Readers follow them through the weird, black comedy of the waning days of their home colony-some of which is caused by the ants themselves, most of which is due to a war with a colony of red ants-as these survivors wander away and consider forming their own, new colony.ĭeForge’s ants are his own, centaur-shaped, many-legged creatures with human-ish faces of bright, primary colors and visible organs shining through their black exoskeletons. These are the ants of Michael DeForge‘s graphic novel Ant Colony, the collected, book form version of his once-serialized strip Ant Comic. A pair of homosexuals beginning to drift apart. The child’s nihilistic, sociopath of a father. This collection is a strong indication of why DeForge is one of the best young cartoonists working.A prophetic child, full of microscopic earthworms and coated in pollen by bees. Not every story is quite as strong as those two, but all bring something fascinating to the proceedings, veering off in directions one never imagined at the outset. “Canadian Royalty”-the funniest story in a very funny book-explores the downright shocking practices of that country’s monarchy. In “Someone I Know,” the Lynchian horrors of Dan Clowes’s Like a Velvet Glove are taken to their Lovecraftian conclusion. It’s not enough for his art to simply swirl and swim and float away-it exists in service of his stories, which live in a world where a profound delight is discovered in the deeply grotesque. But unlike a majority of those peers, DeForge is nearly always grounded by a terrific knack for worldbuilding and storytelling. Like many of his more avant-garde contemporaries, his art is often near-psychedelic abstractions.
By issue #2, there’s really not a whole lot to complain about-DeForge has already hit a remarkable stride. “Lose #1 is a very bad comic,” DeForge (Ant Comics, Very Casual) writes in the intro, by way of explaining why this collection of his ongoing comics anthology omits the first issue in the series.
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