cover image A Western World

A Western World

Michael DeForge. Koyama, $22.95 trade paper (152p) ISBN 978-1-927668-48-1

In the story that opens the latest collection of boundary-pushing comics by DeForge (Big Kids), “Living Hell,” a group of friends imagine living in the same house, perhaps even sharing a single room where they abandon all privacy and defend themselves from the outside world. This surreal scene sets the tone for this volume in which the ordinary rubs shoulders with the bizarre and bodies, minds, and identities are infinitely permeable. Humans are reborn into incomprehensible alien lives in “Mostly Saturn” in “A Softness,” which feels like a folk tale from another species, a colony of soft creatures is threatened by spiky things that can’t help poking holes into them; and “About Kissing” weaves a creation myth that describes life as the interaction of orifices. Some stories flirt with social commentary, like “Placeholders,” the tale of a tech startup that fills a city with massive “soft storage” devices, ominous data-storage growths that loom up in neighborhoods. Deforge switches up the art, scribbling stringy characters in loose settings, constructing geometric compositions suggestive of Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti, or transforming figures into abstract patterns. But no matter what style he adopts, there’s a distancing effect to his art, an affinity for the cool language of symbols, logos, and graphs. The lengthy final piece, “Rhode Island Me,” dares to get a little more human with a horror-tinged tale about friends trying to reconnect on a cabin trip. Taken together, the arc of the collection follows an inventive cartoonist breaking the form down to its basics and building it back up again. DeForge has been a darling of the comics community, and, while esoteric, this volume is a showcase of his sui generis talent. (May)