#it's the most cohesive narrative-wise and i was really impressed by the variety

[justaboutsnapped]

day6 comeback when i need you guys to show them how it's done

love is all-powerful (-> I'm listening to objectively pretty mid music just because they're by kpop groups I like)

[oddygaul]

Girl Juice and Michael DeForge

Girl Juice

P good. It has some absolutely hysterical, standout moments, but overall didn’t leave as much of an impression as I was expecting it to. I dunno, I might’ve just been expecting more of an ensemble thing, when in fact everything’s more or less centered around Bunny. She’s a pretty commanding character, for sure, but the humor loses a bit of its luster when she’s the punchline nearly every time.

I think the format contributed to this wear a little bit. Girl Juice is structured a bit like a comic strip / webcomic compilation, where each page is ostensibly its own standalone story; when they’re more straightforward gag strips with a payoff, they usually kill, but there’s some bits on the first half where it tries to be a bit more narrative / slice of life, and the layouts start to feel stiff and restrictive.

I did appreciate the ending story for branching out a bit in that regard, with deviation in both the paneling and the pacing.

Overall, the art and vibe and character designs are incredibly charming, and I quite like the author’s voice for dialogue, I just think medium-wise it’s a bit clumsy at times.

Also the slow drip feed of clownlore about Nana was fucking wild. The first time it dropped the clown fetish thing it was a fun one-off gag, then we see her clown boyfriend and hear about her clowning aspirations, and things start snowballing - by the end she’s wearing full-on clown outfits with ruffs and buttons, and suddenly I realize that her red nose, which I assumed was an artistic choice and didn’t think twice about, is a big ol clown honker she puts on / paints every day?? yo.

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Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero

Reading Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero consistently filled me with the same delight that first reading the title Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero did. which I consider a success story

This is probably my favorite thing I’ve read from Michael DeForge. I think (unintentionally) everything else I’ve read from him are collections of shorts, so it was kind of a shock to get something with this much of a throughline. DeForge is so confident with his style here, and I felt the longer format really gave him time to fully explore the tone and visual style of this setting.

The art is gorgeous throughout, and remains cohesive while still featuring lots of experimentation and playfulness. The tritone coloring is eye-catching, and DeForge really makes the most of it by constantly messing with line variation and texture, adding a huge variety of middle values even between each of the three printed colors. The book, generally, is incredibly lavish - while heavily stylized, both the characters and backgrounds are popping with detail and incredibly graphic, and it feels like DeForge rarely repeats himself with his visual effects. Lots of cartoonists making a strip-based story like this find a trick for certain elements then put them on autopilot; as if to make up for the book’s general artstyle not changing for once, DeForge instead finds new tricks for each element constantly.

All the designs are incredibly memorable, too, from the geese with their mouths constantly agape to the fuckin constantly sweating outline bear.

“Why should [she] be the exception? Penance is her birthright, just as this mushroom is mine.”

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Heaven No Hell

So yeah, after the relatively cozy Sticks Angelica, hopping straight in here was a fuckin trip.

This is DeForge back on his short story bullshit, and totally nailing every one. The man is a style chameleon - if not for the titling, I genuinely think you could convince someone this was an actual anthology. Visually, not every style resonates with me, but there’s no denying the sheer variety of aesthetic inside Heaven No Hell.

On the recommendation of some internet rando, I held myself to only reading one or two stories a day, leaving time in between to digest them, and… if anything, it only made collecting my thoughts on the book more difficult. Each of the stories is so short, maybe ten pages on average, and they’re all so drastically different - the voice of the writing, the artstyle, the setting - yet they all, to a one, left me with a sense of unsettling bemusement I couldn’t shake. It’s as if you see only a brief snapshot of a story, and are yanked away before you can fully come to grips with what’s going on. Heaven No Hell is almost short comics done as poetry rather than prose, which is a rarity in a medium so tied to narrative.

Some of them come off lighthearted - Soap Opera is one of the funniest shorts I’ve read in a minute, and the middle school murder mystery is surprisingly jovial for its subject matter (and the anti-carceral solidarity that all of the 11-year olds inexplicably share). Some are heady - the title track’s ridiculous tiered heaven system manages to strike a melancholy chord despite its flippancy (honestly bronze tier fucks tho), and the impostor syndrome society, where not a single person is who they claim to be, feels a little too real to be comfortable. Some are surreal and delirious - the war of the unreasonable, New Museum, was an incredibly potent tone piece that fully swept me up in its conceit. And then some are just legit actual nightmares, like the girl whose new ant stepdad keeps knocking up her mom, leaving clusters of giant squirming eggs rampant around the house, hatching and dying and crawling.

Fun panel but also this story is about a skeleton afterlife where the skeletons of every dying thing end up, their skin slowly blooming off them and collecting into a giant shell of flayed skin that girds the planet like a fleshy atmosphere

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“When the crowd cleared out and the snow off everyone’s boots had melted, we realized that at some point in the night our bodies had crushed and killed Barnaby. Barnaby was the littlest among us. He died the way he lived: misremembering the lyrics to a Hole song. We held a service for him, just a few of us stragglers–the ones tasked with cleaning up. It ended the night. We said a few things. Everyone knew the words.”

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In a few words: exhaustingly creative.