Koyama/Space Face: Michael DeForge's Trophies, Lose #7, Dressing

In addition to being a cartoonist, Michael DeForge also does quite a bit of illustration work. Space Face Books published a collection of some of those illo jobs in a broadsheet titled Trophies, a fitting name for an item that's a bit of a DeForge collectible as well as a record of DeForge's own illustration trophies. DeForge is an ideal illustrator for someone who wants an image that will catch the eye, no matter what it's advertising. For DeForge, this has evolved from his days when he mostly worked in black & white and thus made intricately and even obsessively illustrated drawings that emphasized grotesque and even horrific images to something more layered and sophisticated. Since working mostly in color, he hasn't had to rely on that level of detail, instead using unsettling design and figure drawings that were simplified so as to emphasize specifically unsettling details. Be it a figure in the water who's been stung repeatedly by a bee, variations on his wolf or Leather Space Man aesthetic (the predator vs the unsettling observer), or even an interest in combining psychedelia with huge swathes of negative space (like for a Speedy Ortiz concert poster), one can see how DeForge uses this venue for his drawings as a kind of laboratory that allows him to work out and work on specific visual ideas that he might incorporate into later work, or else it's an aesthetic approach that has really drawn him in (the classic DeForge melting figure).

Speaking of DeForge's laboratory, a new issue of Lose can be considered a peek into his current aesthetic interests. #7 features three stories, all of which are about body transformation and its larger implications. The first story is a kind of childish game, the sort where if someone told you to hold your breath and cross your eyes then your face would get frozen or something. In this case, it was a highly detailed method to make one's head bigger so that one resembles an adult. In the story, this led to it being a fun game of "parent and child" and quickly warped into a power game where the "parent" wound up putting her "son" in jail. It's a very Foucault way of looking at relationships as power relationships.

The third story aesthetically sees DeForge move in a direction closer to Big Kids in terms of the design of the boy who is also a bird: a face with six furry appendages flapping about like a Dr Seuss drawing. The bird/boy is aware enough to realize that his state is less than ideal; it's a transformation or evolution that's in fact quite stupid, as he can never really be a bird or a boy. He's drawn to the ornithologist who studies him and she tells him that she longs to be like him, but that she can't have a relationship with a subject. The bird boy finds her desires to be like him to be as stupid and baffling as his own existence is. This story is interesting because it's a brutal takedown of startling surface beauty being utterly pointless if there's no utility or possibility of meaningful contact that can go along with it.

The second story, "Movie Star", is the longest of the book, and it's one of DeForge's best. It touches on family, transformation and alienation. A young woman named Kim is living with and taking care of her ailing father, who is constantly on her case and refuses to listen to anything she has to say. In one of her daily runs (a key metaphor), she happens across some Blu-Rays on the street and she watches them with her dad, who has a contrary opinion from her on each and every one. She does notice that in a dumb action film, there's a buff guy who looks exactly like her dad, which he dismisses as nonsense even though he was adopted and doesn't know anything about his birth family. Things start to escalate when she comes home and the actor is there being chummy with her dad, as they discover that they are related. He spends more and more time with him and his wife, to the point where they both start having sex with her and he decides to essentially cut Kim out of his life for his new life. At every turn, Kim is gaslighted by her father and told to get a job, and every bit of "growth" that he makes is entirely at her expense. Every slow reveal astounds more and more as Kim is slowly pushed out of his life after previously being entirely dependent on her. Visually, it's among DeForge's more conventional comics, with a fairly unwavering eight-panel grid and a thin line that almost seems like a Chris Ware homage at times. It once again makes that point that not all transformation is growth, and it in fact can induce myopia and narcissism.

Dressing is another crucial Koyama Press collection of DeForge's short stories from all over the place: minicomics, anthologies, etc. The title of the collection refers to the idea of dressing up, of changing identity, and of being in the process of dressing or transformation. The first piece, "Flu Drawings" is about a teenage boy who's drawn the attention of an older teenage girl, until one day she makes him dry her off after a shower and then after she models some outfits, she makes him put on some of her outfits and makeup. What's interesting about the story, apart from its erotic content, is that the narrator notes that the experience was not only not transformative for him in terms of identity, it actually allowed him to see what his future self would look like. There's an intricacy and decorative quality to these illustrations that adds to the story's tension. On the other hand, "Mars Is My Last Hope" is all about the desperate need for transformation for a group of humans colonizing Mars, because the Earth had become uninhabitable. Success meant not only their bodies transforming into something more appropriate for Mars, it meant human language slipping away as well, with only the concept of erotic desire remaining. "Dot Com" follows up on that run of stories about desire, this time commodified in some vague way by a dot.com business that specializes in mermaids. It's a brilliant parody of corporate speak that clearly indicated just how much trouble that business was really in.

"My Sister Dropped Dead From The Heat" was a brutal, almost obsessive sketchbook exercise about a relentless death march, while "Websites" explored involuntary identity transformation by way of the internet through a law firm that no doubt engineered it. It's DeForge exploring dystopias and Kafkaesque nightmares, as is "Redundancies", which is about the government outlawing twins, triplets, etc for population control reasons and the resistance that springs up against it that's ultimately doomed to failure. "Christmas Dinner" is about the worst possible holiday meal imaginable, played out on a beautiful table filled with filled by tiny, violent little creatures. "Elves" is a Santa conspiracy tale, while "Wet Animals" is a hilarious story about desire and "flirt fish" gone defective; instead of issuing come-ons, they started issuing insults, all in the background of one woman's crush that went to a very strange place.

"My Interesting Mother, One Billion Miles" is the prototypical DeForge piece in that it presents an absurd premise (in this case, a leaping mother) as defacto reality. "Actual Trouble" uses a slightly nauseating color palette to discuss both the long term (a guy thinking about the entirety of his life and and how he wound up as a teacher) with the immediate (his boyfriend's inability to get rid of his erection). "Gun Cats" is both funny and a little more on the nose than usual for DeForge, as local animals are given guns by the authorities in order to make environmental activists look bad, resulting in all kinds of deaths. "Tiny Opthamologist" short-circuits its own narrative of control and transformation as all parties involved admit to the ridiculousness of the situation. Finally, "All Of My Friends, Up High, In A Jumbo Jet" is an aesthetic rhyme for the book's first story in that it's illustrated text rather than a comic, its action is mostly abstracted and it has a deliberately vague conclusion. The material here overall isn't as strong as in Lose or his most recent comics, but it also shows how DeForge has both refined and expanded his aesthetic.

