After living in many places, Edie Fake now resides in Chicago. His varied practice includes: books, zines, comics, drawings, tattoos, videos, installations, and performances. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists, and his first book, Gaylord Phoenix, will be released later this year from Secret Acres. Fake is a contributor to The Gay Utopia, an online “symposium on sex and the future,” and his next project is a large scroll based on queer history in Chicago.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

EF: I was lucky enough to grow up outside Chicago with a book-collecting father. Underground comix were these weird visuals that were always around, and my dad made some fanzines. When I was a teenager, I started reading a lot more comics and realized it was a language I was interested in. The Newcity free paper in Chicago was running the Acme Novelty Library strips every week, and I was starting to go to Quimby’s Books to buy weirdo comics. The Funny Garbage reprint of Gary Panter’s Cola Madnes blew my mind: words and pictures getting complicated, and being very real while also being so bizarre.

How have your experiences with other media —such as tattoos and zines— influenced the way you make comics?

EF: Tattoo designs have to be precise and legible, and so tattooing really tightened my drawing style in addition to expanding the scope of what I was interested in doing. It forced me to draw amazing and unusual things I would never personally choose to draw. Zines do the opposite for me, where they loosen me up and let me think about pages rather than panels. I don’t draw very many things in panels. I think animation made me see everything as a very flat, panoramic vignette. Or, I saw things that way already and working on animations just encouraged me.

Gender and sexual identity clearly play large roles in many of your projects. What fuels this interest for you?

EF: For starters, I feel a real gender and sexual fluidity in my own life. And I was reading a lot of bizzaro comics, and there would be lots of raunchy sex, but it’d all be straight—and if it had any queerness to it, that’d be the punch line. Also, trans people and trans-sexualities were constantly being portrayed as ugly and laughable. That’s super whack. So I think queerness/gayness became such a big part of my work because I really wanted bizarre, creative, non-misogynist, pro-trans, queer sexuality to be portrayed the way I see it: as being really rad and transformative within these rad and transformative worlds of strange comics.

What’s your definition of the “Gay Utopia”?

EF: I think the idea of a Gay Utopia is linked to the idea of an Autonomous Zone—exploring energy and sexuality without fear, building things with each other, listening, speaking, and supporting each other. Being able to feel an abstract sense of a supportive community. Thwarting hopelessness by loving the people you are around, and being able to work with them and listen to them and be a human being. It’s difficult to feel and tricky to obtain, because it’s so in-the-now and not ever permanent. Youtopia. Metopia. Wetopia!

Your Gaylord Phoenix series is a vivid, pseudo-mythological, dreamlike story in multiple installments. Can you describe the narrative drive of these books and what went into making them? How many are you planning to make?

EF: I’ve published four issues with a fifth on the way, but a full six issues will be collected into a book coming out this winter from Secret Acres. The story actually started with a dream about projectors and sex in the desert, and then it sort of took off from there. It’s a story about a gay bird-man who travels around and is haunted by, and transformed into, a sort of demon-other-beast who comes out during sex and tries to murder his lovers. When I write it, it sounds kind of corny, but the story is sort of this hunt for personal history and self-understanding. I start everything by doing super tiny, small thumbnail sketches and then I hammer out the language—a lot—before I even start drawing the pages. Once I have a few pages sketched and feel certain about the words I’m using, everything else just falls into place like magic.

Can you tell me more about your performative projects and how you see them overlapping, if at all, with your drawings?

EF: I started performing with Lee Relvas (formerly Dewayne Slightweight) in 2004, right when we had both finished big comics projects that had overlapping sentiments. We constructed a sort of mini-operetta about trying to sustain idealistic scrapper communities. That performance was called the “Peacecore Tour” or “Radical Happiness,” and it was ecstatic theater. We had a house show in Los Angeles that I will never forget where the whole audience sang the closing song, “This is a place for lovers,” for fifteen minutes at the top of their lungs. It was great! It was Gay Utopia! Everything since then has been sort of reflections on that ecstasy, looking at the ways it gets complicated. Always very hammy, very funny, very strange, making these really ornate performance props that attempt the same excesses my drawings do—all coming from the same hand.

You’ve moved around a lot in your life; in what ways has traveling and working in different places influenced the course of your practice?

EF: Moving a lot was fantastic. Sometimes it was a pain, but it was mostly fantastic. I really love the idea of being part of a big net, with people in communities all over. Moving was a physical way to feel what I think a lot of people try to get from Facebook and whatnots, but I don’t feel nearly as good about meeting someone on the Internet as I do about actually hanging out with them. Traveling heavily and living nomadically condensed my practice. It made me work on things that were very flexible and portable. Like drawings—very portable.

What are you cooking up next?

EF: My next major project is to do a visual mapping project of LGBTIQ history in Chicago. I’m from Chicago and when I moved back a year ago I remembered how gay Chicago is, but also started realizing I knew almost nothing about its history. It’s going to be a lot of research and digging, and I am beyond excited about it. In the distant future: a tarot card deck.

What are the issues facing us today that you’re most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

EF: I can’t prioritize what everyone should be paying attention to because I think it’s critical that different people work on improving the problems they know the most—and feel the most—about. We do need to take care of each other, and we need to stay empathetic, and work together, and see how things we’re interested in fit in with the things we may not be that interested in. So people need to stay focused on what they can be most involved in, but also stay open so they can see how it works along with everything else.

I’m interested in visualizing queer and radical history, and building communities with a sense of autonomy and sustainability. I’m interested in free speech and free movement, and queer, trans, and feminist visibility, health, and politics.