Ant Colony
...Michael DeForge’s new Ant Colony, a book unbound by its ambition. Originally published as a weekly webcomic following the doomed insect nest—and what’s more termite-like than a compulsive drive to produce X pages every seven days?—this little bug scales some elephantine subjects, such as war, transgression, authority, family, decaying relationships, religious revelation and societal collapse.
The phrase “best cartoonist of his [1980s-born] generation” attends DeForge like a tracking tag on a wing, but less often said, and more interesting, is that he might equally be the most prolific one. Last month, he tweeted: “have drawn 221 pages since January 1st 2013 and trying to hit 242 before January 1st 2014.” All this happens alongside his day job as a designer for the unnervingly funny kids’ show Adventure Time, a gig one hesitates to separate from his comics work, since so much of the latter dwells on strange fashions and warped forms. For all the use of “body horror” as a password to his stories, the ones that do cross that diseased wavelength are extraordinary in this sense of integration; David Cronenberg left the production of his disintegrating jaws and mutant gynecological tools to others.
One of DeForge’s characteristic techniques is transposing some quotidian conversation to a bizarre new context—or, conversely, acquainting alien forces with ours. He gives taxonomy to the unfathomable and watches familiar tropes slide into anachronism. In a near-future dystopia populated by talking dogs, a hapless, delusional dad announces: “I’m gonna start seeing a therapist this week. I’m doing it partially as research for my screenplay!” Half of Ant Colony’s central couple frets “I feel like you’re angry with me,” sitting on their miniature couch in an otherwise featureless landscape. DeForge’s approach to character design works a similar effect, as in Spotting Deer, where Wikipedia-like anthropological examination of the titular animal spirals outwards to encompass cultural history and finally the narrator’s life-destroying obsession his subject. Even in the semi-disowned debut issue of his annual series Lose, which DeForge vowed never to reprint, it seeps through the less elegant compositions and superhero parody: a desiccated mascot-sprite explains “your eyes can only pop out of their sockets so many times before the skin around them starts to sag.”
His aesthetic is more stylized and simplified now, but the very outlandishness of DeForge’s looks sometimes dominates whatever narrative surrounds them: Leather Space Man, for example, imagines Prince as an unearthly fetish-gear-wreathed enigma, then imagines the implications of that. The weirdness in Ant Colony emerges organically, a whole skewed ecosystem. Bulbous ants wear their organs painted on them like cosmetics; centipedes evoke elongated limos; earthworms get chopped up until they resemble melted vinyl, still murmuring “ha ha.” DeForge visualizes spiders as wolfish cartoon dog heads perched atop eight black sabres, a single hidden eye staring from their mouths—Carl Barks adapting Bataille. The funny-animals tradition in comics often gets passed down as something vaguely shameful, a style beloved by French people, children, and the velvety sybarites of FurAffinity.net. Ant Colony fuses animal and human qualities like a telepod accident.
“In his zeal,” Maggie Nelson’s Bluets marvels, “in the ‘dark chamber’ of his room at Trinity College, Newton at times took to sticking iron rods or sticks in his eyes to produce then analyze his perceptions of colour.” I would happily impale my pupils on DeForge’s hues. I’m partial to the custard yellow he uses for everything from the massive ant queen’s breasts to an inverted pyramid of magnified sunlight, but others pierced my affections too. A black sheen sweating on each colony drone. Imperial reds shading a rival ant tribe, the only halfway realistic-looking creatures in the book and thereby the Other. Pale pink snaking its minty course through a whited-out fertilization sequence. After the aforementioned sunlight bears down on warring ants like some towering abstracted sword, their charred corpses lie over smooth lawny green, a bucolic necropolis.