D&Q Michael DeForge: Big Kids and First Year Healthy

Michael DeForge continues to be one of the most prolific and aesthetically curious cartoonists around. While exploring a number of the same themes, his visual approach shifts, mutates and warps from project to project, having cycled through the artists he admires and moved on to his own set of changing strategies. Rites of passage have often been a resonant theme for DeForge, because transformation in general is something he seems to be fascinated by. In particular, the idea of something being irreversibly changed and then being forced to adapt to a new life, be it positive or negative, is a pretty regular theme for him. In Big Kids, the transformation from human form to tree form is not just a metaphor for adolescence, but rather a metaphor for a certain kind of awareness of the world that not everyone possesses.

A teenage boy named Adam is constantly being beaten up by the kids at school, but he also is happy that he is sexually active and has a boyfriend. The book opens with Adam trying to describe memories: of the way people looked, smelled, tasted, etc. It reads much like a past-tense journal of some kind, as though something traumatic had occurred to make him think about life in those terms. Instead, the "change" occurs, which not only alters Adam's perception and understanding of the world, but it also sees DeForge transforming his line into something that was still comics (he rarely wavered from the six-panel grid) but that also resembled a Wassily Kandinsky painting. In this new aesthetic understanding of the world, it was explained to Adam that he was now a tree, which gave him several levels of sensory understanding and experience that he did not possess before. Those who had not yet made the change (including most of the people he knew at school) were referred to as twigs, because that's precisely what they looked like. What was interesting was that many adults were still twigs, including both his asshole cop uncle and his left-leaning reporter dad, implying that neither were ready to evolve or even understood what that could mean.

While the change to a tree often occurred at puberty or first sexual experience (which made his mom, also a tree, very uncomfortable to think about), it didn't always happen. Nor did the transformation include any kind of real enlightenment. Simply put, there was just a greater awareness of one's environment. It didn't give one any ethical or moral enlightenment, as the actions of Adam and others showed in the back half of the book. Whereas his uncle was once a threatening bully, he was now a twig to be easily flicked away. A lecture from his father about the use of violence barely registered. His miserable mother voluntarily went from being a tree back to being a twig so she could be freed of this awareness and happy with her husband again. In a brutal act, Adam turned his lover Tyson (the ex-boyfriend of his ex-boyfriend) back into a twig by physically peeling away his tree-ness. This was in reaction to what turned out to be a key subplot of the book: a computer program that allowed one to see one's old form in animation. When he saw his mother watch the animation and saw her weep, he knew this was something he should not have seen, and he transformed his shame into not just violence, but precisely the same act his mother was contemplating doing to herself. DeForge has often used body horror as a metaphor for transformations gone wrong, but this was body horror on a whole different level.

For the many scenes of tree perception, DeForge created an entirely different kind of visual language. The trees were figures with heads and eyes, arms and legs, etc, but they also had flower baskets. They saw the world in a way the looks warped but was described as simply "more". The "DeForge Detritus" often seen in his work is different in this book: it's more organized, indicative of being part of an ordered system rather than simply chaos. It's both beautiful and strange to look at, and while it may have its own logic, it seems clear that DeForge didn't want this aesthetic to be easily absorbed by human eyes. It is deliberately alienating, forcing the reader to consider the emotional landscape of the book more than its physical landscape. It's a blunt and direct book with subtle subtexts, and while there is obvious regret on the part of Adam, it only goes so far because the relationship between trees and twigs can only go so far. Allowing a lack of closure is ironically what makes this one of DeForge's most assured comics to date.

First Year Healthy (from 2014) takes a different approach, even as both books have a somewhat unreliable narrator. Instead of being a comic, this is closer to a children's book in terms of format with an illustration on each page with a clump of text. There are several different levels going on in the book, and it's not clear which of any of them are true, or if that even matters. The first level is the unnamed protagonist's perception of the world after coming out of a mental institution for an "outburst". The book has a lot of smart things to say about mental illness, not so much in terms of the experiencing of it, but how others perceive and treat you after such an outburst. For her, she was given a job by her brothers and cared for in that sense, but they kept her at arm's length otherwise, something she only understood much later. A running theme in the story is her dawning realization that her senses in many respects had become numbed to the possibility of dangers in the world. The reader is very much asked to wonder how much of what they read in this book is "true" vs being a hallucination of some kind, or an elaborate story made up to trick herself into ignoring reality.

Another level of the story, and this is aided by the format, is to consider the entire thing to be a fairy tale allegory or a bit of magical realism. That's not just because of the intervention of a "holy cat" mentioned early in the book in saving her life, but it's also the presence of the criminal who threatened to kill her like a big bad wolf figure or her suddenly being given the responsibility of taking care of a baby. Is the reader meant to think of these things as ordinary events given magical qualities (like her "hearing" the fish under the ice when it reality it was the ice cracking under her)? Did her slitting the criminal's neck with a knife cause another mental breakdown, leading to her seeing the holy cat? Or was it the realization that she was truly alone while wandering through the forest, trying to escape but finding nowhere to escape to that broke her down? Or was all of it real? DeForge provides no easy answers, just clues to be picked up on, clues that sometimes discussed how consensus reality can mean different things for people from different cultures.

Through it all, the reader is meant to wonder what form the protagonist's original outburst took. Was it a public breakdown where she screamed at those around her? Was it a public and messy suicide attempt? Or was it strange behavior that violated social mores? Throughout the story as we see her in that titular first year, she is kind, supportive and unquestioning. Perhaps she should have been less naive and more aware of her circumstances. She appears to be someone with no boundaries, for good or ill, as she moved in with "the Turk", a co-worker, after a little while and never once questioned his job as a crime boss' thug. When suddenly presented with taking care of his infant son, she tried to breastfeed him, a gesture that was done less of feeling maternal and more of feeling curious, as though she was playing a game with herself to see what it would be like--as though she was crossing a frozen lake. Her behavior is clearly atypical, but DeForge once again makes the reader ask precisely what unhealthy means in this context. Did she retreat into fantasy at the end of the story, or did she simply enter into a different level of consensus reality, like Adam did in Big Kids? What DeForge suggests is that all of these answers are right and wrong in their own way. Visually, the characters are classic mid-period DeForge: distorted and exaggerated hair, tiny bodies that look like Peanuts characters, grotesque facial features and a mostly ugly color palette that looks like bruises, with the exception of the holy cat, who's almost an Aslan-type figure.

mini-Kus! Of The Week #9: Michael DeForge, Daria Tessler and Daniel Lima

mini-Kus! #43: Meat Locker, by Michael DeForge. It was a pleasure to see what appears to be slowly coalescing into DeForge's mature style on display in this comic. DeForge managed to cram three thematically connected short stories into one mini, and each one was satisfying in their own way. The first was "Meet Your Personal Trainer", a series of panels featuring what amounted to a personal ad for a personal trainer. In this particular reality, jocks are a marginalized sub-culture like punks or bookworms are in our reality, and DeForge's particular form of body distortion is a snug fit for these poor, desperate characters. The personal trainers may as well be sex workers, given how marginalized they are and how eager to make money they seem to be. People tend to forget just how funny DeForge is as they focus in on the quality of his drawings, but lines like "I have been fired from my past two gyms for falling in love with my clients. Pick me if you want a passionate personal trainer who loves mixing boundaries with pleasure!"

