Reading Mark Carey’s Faker is like trying to hold an eel; just when you think you have it, it slips away. It’s odd animal, its six issues are at once not enough and too many. And that is too bad. If it weren’t for Carey’s poor pacing, his ideas—brilliant and strange—would mean much more.
Faker had a six-issue run, and Carey spent the first two issues laying out the background, and it seemed like some sort of strange but mundane examination of a group of somewhat despicable collage-age characters. The next two issues build a pseudo-science fiction existential story, and in the last two issues, it felt like a smart, almost introspective, philosophy-leaden action yarn. The fact is, each two issues felt rushed, and, while Jock’s artwork ameliorated some of the rushed feeling—he/she has an ability to effortlessly do in one panel what other artists might do in four or five—Faker feels awkward in its own skin.
In a certain sense, this discomfort fits, as Faker is, in many ways, a meditation on the internal dis-ease of this generation. Nevertheless, it loses something, crammed into its form.
But, thematically, it is riveting and provocative. It gives voice to the silent struggles faced by so many—sexual abuse, addiction, depression—and places it in Gen Pomo’s unique and detached context. It would have been easy—too easy—for Carey to give us a cheap ending, but he didn’t. I’d hold the last pages of Faker on the level of comics’ canonic works--The Invisables, Transmet, Watchmen. Here’s a particularly pertinent passage—both to the way Carey ends Faker and to the way it captures the essence of our cultural paradigm:
Love is like everything else. It’s there if you say it is. Which I guess, if you follow the logic, means that a happy ending is as easy to fake as an orgasm.
If you ever have an opportunity to read it, I’d encourage you to do so. Hell, you can borrow my copy anytime (those of you who know me personally). Otherwise, try to grab it when it comes out in trade. It’s a Vertigo comic.
Later on Oberliner: The Month In Review, as promised; a discussion of paradigmatic media bias and the “Obama is a racist” meme; and why Glenn Greenwald is one of the sanest voices in today’s political punditry.
More will be revealed.
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