The 19th iteration of FLUKE, Athens’ annual mini-comics/full-size comics/zine festival, was scheduled to take place at the 40 Watt Club on Mar. 28, 2020. The exhibition of co-FLUKE-organizer and longtime Flagpole illustrator Patrick Dean’s work at the Georgia Museum of Art would be in its closing weekend, allowing attendees to hop over and see his wonderful drawings. (Note: I organized that show.) Dean had been somewhat recently diagnosed with ALS, and it was important to be able to celebrate his work with him and his family and friends while he was still around before that horrible disease progressed any further.
Welp. You know what happened next. The COVID-19 pandemic blew across the world. FLUKE was canceled and rescheduled for September 2020, then 2021. Dean died in May 2021. Everything sucked. The last 14 months of his life were filled with seeing just how selfish everyone could be.
But here we go: FLUKE is coming back on Saturday, Mar. 26, 2022, still at the 40 Watt. Robert Newsome, Dean’s close friend and the other half of the two-headed monster that runs FLUKE, says that, although he remains nervous about the possibility of hosting a super-spreader event, “FLUKE is a big part of my life, and it was a big part of my friendship with Patrick. It is very important to me, and it’s still amazing to me that it is important to others as well. It’s stupid to use a word like ‘need’ in relation to a comix/zine show, but I need this to happen, you know?”
He’s not the only one. FLUKE, in this way, is a microcosm of the past two years among folks who’ve experienced a lot of grief and loss, not just for actual humans who aren’t around anymore, but also for things like optimism and trust and the fun of walking around the 40 Watt drinking a beer and looking at everyone’s awesome little booklets of art. It taking place is a way to mend some of those harms.
When I asked Newsome whether there was a memorial planned at the event, he said, “The whole thing is a memorial. Whether people know it or not, FLUKE will always be a memorial for Patrick. There’s no specific activities planned or anything. I don’t think you have to have any specific belief in the afterlife to be able to feel Patrick’s presence at FLUKE. He was a part of it for 20 years, so it’s always going to have his fingerprints all over it.”
What do those fingerprints mean? FLUKE has always been actively hostile to profiting off allowing artists a space to share their work. The cost to have a table is incredibly low. The cost to get in is $2 per person. If there was money left over, Newsome and Dean spent it on cake that was available for free on the bar. The ethos behind FLUKE is what it always was and always, fingers crossed, will be.
Newsome says there’s no cake this year because “having a couple of open cakes on the corner of the bar seemed like a bad idea. The cakes will be back someday. I’m determined about that. Just not the best idea in the midst of a pandemic. We’ve always been concerned about getting accessibility right. We’ve probably fallen short in the past, but we try to do a little better every time. As far as the mask thing goes, they’re required. Wearing a mask on your face reduces the spread of germs. The fact that this has become a political issue is really stupid. If you want to come to FLUKE, you’ve got to wear one. There’s no agenda other than maybe keeping someone you’ll never meet from getting sick.”
The list of exhibitors, available at flukeisawesome.blogspot.com, is short on big names and organizations. Lots of the folks who’d signed up for 2020 stuck around. A few dropped out, but there was a waiting list, so the tables will still be full. If you’re a mini-comics fan, you probably have two years’ worth of anticipation fueling your purchases, so bring cash, although some vendors will likely take credit cards. Alternate timeline tote bags, marked with FLUKE 2020, will be available for purchase. If you want to buy some of Dean’s work (and you should!), you can walk down to Bizarro Wuxtry to purchase his novel Eddie’s Week, an absolute romp of a book that came out in 2020, long after he drew and wrote it.
Is any of this normal? I don’t know what that means anymore, but I love comics and I love FLUKE, and Newsome says, “People should know that FLUKE loves them.” Let’s do this thing.
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