 "Getting Big" features some sly visual jokes from DeForge. Sure, it builds on the trainer-as-sex-worker premise from the first story, this time in the form of a "phone sex" trainer, but it's DeForge making this musclebound character slightly resemble Linus Van Pelt from Peanuts that made me laugh out loud. The pitch-black mouth in an undulating shape that formed on the protagonist's face while screaming about making "the legs of women turn into warm jelly, for passerby to slip on pools of it on the floor" combined DeForge's wit on multiple levels. Adding a layer of hatching behind the figure only made it more intense.

"Jocks" is the true standout of the three, as DeForge's use of color and character design are lurid, heartbreaking and hilarious all at once. Seeing the poor jocks just trying to get a workout or a run in and get harassed by everyone was incredible fun, especially when a gang of jocks goes to the beach and we see all sorts of body types: legs up to the neck, totally musclebound, tanned & toned. They fantasize about jocks running the world, as "People would line up for blocks to watch sports! We'd have athletes on t-shirts!" What's remarkable is the incredibly convincing arguments DeForge makes for them regarding their marginalization and how neatly that narrative fits in when compared to our world, and how hilariously emo the jocks get regarding their own sense of identity. That the final scene contained an emotional speech between two naked jocks in the shower only added to the ridiculousness of the story.

mini-Kus! #45: Music Of Changes, by Daria Tessler. The art here reminds me a bit of Gilbert Hernandez's really odd stuff, with weird shapes, bug-eyed characters, shadowy forms flying across the page and a conceptually absurd premise. Tessler's aesthetic is very much her own, as the soft pastels and fiendishly clever visual and written plays on words all serve the surprisingly tight narrative. This is a story about a farm that grows plants engineered to randomly sprout a number of different forms on its trunk, which are then turned into glass to create sculptures. This was conceptually fascinating idea on its own for a mini, but Tessler was interested in exploring order vs chaos where the expectations from the reader were flipped. Here, the protesters, dressed in all black garb, were the ones who were protesting against chaos and wanted the sculptures destroyed on general principles. Instead of those in control being rigid and orderly, they preferred weapons of chaos that were often quite whimsical. Those weapons included Dance Gas, which created little dancers that cut their targets but also entered into their bodies on a cellular level. Amusingly, a couple of protesters slipped away to a bar called Plato's Cave, a place where naturally knowledge becomes less certain in the shadows of a magic show. A magician claims that determinism exists with a large enough intellect to oversee seemingly random choices, but he's as much a victim of entropy as anyone else when he shrinks and then tries to restore the two protesters. This is an example of an issue of mini-Kus! where the anything-goes nature of the series really lends itself to going way out on a limb with strange ideas.

mini-Kus! #47: Sutrama, by Daniel Lima. This is an adaptation of a scene from the Robert Bresson film, Le Diable Probablement, wherein an analyst is asking questions of a woman who appears to be either naked with the body paint of a suit on her or else wearing entirely translucent clothing. I would guess that Lima added that detail to create some visual frisson in a story that is otherwise mostly talking heads. The session the two are having is as much philosophical debate as it is therapy, with nothing less than a quest for meaning being at stake. Every page finds Lima setting up another unusual tableau for the woman to be a part of, as though she were posing for a still life on every page. Her willingness to expose herself in terms of the provocative nature of her poses parallels her willingness to open herself up on an existential level. Lima's line is crude and direct, with colored pencil being used to fill in spaces on most pages. In the end, the analyst, after having run through the analysand's sex life, parents, etc, hits upon suicide as the solution that's most desired. When there's some protest to this (only on the grounds that death is as awful as life), the analyst simply takes over and guides her through. It's a disturbing ending, as it implies a genuine sense of inquisitiveness on the part of the woman that's subsumed and ignored by the analyst, who seems to be plotting her annihilation all along. The fragility of the line (not unlike C.F.) seems related to that imminent sense of extinction.

Youth In Decline Week: Frontier 10-12

Frontier #10 (2015), by Michael DeForge. I've read a lot of stories by DeForge, but this is the first one that I'd classify as heartbreaking. The premise itself is absurd but has a germ of paranoid plausibility that makes it such an effective work of satire. It's about a woman who's a former radical who now works as a kind of deep cover agent for a real estate company. Years ahead of developing quiet neighborhoods, they send her in to blend in and become part of the local community, and then to reshape and ultimately destabilize any attempts at protesting or resisting the ultimate encroachment of developers. On page after page, the nameless, faceless (we see her only in profile) woman lists detail after detail of her method, as she starts off as shy and "blossoms" thanks to the aid of her neighbors and husband, whom she meets and marries as part of the plan. The level of detail and disassociation necessary for her to succeed is almost psychotic, as DeForge paints a photo of a false transformation. That fact that she was a radical but is now a willing servant to an especially brutal and exploitative company shows a very different kind of transformation, one where money and status for one's employers is all-important. However, she reveals that the lives she creates and the tears she sheds are real; she is not unfeeling. Indeed, it is the fact that she can simultaneously live a life that looks and feels authentic while living at different life at the same time that makes the story so devastating and enraging. Visually, DeForge decided to continue with full page illustrations with text at the bottom, not unlike First Year Healthy. There's still "DeForge Detritus" on nearly every page, but his figures are now so pared down that they're nearly abstract. The brightness of the colors and generally pleasing quality of the shapes belie the coldness of the narrative text, as it becomes clear that not only does she feel emotions while on the job, it may well be the only time she is capable of doing so. DeForge's writing is becoming more sophisticated even as his use of imagery is becoming more simplified.

