’m a zinemaker …’ but I’m interested in how the borders of comics have expanded,” he says. “I don’t think of myself as a cartoonist, necessarily, but on the other hand [Memory Palaces] is definitely comics. It has narrative to it.”
The booklet depicts 15 imagined facades inspired by extinct institutions of Chicago’s LGTBQ history and a few gateways dedicated to friends (such as Dylan Williams, founder of Sparkplug Books and a fellow comics artist who passed away in 2011). Fake reimagines such spaces as Club LaRay, a former predominantly black gay dance club from the 1980s, or Nightgowns, a defunct queer arts space from the early 2000s, turning them into exquisitely embellished palaces. It’s the literalization of the ancient Greek and Roman mnemonic device known as the “method of loci” (also known as a “memory palace,” hence the title), wherein a subject imagines a large palace and places within each room a memory (much in the same way that some forms of quilting instill within each piece of patchwork a memory or dedication). To recall a memory, all one has to do is visualize the palace and enter the room corresponding to the desired stimulus. “That was my impulse with Memory Palaces: to create spaces that people could identify with, but that you don’t need to be in to feel.”
The method mimics natural memory processes in the brain (i.e., it’s easier to find the remote if it’s always in the same place), but in Palaces, the result is more dizzying than clarifying, captivating the reader visually and nostalgically. Fake turns a former lesbian newspaper — The Killer Dyke — into an electrified dive bar of flamboyant stained glass. The Newberry Theatre, a former movie palace turned gay porn theater that closed in 1977 (before Fake was born), is given a second life, complete with an eternal marquee advertising two features: Any Boy Can and The Insatiables. As the reader flips pages, each building becomes a character in and of itself, a repository for both Fake’s memories and those of the reader. “It’s meant to help someone reimagine history or remember old friends,” Fake suggests. Indeed, an arch’s keystone holds the nervousness of a first kiss, and there on a pedestal is your awkward dance at the first gay club you ever went to. Each bar on each window is another queer friend who protected you as you began making a space for yourself in your new, queer world.
Fake bridges the personal and the social, pushing beyond entertainment toward activism. “There are some people that, in reviews of my work, just don’t know how to talk about trans-ness as a part of the story,” Fake states.
When I deal with my own body in space, if some people don’t know how to deal with that, then they won’t give me the time of day. People reading my work often want me to make it more clear, more tidy, but I won’t make it clearer for them. I want to take up the space I take up in the way that I do.
Fake mentions that readers of Phoenix, perhaps wanting to pin down the epic work’s unclear narrative, are quick to conflate the character’s questioning of gender and sexual identity with Fake’s own personal story (which he writes about in Sweetmeats).
“One of the questions I get a lot is: ‘Are you the Gaylord?’ It’s like a ‘Yes, sort of, kind of,’ thing,” he offers. “I don’t really have an interest in drawing autobiographical comics, but I do have a huge interest in drawing trans bodies in space and making that an integral part of the story. That’s part of the universe I walk around in every day so it’s become a huge part of my comics.” Memory Palaces is similarly personal, but Fake’s work goes far beyond autobiography to propose a shared history.
As we sit in the coffee shop, Fake regales me with stories of his nomadic past. Raised in Chicago, he eventually left to attend RISD. He moved to New York City, where his work picked up momentum and the offer from Secret Acres came to publish the — at the time unfinished — Gaylord Phoenix series in a single volume.
It’s a funny story: I was living in New York, but they were LA-based. Secret Acres had sent a letter, but I hadn’t received it [when] I [went to] a book fair in San Francisco. These people came up and said, ‘We love Gaylord Phoenix! Have you thought of having it published ever?’ And I thought they were just fans asking about my ambitions for it, so I said, ‘Maybe. But I love self-publishing!’ They just said, ‘Oh, okay. Well, we’ll look for more of them!’ When I got back to New York and got the letter, I called them up. ‘Yeah, I’d be interested in publishing.’ And I think I said, ‘It’s funny, some people were just asking me if I had ever thought of publishing.’ Then when I went to the meeting, it was them! The superfans!
After the offer from Secret Acres but before finishing Phoenix, Fake bought a school bus and toured around the country. “I went feral for a while. The bus kind of ate my life for a year,” he describes. It did take him to Baltimore, where the bus finally broke down. Weighing his options, he decided to return to Chicago, which, he said, “Welcomed me back with a bear hug.” He arrived back home on the day Michael Jackson died. “I got out of my friend’s car in Chicago and another friend called and said that Michael Jackson was dead. I said, ‘What are you talking about? What witchery is this!?’ I remember it being a really communal day.”
In many ways Fake is a classic nomad; this fall he will be moving to Los Angeles for graduate school. “I’m going to USC for straight-up art,” he says. Fake may be nomadic in terms of space and freedom, but he is (perhaps because of this fact) heavily invested in the ideas and politics of place: how we create them, what they can mean to us, and who in our society is denied their security.
