STICK ANGELICA, FOLK HERO - MICHEAL DEFORGE

The library must have re-uppped it’s DeForge section. I had thought I’d read all of the SPL holdings but was pleasantly surprised to find some more downtown. Of all the stuff I read from the library and don’t buy, his stuff makes me the most regretful. I’d love to own it all. It’s so lush and beautiful and distinct. He’s got the thing that, to me, is most important in a comic illustration artist, an individual style. He could draw anything in he world and it would immediately be clearly a DeForge. His common theme are all here: the natural world, dreams, loneliness, longing, parasitism, symbiosis, etc. The book is a somewhat straightforward story about a Canadian folk hero called Sticks Angelica who lives in the woods. At first, I was convinced that Sticks herself was an author aviator, then a rabbit named Oatmeal, before DeForge himself showed up as a character. This is strange since I never before have felt, while reading DeForge, that anything in them was at all autobiographical (with the exception of the one about some people secretly being trees, which struck me as a metaphor for being queer, though I don’t have any idea if DeForge is queer) and I’m not sure why this one struck me that way, even before the author appeared as a character. Lisa Hanawalt, the cartoonist who designed the BoJack Horeseman world appears as a moose-headed woman, drawn in Hanawalt’s style. Man, does the world ever need an adult animated TV show from the design sensibility of DeForge. My understanding is that he worked on Adventure Time, so perhaps this isn’t that far-fetched. Either way, everything DeForge makes is good and I found this one better than most of his, the story was stronger and the art was, as always, god-level. 1 enormous and scary forest.