Frontier #11 (2016), by Eleanor Davis. Another issue by a comics heavy-hitter, this story is simply titled "BDSM". It's about appearance vs. reality, identity and (of course) sexual expression. On the set of a porn set, Victoria plays a dom and Alexa plays a sub. The director demands that each actress pay better attention to the details of their roles (Victoria must be crueler, Alexa must be more innocent) in order to create a better scene (for which he's ridiculed by a co-worker). Throughout the rest of the issue, there is a tension between the two actresses as Alexa's obvious delight in playing a servile role in real life bothers Victoria, even as Alexa sloughs it off as liking to be nice. In the final third of the story, Alexa loses her keys and has Victoria drive her home, where Alexa seduces her. Throughout the entire story, it's obvious that Alexa was engaging in "topping from the bottom", wherein the submissive partner is actually in control of the situation and manipulates the dominant partner. In this case, the reason she was doing this was spelled out quite clearly at the end: Alexa wants Victoria know that it's OK if she wants to hit her--and it's OK if she wants to be hit. Davis clearly sets the story on a porn set as a way of first establishing these acts under the auspices of a sex as a pure act of objectification--a job, as it were. Alexa is a character that transfers and transforms an act done for the pleasure of others (especially men) into a private, intimate and emotional act that is still highly charged. That she teaches Victoria to do this for her own pleasure and embrace this side of her sexuality is the truly transgressive act, and that's what makes this such a sharp commentary. Davis' figurework is brilliant in the way it recapitulates the essence of the main characters: Victoria is all harsh angles, and Alexa is doe-eyed and all curves. The way Davis spots blacks and makes extensive use of negative space further emphasizes the differences between the two characters and sets them apart from everything else in the comic. Davis prefers an economy of line in most panels, but her use of gesture and body language is so direct that she only needs a line or two to pack in a lot of information.

Frontier #12 (2016), by Kelly Kwang. This issue is a return to earlier entries that didn't have conventional narratives, per se. Instead, Kwang explores issues of identity in the guise of the "Space Youth Cadets", a heavily video game-influenced concept that allows for the idea of exploring a space or an object rather than focusing on a particular character as a narrative hook. Kwang uses a dense pencil style that fills up a number of the pages with tiny panel insets, decorative computer screen icons, random characters talking in the corner of the page, and other eye pops that enrich the overall experience. When she wants to concentrate on the action at hand, like when a character wants to be encased in "internet jelly", the details suddenly fall away in favor of Kwang's crisp, rich shading. The epic story references that are only hinted at remind a bit of the sort of thing that Ryan Cecil Smith does, but Kwang's approach is almost an archaeological one, as the reader is given bits of information second-hand, as interpreted by the "screens" that attend so many of the images. Like video games, we get to see a roster of different character types, their vital stats, and their overall aesthetic (which is as important as anything else here). What we might see from page to page is unpredictable, as once the concept is introduced, we simply see snippets of the lives of various cadets. It's a clever experience in turning a digital experience into analog.

Thirty Days of Short Reviews #28: Wailed

Annie Koyama is an interesting publisher because she's willing to take risks in publishing books that she finds to be visually interesting. Whether or not they're comics in the familiar sense is not all that important to her. Indeed, many of the earliest books she published could be deemed as art books, with comics only becoming a focus for her later on. In publishing Robin Nishio's photography book Wailed, she's taking both a short and long-term view. In the short term, this is a book, as cartoonist Michael DeForge notes in the afterword, that captures cartoonists in the rare times when they are not isolating themselves in front of their drawing desks.

These photos zero in on specifics, peculiarities like odd socks or special tattoos. They are all in black and white, capturing a certain timeless starkness in the proceedings. We see three alt-comics participants three to a bed at a convention, trying to desperately catch a few minutes of sleep. We see them playing music, we see them at karaoke, and we see them at dinner. In a particularly funny and telling photo, Calvin Wong and Hellen Jo are sharing some sort of torta at a restaurant. Jo's recoiling reaction as she sees that a fly has alighted on it is priceless, and it's reflective of the almost desperate way cartoonists wind up eating at shows when they have little time. There are pictures of cartoonists doing nearly everything but drawing. The shots taken outside are especially telling, but every photo is interesting simply because it's not just of a cartoonist not at work, but of a cartoonist participating in and creating a culture and a scene.

That's the short-view version of the book: a snapshot of how the creators of today's alt-comics culture are like when their tribes come together on rare occasions. The long-view version will be even more interesting, as this book could become a crucial anthropological and historical touchstone. Fifty years from now, this book will provide context for a particular period of art and artists. Whether that context will be part of a continuum, or whether it will be of interest because of its status as an extinct phenomenon is an open question, but this book shows that documenting this period is important.

The Search: More Comics By Michael DeForge

Michael DeForge is one of the most prolific cartoonists in the world, and he is constantly changing and refining his approach to comics. In his collection of stories from his series Lose, A Body Beneath, DeForge says two interesting things. First, he thinks of each issue as a discrete entity, not meant to be read as part of a collection. In this, I agree with him entirely. The charge of reading individual issues of Lose is lost in this collection, as work meant to be read at a full stop and compared only to the other stories in each issue finds itself bleeding into other issues. Different visual approaches consistent within a single issue look jarring when collected together. I understand the purpose of this collection, as individual issues go out of print and demand for DeForge's work increases, but it's really not the best way to approach his comics.

The second interesting thing he says, by way of brief autobiographical introduction and brutal take-down of his own work, is that he tried to kill himself in 2009. Following that event, he drew Lose #1 and hasn't stopped working. I'm not going to engage in dime store psychology (as is often my wont) for something as serious and personal an admission as this, but I will note that I've always sensed a restless, almost frustrated quality in his work. What's become clear after reading a couple of more years of comics since my initial profile of him is that he's trying to translate some clearly idealized concept onto the page and falling short in his own eyes each time. While he's especially harsh on his drawing in his frequent self-reviews, he also takes shots at his writing and general sense of humor. While most artists tend to be frustrated simply because they lack the technical skill to tell the kind of stories they want, that is most certainly not the case with DeForge. In Lose #1, for example (not reprinted in A Body Beneath; DeForge claims that it's because it's "a very bad comic book"), his stand-in character goes to a bar in hell filled with dozens of cartoon characters, all of which DeForge draws with incredible skill. For DeForge now, this would be an example of what he would call "lousy, try-hard drawing".

Like Ivan Brunetti and Chris Ware in particular, DeForge has chosen to pare down his line and his figures. Unlike those two, DeForge can't help but put these simplified figures into worlds that are filled with refuse, weird fluids and other unpleasant effluvia. Also like these two artists, DeForge is paring down his line in service of a greater thematic mission. In Ware's case, his primary concerns as a creator are memory (especially with regard to its unreliability, played out in narrative terms) and empathy (especially with regard to trying to empathize with those who seem radically different and even repugnant to us). For Brunetti, it's about trying to fight the pull of nihilism and solipsism by making connections to the life narratives of others, all while trying to expunge and make use of one's own bile. For DeForge, he seems fascinated by families and transformations. In so many of his comics, DeForge focuses in on a familial relationship: brother-brother, father-sons, aunt-niece, etc. Some of these families are surrogates, but he's almost always more interested in looking at the dynamics of these relationships rather than zeroing in on particular individuals. In this regard, he reminds me most of another restless cartoonist, Dash Shaw.

