(W) Michael Deforge (A/CA) Michael DeForge Teenaged misfits and adolescent rabble-rousing take center stage in this dark coming-of-age tale. Big Kids follows a troubled teenage boy through the transformative years of high school, as he redefines his friends, his interests, and his life path. When the boy's uncle, a police officer, gets kicked out of the family's basement apartment and transferred to the countryside, April moves in. She's a college student: mysterious and cool, she quickly takes a shine to the boy. Eerie and perfectly paced, Michael DeForge's Big Kids muses on the complicated, and often contradictory, feelings people struggle with in adolescence, the choices we make to fit in, and the ways we survive times of change. Like Ant Colony and First Year Healthy, Big Kids is a testimony to the harshness and beauty of being alive.

(W/A/CA) Michael DeForge Long after the demise of humankind, birds roam freely around a new earth complete with fruitful trees, sophisticated fungal networks, and an enviable socialist order. The universal worm feeds all, there are no weekends, and economics is as fantastical a study as unicorn psychology. Michael DeForge's post-apocalyptic reality brings together the author's quintessential deadpan humor, surrealist imagination, and undeniable sociopolitical insight.

(W/A/CA) Michael Deforge The bodies of citizens and the infrastructure surrounding them is constantly updating. People wake up in apartments of completely different sizes and shapes and commuter routes radically differ day to day. There is no way to resist-the updates are enacted by a nameless, faceless force. The signatures of DeForge's work-a vibrant color palette, surreal designs, and self-aware sense of humor - enliven an often-bleak technocratic future. Familiar Face is a masterful and deeply funny exploration of how we define our sense of self, and how we cope when so much of life is out of our control.

(W/A/CA) Michael DeForge First Year Healthy purports to be the story of a young woman, recently released from the hospital after an outburst, and her burgeoning relationship with an odd, perhaps criminal Turkish immigrant. In a scant 48 pages, working with a vibrant, otherworldly palette of magentas, yellows, and grays, Michael DeForge brings to life a world whose shifting realities are as treacherous as the thin ice its narrator walks on. First Year Healthy is all it appears to be and more: a parable about mental illness, a folk tale about magical cats, and a bizarre, compelling story about relationships. Michael DeForge's effortless storytelling and eye for striking page design make each page of First Year Healthy a fascinating puzzle to be unraveled.

(W/A/CA) Michael Deforge Heaven No Hell collects DeForge's best work yet. His ability to dig into a subject and break it down with beautiful drawings and sharp writing makes him one of the finest short story writers of the past decade, in comics or beyond. Heaven No Hell is always funny, sometimes sad, and continuously innovative in its deconstruction of society.

(W/A/CA) Michael Deforge Richard is a benevolent but tough leader who oversees everything that happens in the valley. When Lyle the Raccoon becomes sick, his ragtag group of friends take matters into their own hands, breaking Richard's strict rules. Caroline Frog rats them out to Richard and they are immediately exiled from the only world they've ever known. DeForge's tale expands from a bizarre hero's quest into something more: they make it out of the valley and into the big city, and we see them coming to terms with different kinds of community: noise-rockers, gentrification protesters, squatters, and more.

(W/A/CA) Michael DeForge Sticks Angelica is, in her own words, '49 years old. Former: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, headmistress, Mountie, columnist, libertarian, cellist.' After a high-profile family scandal, Sticks escapes to the woods to live in what would be relative isolation were it not for the many animals that surround and inevitably annoy her. Deforge's witty dialogue and deadpan narration create a bizarre yet eerily familiar tale of how we build our own sense of self and how others carry on the roles we create for them in our own personal dramas.