mao
Many many years ago, I was asked to write a review on Michael DeForge’s Big Kids that was never published. After hearing its desperate moans coming from one of my computer folders, I decided to translate it to English and publish it myself on the internet, because that is where all “content” should rightly go to die. Let that word simmer, “content”. Let its current usage die as well.
Years ago, when I discovered Michael DeForge’s work through tumblr, I sent him a message asking: Are these comics from the future?
It’s not that DeForge’s comics are about the future, but they definitely possess a prospective quality in the sense of playing with borders and devising situations beyond everyday experience, which nonetheless feel familiar. DeForge creates associations between seemingly unrelated subjects, in a way that perhaps has its source in hypertext-derived thinking processes, which, granted, is nothing more than a ready-made observation. Interpreting an anomaly by invoking a common generational trait (the internet!) is useful as a way to locate these comics as products of their time, but it also dissolves their particularities into a (arguably) universal trait.
Still, we can locate many of DeForge’s comics in future shock territory, even if they don’t subscribe to sci fi in a strict sense. The trick, it seems, is to casually mutate the mundane into an oily and alien substance that exposes the oddity and underlying horror of our habits, surprising precisely because they have always been there. This is a general idea that I have seen floating around in regard to DeForge’s comics, but to which I can only agree with. Ideas are presented matter-of-factly in documentary style or as thought experiments that pull us into “what would Martians think of us?” scenarios. Significant examples of this strategy include: an anthropological gaze into the debilitating body modification practices of the Canadian royal family; a story of addiction to littering; the repeated breach of boundaries between human and nonhuman species or the disregard for other common-sense markers of difference.
Big Kids further contributes to this cabinet of curiosities. Adam, the main character, is a high schooler who discovers that underlying his apparently coherent reality there is a deeper truth that has escaped his senses, one in which people are revealed to be one of two things: trees or twigs. Adam’s first romantic heartbreak catalyzes his transformation from a twig into a tree, bringing with it a profound change in perspective. In this sense, Big Kids can be properly shelved in the coming-of-age/YA section of your local library. Adam’s awakening into a tree works as an unexpected allegory of teenage anxieties and discovery, but it would be a disservice to foreground the book’s incursion into well-trodden paths without taking into consideration the experimental, even disruptive gestures that DeForge performs along the way. The coming-of-age tropes are there to serve as scaffolding, a common ground to engage with readers who already know the appropriate protocols. In truth, Big Kids wants to talk about “experience” in a broader, phenomenological sense, in which the experience of reading a comic book (in particular, this comic book) is included.
Comics have developed ways to hijack sight into providing input from other senses, such that, for example, we are able to “hear” dialogue through lettered ghostly shapes that we call “speech balloons”. Voice, sound, sometimes smell can be seen. We take it for granted, but in fact comics often include systems of signification that have nothing to do with lived experience, even if they have become naturalized for comic book readers. DeForge homes in on this oddity and applies the same principle to other invisible, but perceivable aspects of feeling, creating his own system of representation to imagine how a tree senses. In this regard, trees, whose perceptual mechanisms are, as far as we know, unlike anything we could “have a sense of” or to which we could relate, are the perfect choice to freely experiment with signification, as there is little for DeForge to base himself on. As a result, songs emerge first as worm-like, and slowly become fully developed devilish critters once they get stuck to Adam’s head; light condenses into huge beams or tufts of matter; smells become opaque clouds and chewing noises materialize into little floating bubbles marked with a (+). Tastes, even emotional states gain a visual, if abstract, dimension.
At the same time, visual and verbal accounts are often conflicting, alluding to the arbitrary relation between visual signifiers and signifieds used in the book. Adam’s subjective description of his father as having a “dopey, dumbstruck look” has no immediate correspondence to the faceless yellow twig that we actually see on the page. Similarly, Adam’s eyes are described as “brown”, while at the same time being shown as two opaque black circles. These inconsistencies are not limited to Big Kids, as time-tested conventions of cartooning, in their line and blot-based schematization, cannot deliver universally comprehensible descriptions of the world. We have to be instructed on how to read comics, even if some aspects of figuration, such as the ability to identify basic facial forms in inert objects, are cognitively innate. For Adam and his fellow trees, cartoons become a nostalgia trip, as they retain the conventions of representation from a pre-tree world that they can no longer access. When Adam and his lover Tyson, also a tree, decide to watch cartoons, they realize that their “thick lines, flat colours” are “impenetrable” by the shapes of their new senses, that is, unreconcilable with their richer, more malleable tree reality. If we were Martians, would we identify cartoons, these marks on flat surfaces, as representations of the world?
These frequent remarks on subjective experience are not just knowing nods towards readers: they firmly place experience in unsteady ground, refusing to provide an “objective” representation of reality for twigs, trees, or readers.
“Unsteady ground” is also the classical topography of adolescence, defined as that developmental period where tectonic plates violently crash into one another until we are able to glimpse the hopeful contours of future continents. That is, at least, the conventional wisdom. Big Kids frames growing up not as a geological event, but rather an epistemological one in which things become refracted into additional dimensions. What is told, what is shown, and how we interpret it. We tend to organize our personal mythologies into befores and afters, choosing particular episodes as landmarks. There is Adam bH and Adam aH: before and after Heartbreak. A twig grows into a tree.
DeForge can be placed in a gallery of artists, such as Mark Beyer, Austin English, Patrick Kyle or Bruno Borges, who explore cartoon figuration to its limits as if testing the audience’s ability to see. Simplified, disproportionate anatomies and flattened foregrounds and backgrounds are amplified and distorted until becoming barely distinguishable from abstract compositions. In DeForge’s case, abstraction seems to be playing an increasingly bigger role as time goes. This developmental arc is reenacted abruptly in Big Kids, in which more conventional design choices, left to describe Adam’s world before treeing, are radically reconfigured into a tree world of fluid, alien pictures that we are told represent people, objects, emotions and places. Adam’s sexual encounter with Tyson is documented in the form of two entangling abstract shapes. Fittingly, the twigs and trees of Big Kids are nothing more than reworked stick figures, but I guess one could argue the same about any cartoon character. Trees and twigs are not just expressions of the book’s worlding, but also extreme syntheses of the human figure. By the end of the book, Adam cruelly and absent-mindedly prunes Tyson until he is nothing but a featureless twig. How much can we take out of the human figure until we can no longer perceive it as such?
The care and playfulness with which Big Kids considers the translational functions of cartooning, from depicting physical matter to immaterial experience, inscribe Michael DeForge into the rarified domain of cartoonists’ cartoonists. It is in this sense that we can foresee the future in Big Kids: as a repository of strategies to be pillaged, ripped off and reworked by comics to come.
Oh hey my paper that was submitted in April 2015 was finally published this January and no one told me anything about it.
OMG this abstract >slight groan<. Don’t get put off by it, it’s really sexy on the inside.
Let me know if you’re curious about the work.
I was interviewed by Alexandre Leung about my residency project at IMéRA, in Marseille. I was told I look too serious, as if the comic book I’m working on doesn’t include giant monsters, the masked heroes who fight them and abusive *commentary* on pop culture.
Komikaze #15, where my comic Picaresque has been reprinted, is apparently on sale.
WIP (preface titled Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs for my ongoing work at IMéRA)