One of my favorite experiences, in the endeavor of criticism, is when an aesthete long regarded (by oneself) as total, as stylistically hermetic, betrays, for a fleeting moment, the lineage behind their work. Julia Gfrörer’s earlier work, for instance, bears (with much elegance) a shade of Eddie Campbell; Martin Vaughn–James’ The Cage becomes far more accessible once one has encountered the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Art is rarely created in a vacuum; it is mostly a question of how seamless the integration, how well the present outshines the past.
Michael DeForge is one such seamless integrationist. For all of his enumerated influences — Bell, Brunetti, Beyer — DeForge is enough of an artistic polyglot that, personally, the resemblances have appeared anecdotal relative to the artist facing me; reading DeForge, to me, is an experience of totality.
This is perhaps why, when I recently had the chance to read his 2018 Koyama Press release Brat, having read all but one of his other books, it immediately struck me as different — because more than I thought of DeForge I found myself thinking, to my surprise, of another Canadian cartoonist: Seth.
The overarching theme in Seth’s body of work can be concisely described as frustrated ambition viewed in hindsight — not nostalgia for the past, as cursory reads (or second-hand impressions) may falsely indicate, so much as longing for those promises of the once-future that, crucially, did not come to pass. Dean Motter’s much-celebrated slog Mister X, of which Seth drew several (admittedly very handsome) issues, tried to get at this theme, specifically focusing on the utopian aesthetic of the early 20th century, but essentially failed out of an inability to reconcile lofty philosophical critique with pulp storytelling; in his own work, Seth focuses more broadly on the psychology of hindsight: how the past is granted poignancy (be it positive or negative) by the present, thus blurring temporal boundaries in the mind.
To understand Seth’s construction of retrospection, let us look, briefly, to two specific works: the nighttime ice-skating scene in It’s a Good Life, if You Don’t Weaken and the whole of The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. In the former, Seth relates an anecdote in which he is invited to DJ as an opener for a band and decides to play his favorite music — jazz and dance music from the ‘20s. He imagines himself coming off as a cool guy, imagines everyone at the club admiring the beautiful music of decades gone by, but what happens, in truth, is that he is neither lauded nor booed — “Of the 10 or 12 people there, I doubt one of them even noticed when, after about half an hour, my ancient turn-table froze up and the music stopped.” In the latter book, meanwhile, Seth props up a striking lineage of Canadian cartooning, not only artistically rich and idiosyncratic but cherished by the public as well. This goes on for most of the book, until finally he turns to the reader — quite literally, as the narrator is Seth’s own stand-in addressing his audience — and reveals that he’s been lying the whole time, that the comics themselves really exist but the public backing was merely a fantasy far preferable to the truth.
In both instances, then, Seth gets increasingly tangled up within his own mythology, building up and building up before finally — and inevitably — whiffing out. This construction is almost jokey in its obviousness, paradoxically both dismissing bitterness (by giving it a comedic aspect) and underscoring it (by virtue of the incongruity between intention and result).
The specific placement of Brat in DeForge’s bibliography merits close attention. DeForge made his debut with the first issue of Lose, released by Koyama in 2009; though the cartoonist himself has largely distanced himself from that release, excluding it from the Lose collection A Body Beneath, in real time it heralded the arrival of a wünderkind. The dynamic between DeForge and Koyama was not unlike the working relationship between Fantagraphics and Daniel Clowes in the ‘80s or Drawn and Quarterly and the ‘Toronto three’ of Seth, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt in the ‘90s, extending beyond a publisher–cartoonist dynamic and into a whole aesthetic movement. By the time Brat came out, however, DeForge was no longer the hot new thing, simply because he was thoroughly established, with four shorts collections, four longform books from Drawn and Quarterly, various minicomics and anthology appearances, and a handful of foreign translations. Brat being his final longform release from Koyama—excepting 2019’s Stunt, a short story in function but a standalone release in format—thus signifies, to me, the closing of a chapter: from the ‘new kid on the block’ to the ‘working artist,’ not at all diminished in skill but now fixed into the landscape.
It’s not hard, then, to see in protagonist Ms. D — an artist defined once by her youth and now by her fading youth, by the people who have come after her — a shade of DeForge himself (thirty-one at the time of publication), giving the book a certain air of intrinsic urgency. Ms. D, you see, is a juvenile delinquent, which in the world of the story is a common and respected artistic vocation — except, at the age of thirty-three at the start of the story, she finds herself in a somewhat absurd state: despite her youth, as far as her scene is concerned she is yesterday’s news. Her life is comfortable, to be sure, but nothing distresses her more than her own respectability: she’s writing a memoir, she goes on speaking tours; when she sets a police car on fire, the policeman expresses his love for her work.
