graphics
On "Heaven No Hell" by Michael Deforge
Sometime in January I read Heaven No Hell by Michael Deforge, a graphic novel anthology. This one was on my list for a while before I managed to get it from the library— it’s always on loan. Last year, in lieu, I picked up Deforge’s Big Kids but by that time I had long let the blog lay fallow. So it’s a bit of a 2-4-1 deal in this post. I think I first became of aware of Heaven No Hell, and consequently Deforge as someone to check out, because my friend Kyle shelved the book on Goodreads. Not that Deforge is a new voice, he’s published eleven books, but he was new to me. I’d seen his work before, of course, though unbeknownst to me at the time. Deforge worked as a designer on Adventure Time and has done illustrations for Jacobin and the New York Times, so chances are you have too.
The stories in this anthology vary greatly— both in terms of the written and drawn components. Stylistically, they all look like Deforge but he really shows his range. Some are pretty straight forward, like “One of My Students Is a Murderer…But Which?” which introduces us to a delightful kid detective and has a more traditional comic strip vibe. Others are touching like “Song Selection,” with nostalgic text about getting older on the bottom and large single panel illustrations done all in black and red. Others are harder to parse such as “Surprise” and “Recommended for You.” My favourites lie somewhere in the middle, “My New Stepdad Is a Disgusting Bug, And I Hate Him” is brilliant. The stepdad is a literal bug but the story is clearly about an interloper fucking up your family dynamic. They all sneak in something funny and something true, despite the zaniness of the illustrations.
The art has a definite psychedelic quality to it, everything is beautiful but with a bit of a scary edge to it; there’s something unsettling and vaguely threatening at play. For the most part the words are sparse and restrained. For me, part of the pleasure was in the active synthesizing of the visual information with the text. This is a graphic artist who shows more than he tells. “Album,” does this so simply and so well. Each panel is a “photo” of the unseen narrator’s mother. In each entry, we can only see a sliver of her face, though we know the broad strokes of her life— attending protests, having a kid, cheating on her spouse, graduating, dying, doing the mundane tasks of life, vacationing. It’s such a touching comment on how we never really know our parents, or, we never see them wholly, even though we’re there with them, most of the time.
Big Kids is an allegory about growing up and seeing the world in a completely new way. It’s also about realizing that some people never grow up which can make them hard to see properly. One day, the main character turns into a tree and suddenly everything around him is transformed. I hesitate to draw any truly solid conclusions because while the overarching coming-of-age bit is obvious, everything else is subtle. It’s not a bildungsroman because there is no other side, it’s just change and navigating it. The last line resonates nicely with how I think of Deforge’s work, it reads, “I had a lot of feelings.”
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Whoops I wrote this like a two weeks ago and just procrastinated adding photos and sending this off. It’s a process *sigh*.