In each of these stories, DeForge adds a layer of genre fusion to create a fictive and often visually unsettling transformation that becomes part of his narrative's reality. That fictive element aids in bending reality such that his interest in transformation is a seamless part of the narrative, but it's also there because DeForge seems genuinely curious about pushing the borders of discredited or little-explored genres. Horror and pornography are two good examples of this. Horror is especially explored in terms of bodily transformations/mutations, the formation of new and inexplicable forms of life and his trademark "melting/dripping line" that pervades so much of his work. DeForge has actually stepped back from relying on that particular visual as a narrative shortcut as part of the process of paring down his line. I don't know if the fact that this style has been appropriated by so many other young cartoonists has had anything to do with his decision, but anyone who spends time on Tumblr's art pages can see his pervasive influence.

DeForge's exploration of BD/SM imagery and lifestyle mixed with alien and conspiracy stories is another instance of his use of comics fusion. His Kid Mafia series is another pertinent example, mixing gangster stories with slice-of-life coming-of-age tropes and characters. DeForge isn't afraid to abandon experiments that he feels aren't working, like his Open Country series. That one was about a couple experimenting with a form of mental projection that balanced psychic phenomena, interpersonal relationships and aesthetics. The idea was interesting, but I would guess that DeForge might have dropped it because the concept seemed more fleshed out than the actual characters. This gets at the essence of DeForge's comics: no matter how strange the concept or the aesthetic, his best comics remain focused on characters and relationships over plots and concepts. Let's briefly explore a number of recent minicomics by DeForge, some collections of older work, his first major graphic novel in Ant Colony, and finally what I consider to be his real comics laboratory: individual issues of Lose.

Mini-Comics

I Surgically Altered My Body To Become An Airplane. This tiny mini (3.25 x 3.25") is almost a take- off on his familiar theme of bodily transformation and sex. The main character is a woman who does precisely what is suggested in the title, leading to an adorably stripped-down drawing of an airplane with dot eyes and a tiny smile soaring around the page. DeForge explores family dynamics here and lampoons them, as the rich girl who became an airplane is berated by her family for her choice. When she sees a boy from school who's altered his body to become a car, it leads to the funniest sex scene I've ever seen, like two Fisher Price toys putting tab "a" into slot "b". This is a whimsical comic to be sure, but it's also an experiment in paring down his line to the most basic of levels and still finding ways to draw a reaction.

The Boy In Question, Leather Space Man and World Of The Leather Space Man #7. DeForge's mostly silent Leather Space Man character has been a flexible vehicle for him to write about celebrity, broken friendships, power relationships, BD/SM issues and sex as a transformative act. WOTLSM sees DeForge working in an 8-bit visual style, giving himself a particular constraint as he finds yet another way to simplify his style. This comic is all about a kid's first concert experience (seeing the LSM), only to have it go horribly awry when the LSM is shot on stage. A frequent motif of DeForge's in his narratives is an immediate and ridiculous catastrophization of events, where one traumatic event leads a character to completely adopt a new life and leave the old one behind. This is done in as deadpan a matter possible, and here it serves to satirize certain musical and cultural scenes that tend to act as a default personality for young people.

DeForge's catastrophe motif is also in play in The Boy In Question, wherein a couple of soldiers/cops find the body of the LSM and are told to stay put. Where precisely they are is unclear (it seems to be an alien planet or moon), but it quickly becomes clear that they've been abandoned, leading them to essentially create their own civilization while naively radioing in occasional ETA's regarding backup. The LSM becomes their sort of societal token, laid in a closed series of slabs with only a peephole providing access. This comic was an early attempt at providing a greatly simplified variety of character designs, but DeForge couldn't resist doing insanely trippy and intense backgrounds. It's an interesting contrast, but it doesn't add much to the actual narrative or themes of the book. The LSM is really just a McGuffin, the object that becomes an unquestioned totem of this new society throughout many centuries. It's an amusing satire of how certain ideas can become so reified in a society that no one thinks to question them.

The LSM mini is a sketchbook that reveals some future character designs for comics like Elizabeth of Canada, as well as his fascination with blurring the lines between organic and cybernetic. His comics at times remind me of the films of another Canadian, David Cronenberg. Many of his films have involved frequently monstrous bodily transformations (The Fly), the ways in which cybernetic ports are made to look like organic orifices (especially of a sexual nature, like in Existenz), a raw and frank attitude toward sex, and the ways all of these things can provide rapid alterations in our lives and culture (like in Videodrome). There's also plenty of dripping ooze to be found (The Brood), not unlike DeForge's melting lines, as well as meditations on the nature of creativity (Naked Lunch). DeForge places a great emphasis on humor and less on shock value, especially as he's matured as a creator, though he did once joke in an interview that his art may have been influenced by seeing a Cronenberg film when he was too young.

Sincerely, Abbey Loafer. Originally appearing in Offerings magazine, this is DeForge's take on a warped, Cathy-style strip with a female protagonist. The strip allows DeForge to indulge his love of creating weird title fonts for every strip, something that I've gathered is one of the few truly pure bits of mark-making that always give him pleasure. Part of that joy is clearly the use of a font that's entirely incongruous for its subject matter, something that's at work a bit here. Of course, Abbey Loafer quickly goes off the rails in its satire of gender conformity humor (ACK!) by way of a side-scrolling exploration of environment. Abbey has to deal with her sentient hairdo, her head leaving her body because "I just can't deal with your drama anymore!", make-up dealing her skin deformities and her eventual "makeover" into a beast that's shot with an arrow after a long ramble through a landscape.

When reading DeForge, it's important to keep in mind that above all else, he is a humorist. He's certainly examining any number of themes and ideas and has a particular visual style he's trying to hone, but it's all done through various screens of attempting to make himself or his audience laugh. Certainly, that laugh if often achieved by way of a horrific image; the scene at the end of his story "It's Chip" where Chip is covered with thousands of tiny maggots but is utterly happy is his Ed The Happy Clown moment as a cartoonist. (That is, the scene early in Ed when he breaks his leg walking down the street.) It's a shot across the bow to his audience, as it were, and though DeForge has started to distance himself from that kind of material, it's still an incredibly important part of his development.

