The Best Little “Acid Dungeon” on the Net

There is no way to describe Fat-Pie.com without resorting to its creator’s own words (or going to the site, but I don’t want to lose my audience in this first sentence). On the main page, twisted mastermind David Firth openly acknowledges your understandable confusion and horror with five simple words, “Welcome to my Acid Dungeon.”

That about sums it up. Upon stepping into Firth’s world, there’s a sense of impending doom mixed with cynical hilarity that makes the viewer wonder if such a twisted realm can be handled and processed by a human mind. Personally, I was first lured into Firth’s world by one of his most famous ambassadors: Salad Fingers. I’ve only seen two highly dichotomized responses to that particular Flash series, “What the hell is this?” and “What the hell is this?...I love it!” I was in the latter category.

Firth successfully made a fan out of me with a lesser-known cartoon called Scribbler, a one-time non-series little mindfuck about a boy named Scribbler who was always sick. The cartoon itself was funny not in a laugh-out-loud way, but in the way that you laugh when someone you don’t know gets kicked in the balls. Okay, fine, that too is laugh-out-loud funny, but, there’s a sense attached to the latter that said injured person got something he deserved. It’s funny with a sense of grave ambiguous importance attached to it. So I found it with Scribbler when, at the end of the cartoon, Scribbler said, “But I don’t complain. No one likes a morbid bastard.” The next scene to spill forth from Firth’s mind was a random person who had hung himself wearing a black t-shirt with the words “Cradle of Filth” splashed across it in white lettering.

Oh David, how you touched me then. I too was once an unwitting member of that cult, one of those terminally depressed teenagers listening to Cradle of Filth as I stomped through the slushy streets of Boston winters, thinking how aptly the music suited my mood. Well, thanks for helping me get out of that. Though, for the record, it wasn’t all your doing. The major blow to those gothic sensibilities came when I actually saw the band in concert. Lead singer Dani jumped on a guitar amp to make himself look taller, slipped off it, fell ass-first back onto the stage and proceeded to curse out the audience while the band behind him shrugged and kept playing. It’s true, no one likes a morbid bastard.

Firth’s website brings to mind a question I’ve been trying to answer a lot lately, one my friends present me with as if I’m the Oracle of Delphi choking on sulfur fumes with a direct link to the gods: Can you consider David Firth’s cartoons art? I think you can, especially considering that art is often identified in hindsight. Let us not forget that those cave paintings in France, the ones that archeologists and anthropologists are currently pissing themselves over, were probably done by the laughing stock of that society. “So, Thak use hand make stupid picture on walls again. We only let him do pictures because he suck at hunting and gathering.” A couple thousand years later and no one remembers who brought home wooly mammoth rump roast for dinner, but we all remember those crappy paintings. Firth already meets some of the personal conditions I require when considering someone an artist.

One of those conditions is an unshakable and authentic individuality. I have a difficult time describing what Firth’s artistic creations look like, exactly. I’ve been frequenting this guy’s site for over a year now and I still can’t explain it well. Sure, I could give an approximation, something like Edward Gorey meets Edvard Munch on a Bill Hicks’ sized dose of mushrooms. But really, does that tell you anything? Nope. But Firth is still good.

Another condition Firth meets is that, despite the outward obscurity of what he’s doing, it makes a disturbingly large amount of sense in its own context. His style is twisted, his cartoons so bizarre in both appearance and subject matter that they are to be experienced, not watched. I could try and explain the “plot” of Salad Fingers or the “subtext” of something like Spoilsbury Toast Boy, but that won’t do you any good. Like the visual style of the cartoons themselves, a hodgepodge of so many assumed influences that any attempt at naming them all would only produce a meaningless response, the subject matter of these pieces are nothing but the jumbled purging of Firth’s mind. Case in point: In Firth’s cartoon Socks, there’s a man relaying a dream he had the night before. Unable to stop running in slow motion, he’s led by a woman to a kitchen and her husband urges the dreamer to look in the Russian Laughter Room. Even with such a self-explanatory name as Russian Laughter Room, the viewer’s eyes tend to ache from being held so wide open while he stares at stereotypical Russian men laughing in fur hats.

Firth’s style is unequivocally his own. Aside from a few artists on Newgrounds that parodied Salad Fingers about 15 minutes after it came out, I haven’t seen anyone really try to imitate him. That’s because it’s damn impossible: Firth’s bastard-Flash-children are more than just little quips of postmodern art. Watching a Firth cartoon, knowing that there is no coherent plot to follow, you can’t help but feel comfortable with the lunacy pouring from the screen. Firth’s true genius lies in letting the insanity in his mind make sense to the viewers. Yeah, fine, it’s not the kind of sense that you can convey to others easily, but seeing it is tantamount to understanding it on a level nestled within the confines of the brain, but not actually a part of its cognitive processes.

David Firth’s success lies not in an assumed artistic ideal or goal, but in the fact that he successfully built his own context, one in which there is no official plot or goal but it still manages to be understood. British author Margaret Cavendish, in her novella “The Blazing World,” asserts that the only reality that cannot be questioned is the one you create in your imagination. No one can touch it because it is inherently your own; what your mind conceives of is fully under your power and no one can debate its existence because you know it’s there. I see Firth in a similar way, except that he has successfully externalized this philosophic ideal both visually and linguistically.

Demented and deranged, David Firth took his imagination and made it a website. I’m not advocating sticking Salad Fingers on a video loop and playing it at the DeCordova Museum as an exhibit (though given the postmodern miniature golf course they had a decade ago, I’m guessing they’d jump at the chance to do something like that). His success is in the fact that while you’re in that world, after you’ve willingly shackled yourself in that “Acid Dungeon,” everything in there makes sense according to its own lax rules of reality. With his own imagination externalized, animated and running rampant, Firth’s perplexing yet oddly compelling Website makes for some of the most intriguing, baffling and strangely alluring art online. Have at it: www.fat-pie.com

Wait, before I go, I need to warn you about something. Don’t stop reading yet! Wait!!!!! Okay, good, you’re back. Whatever you do, make damn sure you don’t forget to put the hyphen between “fat” and “pie” on the URL. It’s Fat-Pie.com, not fatpie.com. I don’t want to talk about what happened when I forgot the hyphen, okay? I just don’t want to relive that horror. Let’s put it this way: Out of those two websites, Firth’s is the less traumatic one. You’ve been warned, even though you sick bastards are going to do it anyways. I’ve done my part; I can’t control you. But when your eyes are spontaneously combusting and the pain of them burning is a pleasant distraction from what you just saw while the only other sounds you hear are the whir of your computer and the gagging heaves of your stomach trying to turn itself inside-out and vomit, don’t come crying to me. I’ll be too busy watching Scribbler again, flipping the bird to my Cradle of Filth poster with the free hand I haven’t eagerly chained to Firth’s endearing dementia.

Meghan Guidry is currently throwing a PS2 controller at her TV. Stupid addictive God of War game.

All images courtesy of David Firth and Fat-Pie.com.