From here emerges a rather cynical view of the practice of art itself. On one hand, as DeForge’s delinquents all share a wilful emotional distancing from their surroundings (perhaps the most overt display of romantic affection between Ms. D’s intern, Citrus, and her boyfriend Franco comes when he tells Citrus that after getting fired from his job at the hospital he swapped two newborn babies in the maternity ward), the conceit of delinquency-qua-art becomes a furthering of a common trope of artists as exploiters incapable of viewing the lives and hardships of others as anything but fodder for their own work. On the other hand, given that society has wholly accepted delinquency as an art form, the very nature of delinquency changes — it is no longer an art of confrontationalism so much as toothless affirmation.
That this cynicism rings true — think of the progression of the recently departed Ozzy Osbourne in the public eye, from the ‘prince of darkness’ vilified by polite society to a charming icon of reality television — does not make it an easier pill to swallow, certainly not for Ms. D herself. In a field that has already rewarded her recklessness, she spirals further and further into nihilism. She drunkenly hooks up with interviewers; she repeatedly takes advantage of her new intern (unpaid, of course), Citrus, and subsumes her entire life. All the while, what the protagonist searches for — relevance, or at least repercussions — continually eludes her.
And so she retreats, for a time, into the past, only to find it likewise polluted. Brat employs a narrative structure reminiscent of Daniel Clowes’ The Death-Ray, or Seth’s George Sprott, panoramically flitting back and forth between the ‘main plot’ and what may be termed ‘additional footage’ vignettes. One of these vignettes, the six-page “A Shit, in the Middle of Your Floor,” has a simple-enough set-up: the protagonist, aged two years and two months, takes a shit in the middle of the floor of her home. She lies down on the floor, carefree, and allows bugs to walk all over her body — then she crouches and goes for another round.
Throughout the vignette, Ms. D speaks. For a toddler, she speaks remarkably eloquently (indeed, does not speak like a child at all), and with a remarkable stoicism, as if what she’s talking about is completely detached from her. It’s not — she’s talking about the unbridgeable distance between her mother and her, a relationship so estranged that they may as well be coworkers, or two people standing in the same supermarket line, only tied together by circumstance. Palpably absent is any tone whatsoever, be it mournful or celebratory; though she phrases herself in the future tense, her prophecies are set in stone, something to resign oneself to, which of course only stands to make things feel worse. “A Shit, in the Middle of Your Floor” is a note-perfect encapsulation of the cartoonist’s sensibility of emotional dissonance: as he injects the core set-up — a child’s inability to control her whims, an inability painful only to her spectators — with unlikely levels of philosophical intent (“You’ll clean it up, but I’ll beg you not to. The shit is mine. I am finally accounted for, and I won’t have my record scoured from existence”), the toilet-humor component feels incidental, almost incongruous; the joke feels sullied enough that the reader feels momentarily guilty for laughing.
DeForge has always been an artist in flux, constantly pulling from, and in, different directions. One look at A Body Beneath is enough to make one dizzy, with its remarkable progress over a relatively short span of time: the elder brother in “It’s Chip” (2010) evokes Martin Cendreda with his beady eyes and stick-like nose organically rendered in soft brush-strokes, but by the time of “Living Outdoors” (2013) his line takes on a harder, more solid feel, and his characters, take on a distinct sense of geometry.
By Brat, DeForge has taken on yet another form: the unwaveringly-solid pen texture remains, but his faces have been pared down to a streamlined manner similar to the English illustrator Roger Hargreaves, all circles and arches, while his forms and contours, no doubt informed in part by his stint working on Adventure Time, take on a rubbery quality, his characters’ physiques resembling balloon animals.
See, for example, the vignette “Tantrum,” which immediately follows “A Shit, in the Middle of Your Floor”: what starts out as the default geometrically-simplified anatomy—tubular limbs, small elliptical abdomen, round head, rubbery swoop of hair—rapidly warps as if in a funhouse mirror: Ms. D’s mouth grows larger than her own head, her eyes and nose floating in the air, before she takes on a doglike form as her tongue stretches much larger than her entire body. The setting around her, meanwhile, changes from glyphic indicators of her mood (thunder, rain, wind, and harder-to-classify squiggles) to a blank white expanse, which she then proceeds to physically break with her own hands, giving way to a pitch-black abyss. (Her dialogue throughout “Tantrum” consists exclusively of the words “shit,” “piss,” and, one time, “fucking”: not mere cussing so much as a child’s idea thereof.) Elsewhere, in the chapter “Immodest,” what begins as an interview devolves into a booze-driven affair with the interviewer, an affair that comes to an end after the second of two Vanity Fair features is published. During the breakup, Ms. D, hungover and dehydrated, is drawn ‘deflated’: she lies on the floor, the lines that make up her body drawn in a wobble, her head not a curve of hair so much as a nonexistent lump, her torso nonexistent. She then appears to fade away even further, growing thinner and thinner until she is reduced to just five lines which gradually shrink and converge into one.
