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From its opening pages, Ant Colony immerses the reader in a world that is darkly existential, with false prophets, unjust wars, and corrupt police officers, as it follows the denizens of a black ant colony under attack from the nearby red ants. On the surface, it's the story of this war, the destruction of a civilization, and the ants' all too familiar desire to rebuild. Underneath, though, Ant Colony plumbs the deepest human concerns--loneliness, faith, love, apathy, and more. All of this is done with humor and sensitivity, exposing a world where spiders can wreak unimaginable amounts of havoc with a single gnash of their jaws.
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.
"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 coup...
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’v...
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...
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 s...
A collection of stories by Michael DeForge about litter gangs, meat-filled snowmen, righteous cops, beagle/human hybrids, and forest-bound drag queens.
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 Lis...
"Lose #4" blends the banal with the bizarre to create a melange filled with horror and discomfort, humanity and humour.
A stunt double is hired by an actor to serve as his doppelgänger in order to sabotage his career.