Fake’s work examines the intersections of history and sexual and gender identities, how they can be used to create artwork, and how they can create a place for his readers. In Gaylord Phoenix, he gives gender-neutrality an origin story via a grand queer tale. The anthropomorphized objects in Lil’ Buddies turn ubiquitous advertising conventions into friends, instilling them with a sense of familiarity. (I now point out a Lil’ Buddy whenever I see one.) And in Memory Palaces, Fake gives a second life to institutional spaces that no longer exist in any form — each now devoid of a real space — providing them a historical security and queer readers a mythological origin story of their own.
“Autonomy complicates the definitions of things and the rules about things — especially about gender and sexuality,” Fake said, considering his work’s place and appeal in contemporary comics culture. “I think that knowing who you are, finding out who you are, and claiming who you are can be like the trans 13-year-old who plays baseball but doesn’t have an organized sports teams to join. It’s about an all-is-one kind of thing, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be nuance.”
In her book Belonging: A Culture of Place, bell hooks writes about returning home to rural Kentucky after a long academic career in New York City. In one chapter she discusses porches, the ubiquitous womb-like structures attached to the front and back of any rural home, writing: “A perfect porch is a place where the soul can rest.” In the same way, perfect comics can give openly and sincerely to the reader a place to rest their soul. This is Fake’s most powerful talent and his work’s best quality.
¤
Joshua Michael Demaree drives and pays taxes. He lives in Philadelphia.
‘Gaylord Phoenix’ by Edie Fake
Review by Cathy Camper
March 10, 2011
Reading the comic Gaylord Phoenix (Secret Acres) is a little like watching a psychedelic silent movie, or dropping acid. Unlike talkies, or mainstream comics, or real life, this story is told more in pictures than in words. Like in silent films, words and dialog are static insertions between blooming, exploding images.
And like tripping, the plot — what you the audience get out of the experience — has more to do with how you uniquely read the images you see, as opposed to following a predisposed script.
Gaylord Phoenix is a hairy Sasquatch kind of guy. He falls in love with a cute boy
carrying a video camera. They film, they hug, they pork. Unfortunately, his monstrous crystal bloodlust takes over and he rips the poor kid to shreds. Not to fear, the boy is rescued and stitched up by multi-eyed subterranean dwellers. Now a somnambulist, he totters through a labyrinth whose alligator queen he ends up gatorbating. Crocosnogging.
See, that’s the problem, trying to describe a silent movie or an acid trip wrecks it, makes a parody of it, becomes a clumsy boring paraphrase for experiential visual poetry.
Gaylord Phoenix isn’t happy about his bloodlust. In fact, the rest of the comic is his visual heroic journey towards redemption. It’s a path gay and transgender folks will recognize: one involving the pokes and proddings of science, thrills of sexual discovery, inner hallucinogenic voyages, and the quest to find one’s true self at any cost.
This is where Edie Fake’s artwork takes over. A tale told in two colors, readers will fantasize many more, as paisley swirls the page, as a dark magic of feathers transforms into oceans of tears, as sphinxes and ribbons festoon the court of the Gaylord risen up into the clouds. It’s not a plot you can articulate, but a poetry you will recognize.
There’s sex too, lots of it, and since Gaylord and friends sport genitals like nozzles or tubes the mere mortal question of “who’s on top?” becomes irrelevant…it might be both or neither. Like daydream sex, in these cartoons you can fly and fuck or be an alligator or both sexes at once, at no cost, or at a cost of your own determining.
It’s this determination of who you are and what your sex will be that is the real plot of this amazing graphic novel. “At last I hold my own,” Gaylord Phoenix declares at the book’s conclusion. “ And I partake of who I am.”
Reading this transformative book will make you shout “Me too!”
NOTE: Gaylord Phoenix came with a little packet of “Fast Action HOMO-“erotic” love powder” which looks a little like pink aquarium sand or Lick-A-Maid candy. For more on Edie Fake visit ediefake.com.
Homage to a City’s Queer History
Alicia ElerJanuary 11, 2013
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Edie Fake, “The Snake Pit” (2012), ballpoint pen, ink, and gouache on paper, 17 x 14 inches (click to enlarge) (all images courtesy Thomas Robertson Gallery)
CHICAGO — Edie Fake is a radical punk queer feminist activist. He is currently “at large” in Chicago. Before that, he was driving around the country in a yellow school bus doing the gay performance “Fingers.” At the opening of his solo exhibition Memory Palaces at Thomas Robertello, he told me that he grew up somewhere outside of Chicago, and when he left town he thought his relationship with the Windy City was over for good. But much to his surprise, he returned. Chicago is like that. Many born-and-bred Chicagoans swear they’ll leave, and they do — for a time, anyway. Chicago has a way of bringing its queers back to the city for reasons unbeknownst to them. The theme of Fake’s show offers us a clue as to why.
