Michael DeForge

Take flight to this post-apocalyptic utopia filled with birds Long after the demise of humankind, birds roam freely around a new earth complete with fruitful trees, sophisticated fungal networks, and an enviable socialist order. The universal worm feeds all, there are no weekends, and economics is as fantastical a study as unicorn psychology. No concept of money or wealth plagues the thoughts of these free-minded birds. Instead, there are angsty teens who form bands to show off their best bird song and other youngsters who yearn to become clothing designers even though clothes are only necessary during war. (The truly honourable professions for most birds are historian and/or librarian.) These birds are free to crush on hot pelicans and live their best lives until a crash-landed human from the moon threatens to change everything. Michael DeForge’s post-apocalyptic reality brings together the author’s quintessential deadpan humour, surrealist imagination, and undeniable socio-political insight. Appearing originally as a webcomic, Birds of Maine follows DeForge’s prolific trajectory of astounding graphic novels that reimagine and question the world as we know it. His latest comic captures the optimistic glow of utopian imagination with a late-capitalism sting of irony.

Birds of Maine

In a thoroughly modernized, constantly updating society, where can true connection be found? The bodies of citizens and the infrastructure surrounding them is constantly updating. People can’t recognize themselves in old pictures, and they wake up in apartments of completely different sizes and shapes. Commuter routes radically differ day to day. The citizens struggle with adaptability as updates happen too quickly, and the changes are far too radical to be intuitive. There is no way to resist—the updates are enacted by a nameless, faceless force. The narrator of Familiar Face works in the government’s department of complaints, reading through citizens’ reports of the issues they’ve had with the system updates. The job isn’t to fix anything but rather to be the sole human sounding board, a comfort in a system so decidedly impersonal. These complaints aren’t mere bug reports—they can be anything: existential, petty, just plain heartbreaking. Michael DeForge’s ability to find the humanity and emotional truth within the outlandish bureaucracy of everyday life is unparalleled. The signatures of his work—a vibrant color palette, surreal designs, and a self-aware sense of humor—enliven an often bleak technocratic future. Familiar Face is a masterful and deeply funny exploration of how we define our sense of self, and how we cope when so much of life is out of our control.

Familiar Face

Ant colony

Teenage misfits and adolescent rabble-rousing take center stage in this dark coming-of-age tale Big Kids is simultaneously Michael DeForge's most straightforward narrative and his most complex work to date. It follows a troubled teenage boy through the transformative years of high school as he redefines his friends, his interests, and his life path. When the boy's uncle, a police officer, gets kicked out of the family's basement apartment and transferred to the countryside, April moves in. She's a college student, mysterious and cool, and she quickly takes a shine to the boy. The boy's own interests quickly fade away: he stops engaging in casual sex, taking drugs, and testing the limits of socially acceptable (and legal) behavior. Instead, he hangs out with April and her friends, a bunch of highly evolved big kids who spend their days at the campus swimming pool. And slowly, the boy begins to change, too. Eerie and perfectly paced, DeForge's Big Kids muses on the complicated, and often contradictory, feelings people struggle with during adolescence, the choices we make to fit in, and the ways we survive times of change. Like Ant Colony and First Year Healthy, Big Kids is a testimony to the harshness and beauty of being alive.

Big Kids

When a group of outcasts have to leave the valley, how will they survive the toxicity of the big city? Richard is a benevolent but tough leader. He oversees everything that happens in the valley, and everyone loves him for it. When Lyle the Raccoon becomes sick, his friends—Omar the Spider, Neville the Dog, and Ellie Squirrel—take matters into their own hands, breaking Richard’s strict rules. Caroline Frog rats them out to Richard and they are immediately exiled from the only world they’ve ever known. Michael DeForge’s Leaving Richard’s Valley expands from a bizarre hero’s quest into something more. As this ragtag group makes their way out of the valley, and then out of the park and into the big city, we see them coming to terms with different kinds of community: noise-rockers, gentrification protesters, squatters, and more. DeForge is idiosyncratically funny but also deeply insightful about community, cults of personality, and the condo-ization of cities. These eye-catching and sometimes absurd comics coalesce into a book that questions who our cities are for and how we make community in a capitalist society.

Leaving Richard's Valley

"One of the most inventive and prolific cartoonists working today."—Vulture In the past ten years, Michael DeForge has released eleven books. While his style and approach have evolved, he has never wavered from taut character studies and incisive social commentary with a focus on humor. He has deeply probed subjects like identity, gentrification, fame, and sexual desire. In “No Hell,” an angel’s tour of the five tiers of heaven reveals her obsession with a haunting infidelity. In “Raising,” a couple uses an app to see what their unborn child would look like. Of course, what begins as a simple face-melding experiment becomes a nightmare of too-much-information where the young couple is forced to confront their terrible choices. “Recommended for You” is an anxious retelling of our narrator’s favorite TV show—a Purge-like societal collapse drama—as a reflection of our desire for meaning in pop culture. Each of these stories shows the inner turmoil of an ordinary person coming to grips with a world vastly different than their initial perception of it. The humor is searing and the emotional weight lingers long after the story ends. Heaven No Hell collects DeForge’s best work yet. His ability to dig into a subject and break it down with beautiful drawings and sharp writing makes him one of the finest short story writers of the past decade, in comics or beyond. Heaven No Hell is always funny, sometimes sad, and continuously innovative in its deconstruction of society.

