Fargo

Since we have relaunched and this will never make it into any of the graphic novels I’d like to point something out from the original comic books before it is lost to time. Something I’ve hinted at, but never revealed (except to a lucky classroom at UC Berkeley who got to hear me lecture about the relationship between comics and films). Something literally no one seemed to pick up on, despite a clue later in the issue. First watch this clip from Fargo courtesy of YouTube (sorry about the sound quality).

Now look at these pages from Issue 3 of Black Snow.

There you have it. It’s my favorite scene from Fargo. I thought it would be really funny/interesting/I don’t know what to make our car salesman villain play out my favorite car sale scene. I got Alex to eventually agree, and he literally just wrote “that Fargo scene” in the script.

I downloaded the screenplay (which you may notice has one obvious difference) and used that as my dialogue, toning down the cursing, adding a Detroit reference, changing some small talk and making William H. Macy’s lines have a Kannibal Karl voice. I still think it’s ridiculously funny on it’s own, but knowing all that adds another level.

Then I sat down with my borrowed (from Alex, for several years) dvd of Fargo and still framed what I wanted each panel to be and drew it. Look at how closely that scene matches. It was lovingly crafted.

I’ve done a lot of things like this on a smaller scale, taking other comics, movies, pictures, things from my life, etc and worked them in or paid tribute to them in ways. This was the most overt, and seemed to go over everyone’s head. Maybe Fargo isn’t as well known as I thought, or people don’t remember that scene? Well, they do enough to put it on YouTube and I even saw another video where people just tried to reenact it, so it must be somewhat known. Maybe not so much back then?

I don’t know. But I wanted to share it with ya’ll and let you in on it. Now you can go look for the lesser homages to things yourselves.