Fake reflects on Chicago’s queer history both through his own personal experiences of friends who passed away, and through the spaces and places that have either disappeared, still remain, or never existed at all, yet still host the politicized queer ghosts and spirits of its occupants. This body of 15 drawings took Fake one year to produce. All are dated 2012 and made rather meticulously, almost scientifically, from the same materials — ballpoint pen, ink, and gouache on paper. Fake’s hyper-geometric patterning looks like a Southwestern mosaic, the lo-fi aesthetic of a 1980s Nintendo video game, and a touch of Magic Eye. Among Chicago artists, it’s highly recognizable — a mesmerizing meshing of geometrically inclined lines that seem handspun from a mind with an impeccable precision for detail. The drawings appear genderless and are located somewhere in a space outside of normative time structures.
Edie Fake, “Killer Dyke” (2012), ballpoint pen, ink, and gouache on paper, 17 x 14 inches
Of the 15 drawings, ten of them are rooted in the city’s queer history. “Killer Dyke” and “Blazing Star” refer to twin lesbian newspapers of the 1970s. Killer Dyke was a 1971 radical feminist newspaper published out of Northeastern Illinois University; Blazing Star refers to the newspaper and group that were part of the mid-1970s Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU). In Fake’s “Killer Dyke,” a yellow doorway with the word “DYKE” emblazoned at the top of it and the squiggly lettering of “KILLER DYKE” painted on the window blend into the hyper-patterned facade; though not purporting to be an actual representation of what this space was, Fake’s contemporary reenvisioning of it draws energy from the past, pays homage in the present, and looks forward to future radical queer spaces and publications.
Edie Fake, “Untitled Building (Shapes)” (2012), ballpoint pen, ink, and gouache on paper, 24 x 19 inches
As such, each piece in this exhibition acts as its own intricate study of past, present, and future in one image, drawing viewers into both the fantastical and actual history of the space. Fake travels from bathhouses to gay bars to clubs to feminist clinics to punk venues and theaters until he reaches completely imaginary places, such as the one depicted in “Untitled Buildings (Shapes),” a yellow, orange, green, and red facade with a sign that includes a wishbone, key, anal beads, and random amorphous shapes.
Edie Fake, “Gateway (for Mark Aguhar) (Palace Door – calloutqueen)” (2012), ballpoint pen, ink, and gouache on paper, 17 x 14 inches (click to enlarge)
The other five pieces in the show are tributes to friends of the artist who passed away in the last two years. Queer Chicagoan Mark Aguhar, aka Call Out Queen, was a fierce, femme-identified artist of color whose Tumblr presence and artwork commented on and called out the mainstream media’s glossy glorification of the gay white male body, among other problematic representations. Only months away from receiving her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Aguhar decided to take her own life. The tightly knit Chicago queer art community responded with a powerful memorial exhibition, The Dragon is the Frame, at UIC and a memorial ceremony at local art space Roots & Culture. Fake’s “Gateway (for Mark Aguhar) (Palace Door – calloutqueen)” is a magnetic, mesmerizing, three-dimensional-seeming yet two-dimensional in reality drawing of cubes, slashes, diamonds, stacked boxes, and hook-like jags that lead the eye to a singular closed door. Like looking too long at a Magic Eye drawing, it’s impossible not to get lost in the image. The experience is also similar to the way one can travel down the rabbit hole of Aguhar’s Tumblr, which still lives online. Fake’s drawing marks the fact that Aguhar has traveled to the other side; it is Fake’s vision of Aguhar’s passage from the world of the living to the world of spirit.
Fake also pays tribute to four other fallen, creative queer heroes. Nicolas Djandji, a 24-year-old aspiring curator who had been living and working in New York City, was riding home one evening when he was struck and killed at an intersection in Brooklyn only blocks away from his home. For him, Fake draws towering blue pillars with triangular tips up top that point into a black sky background. A folded and jagged yellow accordion-like shape leads the way to a portal door covered in pink diamonds and black-and-white triangles, outlined with red, black, and green lines.
The three other tribute drawings are for publisher, cartoonist and comics historian Dylan Williams, who died of cancer; artist Flo McGarrell, who was killed in the Haitian earthquake of 2010; and pioneering activist, video/performance artist, writer, and artist Dara Greenwald, whose battle with cancer ended last year. Fake pays respect to these creative people whose spirits live on through our memory of them. Memory Palaces is a powerful, comprehensive tribute to Chicago queer history. If there’s one flaw, it’s that, at times, the drawings may begin to look repetitive. But much like the same types of faces one sees over and over again regardless of what queer establishment they happen to arrive at, there is a comfort in sameness.
Edie Fake: Memory Palaces continues at Thomas Robertello Gallery (27 N Morgan Street, Chicago) through February 16.