Elizabeth Of Canada #1-2. These are the first two entries for DeForge's Oily Comics series. It's been over a year and a half since the second issue, so DeForge may well have chosen to abandon it. These comics are all about family dynamics and DeForge's demented version of Canadian history. The premise involves the titular character and her family trying to get by in a settlement town. DeForge portrays her father as a drunken layabout, but the industrious Elizabeth takes up a trade as an assistant butcher. There's all sorts of things hinted at in the combined twenty pages, as Elizabeth is an independent spirit who has clearly caught the eye of both the butcher and his assistant. Beyond that, the story is still in a raw stage, other than depicting Elizabeth's barely-concealed contempt for her family and in general a dysfunctional family dynamic. The most interesting thing about this series is the drawing, as one can see DeForge starting to strip down his line more and more while experimenting with odd shapes for his characters. The way he draws Elizabeth's hair as a hat-like object sitting on her head (a common motif for him now) is an interesting way of capturing something detailed with as few lines as possible; it also gives his characters a static quality.

Structures 24-34. Published by Uncivilized Books, this mini is part of a series where each artist is asked to draw eleven structures of some kind. Ever the wise-ass, each of his curving, organic structures is a National something: "National Chair", "National Burp", "National Ladder", "National Living Room", etc. DeForge goes wild with lots of spotting blacks, hatching, psychedelic & curvy lines and other elaborate, decorative pyrotechnics surrounding the most mundane of concepts. I like the idea of making many private and personal concepts (like a burp or one's living room) into a national monument, filled with excess and impracticality. This comic also clearly gave DeForge a chance to go crazy on the drawing end again, using a much thicker line and the kind of "show-off" drawing he's since eschewed for his more serious work.

Kid Mafia 1-3. Speaking of families, the high concept behind this series is so obvious that it's a head-slapper: teenage kids make up a traditionally structured mafia family. It's DeForge fusion at its most literal, as this group of high school kids negotiate slice-of-life high school stuff like unrequited crushes, trying to be cool and going to see shows with mob hits. This is another series that DeForge has apparently abandoned, and that makes perfect sense. While it would have been fun to see the detective introduced put the squeeze on the mob, for each of the mob members to see their interpersonal differences put each other at risk, and for more humor to be mined out of the weird tension he creates, it's also material that sort of writes itself. Neither the high school stuff nor the mafia stuff alone was done in an especially unique manner (though both are executed quite competently); the series depended entirely on the clashing high concept to generate its kick, as DeForge tried to show that the rashness and impulsiveness generated from teenage hormones wasn't all that different from mafia testosterone. I did like the autobio strips on the back cover of #2, featuring one character asking "Michael" (buried in a hole) "What's today's riddle? Answer: you're a piece of shit!" DeForge's self-flagellation in these strips is played for laughs, but it reminds me a lot of Chris Ware's sketchbook material that desperately spells out his own mental health issues. The drawings here are standard early DeForge, only reined in considerably in terms of warping space and figures.

Flu Drawings. This is a series of color drawing experiments from DeForge, accompanied by narrative text that begins in media res with the narrator noting that her father was an apartment manager who kicked out most of its inhabitants after the building was remodeled. Each image corresponds to the text in an occasionally oblique manner. For example, the apartment building is depicted as a series of hills staked upon each other, not unlike one of the "structures' of his other comic noted above. This one gets interesting when the narrator (a boy) talks about hanging out with an older rich girl (depicted as a looping series of color patches, organic/cybernetic jewelry and looping lines depicting something akin to a circulatory or nervous system. DeForge uses some interesting foreshortening techniques here for some of the poses, particularly one where the girl took a shower and "came out to greet me completely naked and sopping wet".

The comic suddenly takes a turn toward an interesting sort of sexual play that was not directly sexual, as the boy acted as a sub to her domme when she had him try on some of her outfits as well as make-up. The mini ends as the boy noted that it didn't make him feel feminine, but rather "a preview of the boy I'd grow up to be". It's a fascinating fragment that plays on a frequent running theme of DeForge's: sexual power relationships, sexual awkwardness and transformations. Here, a hint is much more effective than a longer narrative, and the distorted figures more accurately represent the distortion of reality that these kinds of encounters can create.

Older Work

"Very Casual": Apart from Lose, this is where I'd point newcomers introduced in finding out what DeForge is all about. A mix of his oldest material and some newer stuff, this collection from Koyama is expertly edited for proper story flow. It opens with "All About The Spotting Deer", one of his earliest comics released by Koyama and ends with "Incinerator", originally a stand-alone minicomic. "Spotting Deer" was originally published as a stand-alone comic by Koyama, and it's one that rightly got him a lot of attention early in his career. This story has a lot of layers. It's part faux-documentary, giving the reader a nature channel-style guide to the titular creatures who resemble deer but are "actually a kind of terrestrial slug". At the same time, we're privy to the actual documentarian and the quotidian, sad details of his daily life. The details regarding the deer grow increasingly absurd, especially with regard to those who leave their herds. Essentially excommunicated, they join human society and produce "psychic meat", which takes on suggestions to become any meat desired. So many of DeForge's favorite themes resonate in this comic: the transformation of the familiar into the strange, the behaviors of groups (especially organized groups like families) vs alienated individuals, the unforgiving brutality of the world, funny cultural criticism, the loneliness of being an expert in an unappreciated field, etc. In terms of the drawing, it's in his earlier and more detailed style, but there's a certain spareness in how each panel is composed, with a lot of negative space and very little fussiness in the backgrounds.

"SM" is the classic DeForge body horror story, one that plays on the conventions of horror films with twist endings. Two young women search for and discover a particular snowman in the woods; they're drawn in DeForge's "lizard person" style, a sort of cartoony and distorted frame with few detailed facial features. They cut a slice of what turns out to be "meat" from the snowman, chew on it, and have a psychedelic experience that knocks them for a loop. The ramifications of their act are serious, with DeForge sparing the reader from seeing them killed but doing them no favors because readers are forced to imagine it. "Sweet Tat" mixes body horror and transformation with DeForge's fascination for deconstructing cultural scenes, especially those surrounding bands. It's both deadly serious in how it depicts band and personal politics playing out with young people and hilariously disgusting, as the members of the band aren't even humanoid in shape; they're phallic, oozing monsters.

"Queen" is also about transformation, as a creature takes on more and more elements from the forest in order to appear traditionally female, no matter the pain she causes to creatures loyal to her. This one feels like DeForge riffing on an idea that felt fun and interesting to draw and less a specific statement about beauty, identity or femininity, but those latter aspects can certainly be read into it. "Cody" features a kind of superdeformed character design that looks like it was inspired by video games, but it's a critique and send-up of niche, insular subcultures. In this case, it's avid litterers, and DeForge himself becomes a character in the story about pointless obsessiveness and how it can develop (one might even say metastasize) into a fetish.

