Search results for ""Author Michael DeForge""

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.

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Sticks Angelica is, in her own words, 49 years old. Former: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, head- mistress, 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 harbours 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 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.

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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, 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) behaviour. Instead, April and the boy hang out with 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, Michael DeForge's Big Kids muses on the complicated, and often contradictory, feelings people struggle with in 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.

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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 thirty-two pages, working with a vibrant, otherworldly palette of magentas, yellows, and greys, 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 folk tale about magical cats, and a bizarre, compelling story about relationships. Michael 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 and Quarterly: it appeared on the New York Times Graphic Bestseller list and was lauded by the Chicago Tribune, 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 unravelled. First Year Healthy is knotty and mysterious - it demands to be read and reread.

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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. Familiar Face s narrator 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 DeForge s work a vibrant color palette, surreal designs, and 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.

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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.

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