Real anthills only seem matriarchal to human eyes. A queen exercises no command or authority over the superorganism; she exists solely to reproduce, a fascist’s dream girl. In a species marked by individuality, classes would begin to assert control—none more aggressively, DeForge suggests, than the paramilitary male variety. The creepiest figure in the book is a cowardly, violent ant cop who seeks to maintain the status quo primarily because of the sadistic license it grants him. “I don’t want to fight,” he confesses. “I don’t want to die. I want to remain alive as a police officer.” The detective explains that “officers are encouraged to strike criminals in a way that leaves their faces scarred in order to shame them,” then adds: “That was a lie. We aren’t encouraged to do that. But I’ve done it twice before.” One of the baby red ants play-acts as a cop by wrapping its head with entrails.
Made up of short serialized chunks, mostly drawn across the same nine-panel grid, Ant Colony depicts a civilization annihilating itself in bleak, queasy-funny episodes. Survivors can only stagger onwards, upholding the worst tendencies imparted to them, whether romantic or murderous. DeForge’s story is a horrifying indictment of a system where revolutionary thought seems impossible. The one ant who truly escapes social law is a libertine psychopath, the sort of gourmand who wonders what cannibalism might taste like, later musing: “I’d like to go swimming … I’d like to eat a mosquito … I’d like to fuck a living thing while that thing was caught in a spiderweb.” DeForge gives him roaming, ovular eyes and a little parenthesis of a mouth, inverted with self-amusement. In the wreckage of the queendom, he grills rancid meat and sings “Just Can’t Wait to Be King.”
DeForge’s grim joke of an ending leaves the future in the mandibles of a traitorous cop, a sundering non-family, and a child prophet high on inhaled earthworm. Our closest thing to a heroic character is reduced to dragging a shovel through the dirt, pleading: “We can design it how we want. We can make things different! … I’ve spent my whole life just—just moving tiny bullshit around some other tiny bullshit…” The lone hopeful note comes when the oracle tells him that visionary foresight is really only a series of randomly apocalyptic hallucinations. In 1962, thinking about Little Orphan Annie’s blank eyes, Manny Farber argued that termite art aims for “the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.” What happens to a society that cannot even picture anything but the settled order? Ant Colony’s first image is one of the oldest: a plump fallen apple, chewed down to its sinewy, shriveling core.
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Chris Randle (from 'A Bug's Strife'originally published in Hazlift)
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Chris Randle (from 'A Bug's Strife'originally published in Hazlift)
'test frames' by Michael Deforge
Art Show
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p.s. Hey. This weekend the mighty writer and d.l. and so much more Chris Dankland directs our attention to the uniquely amazing comix artist and cartoonist Michael Deforge, and, hence, consider your imminent blog time's occupation filled to the brim. Scroll, peer, click, contemplate, and enjoy please, and any triggered words you can send Mr. Dankland's way would be most appreciated. Also, in a nice coincidence, this weekend marks the beginning of Chris's new gig as the managing editor of Alt Lit Gossip, almost inarguably the most central site and literary goodies-dispersing fount of the so-called "Alt Lit" writers scene/movement, and a site that, if you're interested in keeping up with the latest turns and twists within some of the most exciting new writing being done today, is or should be a heavily key bookmark. You can go read Chris's introductory editorial by clicking this. So, yeah. Thank you so much for this weekend, and major congrats on the new gig, Chris! ** Kiddiepunk, Cool, yeah, amazingness indeed, right? Great to gaze at you and Oscar across my steaming nachos plate last night, man. ** les mots dans le nom, Hi. Oh, my total pleasure on the Benning post, of course. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Understood about your 'nothing beyond' remark. All respect to you. I'm kind of on the other side of that, I guess, as 'happen to be gay' is a common phrase of mine and way of thinking, etc., but I don't think that thinking about gayness as something that can be transcended via art reduces it to nothing at all. I think the way it can be expanded and how it forms a launching pad for expansiveness speaks to its strength and, given that the sources of a lot of the consensus greatest art throughout history happened to be gay, speaks for itself. I wouldn't trade being a writer who happens to be gay for heterosexual inclusion or for any other possibility. But I don't think my writing or anything else I make is about being gay at all. When I write or make artistic things, I just think of my being gay as one of the important things I'm working with, I guess. ** Steevee, Hi. I'm in agreement with you, I think. Yeah, I also agree it's disappointing that 'The War' isn't in that Benning video trove. I'm extremely interested to see it. Since Benning is very highly regarded in France and shows his work here reasonably often, I hope I'll get the chance. Have you heard anything about his collaborative film with Richard Linklater or what's up with it as far as a release goes? That's something I'm so very curious to see as well. ** _Black_Acrylic Hey, Ben. Hopefully the wait vis-à-vis your interview will be very worth it. I just read a couple of days ago that Alig might be released from prison very soon. Very odd, interesting character. I used to go to his Limelight events fairly often back in the day. ** White tiger, Hey, pal! Oh, right, yes, Antonio's and Joel's b'days were a day apart. The time change between here and the US often confuses me re: when exactly people have commented, i.e. today or yesterday. Really cool about the site you're working on. Let me know when it launches, if you remember and don't mind. Everyone, the great multi-faceted artist/person/d.l. white tiger is, in her words, 'working on a new website that will teach you how to read the tarot'. It's called Crowncutter, and here's a trailer. Check it out, yes? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Best of luck with the connectivity issues. Yeah, crazy about the availability of the Bennings. Mm, favorites ... I really do love everything I've seen by him. Among those available there, maybe I especially loved 'small roads' and the two cabin-oriented ones -- 'Two Cabins' and 'Stemple Pass' -- and maybe 'Ten Skies'. The novel is coming along very well, I think. It's building gradually but intensively. I worked on it a little bit while on the road in the early mornings, yeah, but not a lot since we were really busy. I think maybe the trips are shaping the novel, yeah. I mean, it's a hugely personal novel, and my most personal, life-based novel by a long stretch, so everything I do, see, learn, etc. colors it and could even end up in the novel's content itself. Thanks for asking. How is your new one going? ** Bill, Hi, Bill. The Boltanski was simultaneously really cool and fun and kind of silly in a way. Hard to explain. Maybe not silly but rather awfully romantic or something. But that's Boltanski for you. Your projects just sound ever more exciting the more you explain. Yeah, I hope your collaborators pony up with some online evidence asap. ** Misanthrope, Well, profit-wise, and sticking to the McDonalds comparison, I guess most people who buy shit at McD's probably spend around $10 or so maybe? And they obviously make a heck of profit? So, I don't know. Commerce is not something I understand at all. I need to check the average temperature in Antarctica in late February. It'll be the summer there then, so I guess it'll be as warm as that place gets. I have to buy a ton of warm clothes and a hat and boots and dark glasses and stuff. I've never owned a pair of dark glasses in my life, which I guess is kind of weird. ** Gary gray, Cool, so glad you liked the Benning work. He's a big fave of mine. Seeing his early films when I was younger really shifted my thinking about art and about making stuff. Here's hoping that you get that calm weekend. I think calmness is in my weekend's cards too. Good, cool, about the therapy and that it's working. What's it like? Is it a private one-on-one thing or a group thing or what? Enjoy everything. Love, me. ** Rewritedept, Hi. My lag maybe started easing up today, fingers crossed, gulp, etc. Finches, nice. Richard and Karen, ha ha. Better than Captain and Tennille. Mm, I like hiking pretty well, yeah. Not steep uphill hiking, though. Always have hiked a bit. I think Patagonia will involve a fair amount of hiking, but it's kind of a big mystery. I don't think my weekend will be boring. I almost never get bored. I'm weird that way. I have a bunch of work/writing to do, and that'll probably be the bulk of my goings on. Have the greatest one you can. ** Right. Get yourselves back up into the fray created by the Deforge/Dankland power duo, and I'll see you back here on Monday.