The other interesting thing about his early work is how obsessed he was with other comic strips and comic books. "Peter's Muscle" is his attempt at unpacking the psychological implications of Spider-Man; again, it reads like it was a fun thing to draw rather than a profound statement. The same is true of a comic about a sacrifice made to the giant head of a character from Foxtrot, a disturbing drawing of Marge Simpson, and "Riders", which is about a gang of vicious, criminal motorcyclists who offer a sacrifice to a gate in order to transform into the cartoon characters they wear as clothing.

"Incinerator" touches on a number of DeForge's interests, including the dynamics of the strip Peanuts, family dynamics, BD/SM, bodily transformation, and sexual humiliation. It's also one of his funniest, sharpest strips in terms of the timing and rhythm of its dialog, and it maintains its absurd premise by employing an entirely deadpan and serious mien. The collection as a whole is remarkably coherent, held together by short strips and visual callbacks that act as interstitial material as well as a sort of thematic glue.

Root Rot: This is another early release that I wanted to include because it displays DeForge's interest in editing and publishing. Co-edited by Anne Koyama, it reflects their mutual interest in both comics and illustration, as each artist in the anthology is given just two pages to work with. DeForge did the cover but otherwise makes his presence known as an editor. The result is a mix of some clear Koyama favorites like Jesse Jacobs, Jon Vermilyea (the two pages here would go on to be part of his Fata Morgana, also published by Koyama) and Chris Eliopoulos, as well as DeForge favorites like Angie Wang, Hellen Jo and Mickey Zacchilli. My favorite pieces include T. Edward Bak's flattened forest drawing, Jo's crying skater comforted by a girl in a flower, Wang's desperate mother-daughter exchange of secrets, Joseph Lambert's terrifying father-son doppelganger forest chase, and Dan Zettwoch's amazing cutaway drawing/story about excavating a car from a swamp and finding a nest of beavers. Eliopoulos is the one artist that Koyama boosts whose work has never done much for me, falling a bit too close to the cloying qualities of a James Kochalka comic. Otherwise, Root Rot is an interesting opening salvo for both DeForge and Koyama.

Ant Colony

Originally published as a web comic, Ant Colony is the first "graphic novel" length work by DeForge. It plays on a lot of familiar themes, like family structures (especially unconventional and/or chosen family structures), hierarchical power structures, sex in the context of power relationships, gender, alienation and transcendence. DeForge puts all of that in the context of life in an ant colony that's on the verge of collapsing, adding the kind of nature documentary details that he's brought to several other comics. Anthropomorphizing insects and animals and then violently pulling away their human characteristics to reveal their animal nature is one of his favorite tricks, and it's used to great effect here. It's also tremendously funny, more than a little sad and repeatedly brutal.

DeForge puts in details about ants, like the males all having to service the female queen of the colony, and turns them into key plot and character points. The central characters of the book are a gay couple who are starting to drift apart, as one starts having an existential crisis about being a tiny, insignificant ant and the other can't comprehend this struggle or understand how to relate to his lover. Their dynamic changes later in the book after a savage battle between the ants and a group of deadly red ants, who murdered a member of their colony. The submissive member of the couple became dominant after he experienced the insanity of violence and the utter collapse of their colony, and his once-distant partner finds himself pleading for the stability he once gained from him as his abstract and even bourgeois belief systems lost their meaning in the context of disaster.

DeForge plays with the implication that the father of a boy ant in the book is also his brother, and that technically everyone in the colony is related. It's a stratagem designed to squidge out the reader a bit, but it also points to a key aspect of the the colony's way of life that was sub rosa. That said, the kid who inhales an earthworm divided up so small that they infiltrate his brain and change his perceptions of everything feels sorrow when his father essentially abandons him after bees mark him as a "chosen one". The bees act as sort of hippie superbeings, above the concerns of mere ants and concepts like doubt.

The silent, predatory spiders who scuttle around wearing what look like funny but terrifying dog or cat disguises are my favorite of DeForge's character designs. They are the only silent characters in the book and are by far the most feared. They fall outside of the family dynamic model of the book, as do most of the female characters. Indeed, women in many of DeForge's comics--especially up to this point--are frequently seen as a kind of unknowable other. Not that DeForge's comics are sexist, but rather that his earlier work (including Ant Colony) doesn't quite know how to write prominent female protagonists. There's a far greater focus on how the male-dominated cultures he explores are deeply dysfunctional precisely because they are male-dominated. Indeed, the only other female characters in this book are colonial female ants who are supposed to be scullery maids or nannies, which is in itself a commentary by DeForge on our own sexist culture and how difficult it is to break out of socially (and sometimes biologically) constructed roles. Biologically, pheromones are frequently discussed in the book as something that transcends reason or affection in terms of driving behavior, and this is more true for humans than most would acknowledge.

Visually, DeForge's cute and weirdly-drawn ants are awash in a sea of color. The palette is simple but bold across the board, emphasizing color contrasts to heighten the strangeness and terror of the environment. That bit of strangeness is in tension with and accentuates the way he treats these characters as having the anthropomorphic equivalents of human intelligence and desire. The same goes for the dialog, which is mostly in the patois of young and old humans alike. Ultimately, this is a story about the ways in which we try to create community even when old ways of living life have completely disintegrated. There's not a happy or unhappy ending, or even an ending at all. It just stops after the young ant starts spelling out various scenarios as to what could happen and doesn't bother to pick one is the most likely. This book isn't about the stability of the society of the colony before the collapse, nor is it about a potentially reconstructed society; it's specifically about trauma, disaster, and decay and the way it shifts power and power relationships.

Lose

Lose #4. To really trace DeForge's development as an artist, you can sweep away everything else and turn to his laboratory: his continuing series Lose. Each issue is a complete statement that acts as a kind of yardstick for his evolution as an artist and his aspirations to get better. #4 is all about transformation, and DeForge starts to let plot details and conventional narrative concerns drop away in tackling transformation as it relates to sexuality and identity.

The main story, "Someone I Know", is an exploration of the transformative qualities of BD/SM made visceral and alienating. Here we can see the Cronenberg influence at its most pronounced, yet DeForge always creates a distance between his characters and the reader with their blase' small talk and informational lacunae. The lead character here experiences a transformational experience at a sort of fetish club that features memory loss that hides some kind of horrific actions from both himself and the reader. All we know is that a line has been crossed that he didn't necessarily cross willingly, that this transformation has been done as part of an attempt by a shadowy group to make him part of an evolutionary leap, and that the nature of the transformation blurs the lines of biology, cybernetics and fetish culture. Everything about this story is designed to make the reader queasy.