Heaven No Hell

A Johnson has his Boswell and every Sticks Angelica has her Michael DeForge Sticks Angelica is, in her own words, “49 years old. Former: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, headmistress, Mountie, columnist, libertarian, cellist.” After a high-profile family scandal, Sticks escapes to the woods to live in what would be relative isolation were it not for the many animals that surround and inevitably annoy her. Sticks is an arrogant self-obsessed force who wills herself on the flora and fauna. There is a rabbit named Oatmeal who harbors an unrequited love for her, a pair of kissing geese, a cross-dressing moose absurdly named Lisa Hanawalt. When a reporter named, ahem, Michael DeForge shows up to interview Sticks for his biography on her, she quickly slugs him and buries him up to his neck, immobilizing him. Instead, Sticks narrates her way through the forest, recalling formative incidents from her storied past in what becomes a strange sort of autobiography. Deforge’s witty dialogue and deadpan narration create a bizarre, yet eerily familiar world. Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero plays with autobiography, biography, and hagiography to look at how we build our own sense of self and how others carry on the roles we create for them in our own personal dramas.

Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero

A collection of short comics by the prolific and vital author behind Dressing and the Lose series.

A Western World

A mysterious, unsettling parable from one of North America's most popular cartoonists First Year Healthy purports to be the story of a young woman, recently released from the hospital after an outburst, and her burgeoning relationship with an odd, perhaps criminal Turkish immigrant. In a scant forty-five pages, working with a vibrant, otherworldly palette of magentas, yellows, and grays, Michael DeForge brings to life a world whose shifting realities are as treacherous as the thin ice its narrator walks on. First Year Healthy is all it appears to be and more: a parable about mental illness, a folktale about magical cats, and a bizarre, compelling story about relationships. DeForge's singular voice and vision have, in a few short years, rocketed his work to the apex of the contemporary comics canon. Ant Colony was his first book with Drawn & Quarterly: It appeared on The New York Times Graphic Bestseller List and was lauded by the Chicago Tribune, The Globe and Mail, and Harper's Magazine. His effortless storytelling and eye for striking page design make each page of First Year Healthy a fascinating puzzle to be unraveled. First Year Healthy, knotty and mysterious, demands to be read and reread.

First Year Healthy

Follows the strange exploits of a handful of black ants in a colony at war with a nearby colony of red ants.

Ant Colony

Lose

Un Visage familier

The sixth issue of this standalone, multiple award-winning anthology series by one of comics' brightest young stars.

Lose #6

A collection of stories by Michael DeForge about litter gangs, meat-filled snowmen, righteous cops, beagle/human hybrids, and forest-bound drag queens.

Very Casual

Take flight to this post-apocalyptic utopia filled with birds.

Lose # 1

Une énorme star. Voilà qui est Miss D., une énorme star dans son domaine, à savoir la délinquance juvénile. Certes, elle est de moins en moins jeune, certes, il lui reste des fans zélés, certes elle compte bien se maintenir au top, mais la concurrence fait rage, et rester célèbre et adulée est un combat de tous les jours. Face aux médias, face à la compétition, elle doit accomplir un grand coup qui laissera le monde sur l'arrière-train. Dans Brat, Michael DeForge fait un pas de côté avec la réalité pour mieux taper sur notre petit monde, qui ne demande rien mais le mérite bien. Reconnaissance éphémère, sur-médiatisation du vide, quête stérile de la célébrité, récupération commerciale (de l'acte de rébellion, de l'idée de révolution), jeunisme à tout crin, voilà ce que tacle Michael DeForge, à l'heure où l'attitude a plus d'importance que le sens, où l'image est partout mais ne veut plus rien dire. Enfant de la modernité mais pas dupe pour autant, Michael DeForge est une espèce de génie versatile, imprévisible et passionnant à suivre, trublion surdoué de la bande dessinée nord-américaine, dont le travail nous hante et nous obsède. Véritable mine d'idées et d'inventions visuelles, sans barrière ni limite, Michael DeForge prouve, à chaque nouveau livre, l'incroyable potentiel d'un art (la bande dessinée ! ) qui n'a pas encore tout dit ni tout montré.

Brat

Frontier #10

This issue—"The Fashion Issue"—features a post-adolescent punk's leather-and-spike-laced metamorphosis, a look at the lives and fashions of the exquisite corpses that make up the Canadian Royalty, and a town that is haunted by its past, which happens to look a lot like its present.

Michael DeForge

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