The visual transformations of “Tantrum” and “Immodest” are the prime embodiment of DeForge’s transition from an artist whose minimal artistic unit is the individual shape to one whose minimal artistic unit is the drawn line. R. Fiore once wrote that “[t]he writer of poetry or prose however vivid his imagery must depend on the reader’s internal image of the things he describes. The cartoonist doesn’t merely describe a tree, he determines what trees look like. And so with every person and object in the cartoonist’s world.” DeForge, as he implements this insight, does so with a Steinbergesque twist: his line does not simply determine; it dramatizes the look of the object at hand, underscoring the impermanence of its real-time appearance. A tree when calm is, fundamentally, on the genetic level, a different entity than a tree in a moment of anger.
In the final movement of Brat, Ms. D attempts her grand stunt, releasing a special pollen that temporarily enlarges the ‘D-sections’ of the city-dwellers’ brains, making them all juvenile delinquents. In other terms, for her big blow-out, she tries to avoid growth by placing everyone else, briefly, on her own level.
After a six-page montage of vandalism and havoc, DeForge employs, for a moment, the same Seth formula, build-up then whiff-out, as we learn that “critics wrote it off as an unremarkable, late-career effort from a delinquent long past her prime.” And yet there is no bitterness there, only a distinct note of comfort — Ms. D eventually retires, taking Franco and Citrus as lovers, and states that she has found greater peace in stillness than in continually competing with her past self. Citrus, for her part, eventually outgrows Ms. D, leaving to pursue her own evidently-highly-successful career. The reader may infer what is left unspoken — that Citrus too will eventually find herself subject to the passage of time, that her fame and success are just as fleeting as Ms. D’s — but at least when we leave her, she is content.
It’s worth lingering for a moment on the differences between the two characters throughout the book: Ms. D treats the whole world with uniform abandon and apathy; if she guards Citrus zealously, it’s not out of love but out of recognition of usefulness (“I know what Citrus wants from me,” she says after Citrus is accepted into college and debates whether to stay under Ms. D’s tutelage or leave to pursue education, “but she’s never gonna get it! Hell’s the only thing I’m interested in raising”). Citrus, on the other hand, is substantially more nuanced; though she is a dyed-in-the-wooled appreciator of Ms. D, eager to defend even her oft-dismissed later work, she still engages with critical level-headedness — she’s not afraid, for instance, to term the elder delinquent’s latest memoir “terrible.” Ms. D, then, is a monolith; Citrus is the well-rounded person that emerges from it.
It is through this divergence that DeForge appears to reconcile the book’s central internal conflict. If the passage of time is expressed in terms of generations, then let it aspire to be a process of refinement, not decline, and let it manifest in different ways for different people, be it a retreat (for Ms. D) or individuation (for her former intern). Seven years after the fact, we can safely say that DeForge himself is closer to Citrus than to Ms. D: far from retreating, since Brat he has released four more books and another short story collection, with yet another coming in the next year.
My birthday was a few weeks ago. I turned 25, one of those ages where rationally you know most of your life is still ahead of you but on a more emotional level you feel compelled, for your own developmental benefit, to indulge in the delusion that life is more or less over and that whatever you haven’t experienced so far you probably never will, unless it’s a bad thing, in which case it’s right around the corner. Just to dig my heels in, I decided to spend a chunk of my birthday reading a book I knew would make me feel that, yes, things will only get worse from here and I may as well resign myself to the notion of all goodness and positivity existing exclusively in the rear-view mirror.
That book was Seth’s Clyde Fans, and I am thrilled to inform you, dear reader, that it did the trick. I still find myself more compelled by bleakness than by the alternative. Books like Clyde Fans, or The Death-Ray, or Ware’s Jordan Wellington Lint, or Hernandez’s Bumperhead — books whose protagonists’ inner lives run around themselves in ever-tightening, ever-smothering circles — are simply closer to my realm of belief.
“I would think love is a gentle thing,” said Brian Wilson of his single “Love and Mercy,” “and mercy would be a more desperate, ultimately more desperately needed, thing in life. Mercy — a little break here and there for somebody who’s having trouble.” One suspects that Michael DeForge has known a thing or two about this feeling, and perhaps that is the reason that Brat nonetheless manages to affect me (deeply, even, I would say): its hopefulness, such as that exists, is not weightless; it is the result of an active process of dialectical reconciliation, a process fretful enough that it still opens up a portal to a pessimistic reading.
Yet, if Seth is the starting point, Brat is both an embrace and a handsome kontrapunkt: despite the displacement inevitably brought on by time, peace is possible after all, if one knows what one’s own definition looks like. At the very least, isn’t that nice to think about?
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