That's followed with "Canadian Royalty", a variation on this theme and "Spotting Deer" that posits a "royals" culture in Canada not unlike that in Britain, spoofing the incestuous nature of their lives. It's a funny piece with exquisite drawings, to be sure, but the targets feel obvious. The last piece, "Sixties", uses the concept of disease causing transformation as a metaphor to explore racism without actually mentioning racism (the disease makes everyone look like a girl named Stacy). It's brutal, funny and on point in a way that's both blunt and subtle, veering into nostalgia in a way that young people often do as a way of escaping grappling with their current surroundings and culture. In terms of the drawings, Lose #4 sees DeForge at his most ornate, detailed and alien. His figures and backgrounds are drawn in a deliberately strange, unsettling way, even as he cut way back on any actual scenes of gore, violence or anything visceral at all. The horror is all psychological, and even that horror is regarded as a mixed bag rather than something to be avoided at all costs.

Lose #5: There are a number of interesting shorts, but the real main event is "Living Outdoors". Certain of his drawing tropes came together in a relationship story that was genuinely moving and tragic. There's still the requisite crazy ideas, like a "bookworm" that literally wears glasses and acts as sort of an ever-present interloper in various scenes, octopus ink that gets you high but is used to "create" zebras at a zoo, and other such weirdness. However, the story at its core is about teen heartbreak and identity, as a high school boy and a slightly younger girl have a complicated and exploitative relationship. Her knowledge of the psychedelic qualities of certain plants (thanks to her zookeeper dad) is used by him to score points with his peers, and the girl he wants to bed in particular.

DeForge takes teen drama genre tropes and turns them upside down, attaching themes related to authenticity, identity and the ways in which the promises and ideologies of adulthood are falsehoods. DeForge's drawings are simpler here, which only serve to highlight his page composition. Whether it's using an intricate splash page or using a six panel grid (2x3) to create interesting gestalt images, this is the most visually spectacular of any of his stories. His use of negative space also accentuates the lingering desires of both the male lead and his younger female friend. The way he uses individual images in panels and then an overlaying image going across the panels is not unique to him, but it's still tremendously effective in getting across the psychedelic experience. It's also one of his funniest stories. It can't be overstated just how much DeForge has been influenced by the rhythms and gags of classic comic strips. He can throw all sorts of bizarre imagery and casual, ambling conversation between characters at a reader, and then snap into a premise/gag set-up on a dime.

Indeed, the short pieces in the book take a cue from Ivan Brunetti, except that they insert DeForge as the object of horrible abuse while still using the rhythms of Ernie Bushmiller. There are other strips that take on the static appearance and function of a New Yorker cartoon, and the opening strip "Recent Hires" uses the same sort of tropes that Larry David uses in his squirm-comedy show Curb Your Enthusiasm. If Lose #4 was DeForge cycling through his interest in the "dripping line" aesthetic
and body horror then Lose #5 was him making his best effort at cycling through what he would describe as "show-off" drawing (at least in terms of format). Both also reflected his growing confidence and assurance as a storyteller and creator of compelling characters, something that would come to fruition in Lose #6.

Lose #6: This issue features DeForge's best story to date, "Me As A Baby". It's about a woman named Cherrelle who finds herself going to any lengths to recover her niece's stolen clarinet case. This is the first story from DeForge where I've seen him truly step outside himself in creating a character, including her motivations and relationships. It's also a story that's directly about family dynamics, as Cher has a barely-repressed rage toward her sister, her boyfriend and pretty much everyone but her niece. Indeed, her niece is the one and only opportunity Cher gives herself to be a good person and (potentially) a good mother. Everything else about her screams sociopath in this story, especially when confronted with the classical ethical dilemma of Plato's Ring of Gyges. In Plato's story, Gyges is a man given a magic invisibility ring, and with no possible repercussions that could arise if he commits crimes, Gyges winds up murdering, raping and robbing. For Cher, she revisits her shady past because she has to join "the Mafia", a hilariously-rendered version that's part cult and part wilding expedition.

When she becomes a member of the Mafia in order to retrieve the clarinet case, she not only willingly goes on a crime and murder spree, she also cuts the throat of a guy she had a fling with at her office. The urge she felt to punch her perfect boyfriend's face in, earlier in the story, is fully unleashed when there's no chance of repercussions. At the same time, she saves the day for her niece and weeps when she sees her on stage, or rather weeps in anticipation of her niece's future redeeming her own actions and life.

The story is told with her as narrator, and in many ways it's an improved and updated version of "Dog 2070", another story about someone desperately trying to make a family connection who repeatedly attempts to justify their own shitty, borderline insane actions. "Me As A Baby" seems to take pieces from other DeForge stories and makes them shine; the Mafia aspect of the story goes from being typically exploitative violence in his Kid Mafia series to something that's nihilistic and frightening (while still totally absurd) here.

There are typical DeForge drawing tropes, like the lumpy full-body outfits of the Mafia, the serpentine eye slits and the way they skitter across the page like video game characters. There's "DeForge Detritus", as he fills up panels with tiny bits of garbage and extra lines to get across the weight of the lawlessness of the setting.

The reason the story works is DeForge finally simplified his line in such a way that made it versatile and still capable of expressing a great deal of emotion. Looking toward Charles Schulz and Chris Ware, DeForge's figures here are Schulz-basic, and Cher in particular is a triumph:a round head with a single continuous scribble for hair, round eyes with big pupils, a tiny oval mouth and small lines to indicate eyebrows and cheeks. She's also grey-scaled in such a way to indicate that she's a person of color. Her niece Sally looks very much like Woodstock, drawn in the "gummy, doughy quality that kids have", which is an observation that Cher makes about her but one that plays out precisely in the way Sally is drawn.

DeForge has worked very hard to make things simple, stripping away layer after layer of lines extraneous to the emotional core of his stories. The "autobio" story that leads off the issue gets at this, as DeForge is kidnapped by dogs and replaced by dogs so that he and his style of doing things will never be missed. The story "Dogs of Canada" is a reprise of sorts to "Spotting Deer", only it subtly picks up on body horror, transformation and the creeping realization that our society is built on the flimsiest of foundations, vulnerable to forces that we don't  understand.

Transformation is a constant theme for DeForge, but this issue is less about transforming into something new and more about transforming into what we really are and dropping all other pretenses. It seems to be a key for him as a way of invoking his own series of transformations as an artist, as he sheds different skins and approaches on his way to getting his pencil to draw precisely what he sees in his head. Few artists have left more interesting or complicated molted skins behind as DeForge has, especially in such a short period of time. There is a new "burden of promise" for him, now that he finally seems to have reached his mature style as an artist. This is not to say that his transformation is complete, but rather that the foundation is there for him to pick through past themes, tropes and styles and build something completely new.