By Adrian Norvid. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. Softcover, 48 pages, 2-Colour, 2019. Get to know the world of Fake Lake, built on an architecture of vibrantly kooky and warped jokesIt’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. "With wit and ingenuity, Norvid papers over our cruel reality with one that, though visibly no less vile, is at least attuned to its own ridiculousness."— Artforum"Norvid's drawings revel in and eschew childlike naivete with an ironic, off-colour undercurrent."— Nightlife
