“Aside from all the obvious adolescent allegories, and the changes in perception, and the way he sees his body and other bodies in Big Kids, I feel adolescence is the time when you become very aware of the edges of the world around you.” “I tried to think of the way you feel when you are that age,” he says, his chair swiveled away from his drawing table, where he’s been spending the afternoon on a series of large sketches of insectoid figures with bright orange phalluses for an exhibition this April at Weird Gallery. Everyone else in the world, he can now see, is either a tree or a twig. Yet he found himself revisiting adolescence for his new graphic novel Big Kids (Drawn & Quarterly), a coming-of-age allegory with the surreal twist that after the teen protagonist is abandoned by his best friend/bully/boyfriend, he wakes up one afternoon as a tree. “It is not a time I like looking back to,” he says. The Toronto-based artist says he often wakes up on the mattress on his bedroom floor with a sense of relief that he’ll never have to go to school again.
It’s not out of a fondness for his days as a student in Ottawa that the 28-year-old surrounds himself with the graphic art of his youth. With wall space at a premium, there haven’t been many additions since.
Nearly everything hung by the award-winning cartoonist, who moonlights as the props and effects designer on the gently insane fantasy cartoon series Adventure Time, was collected when he was in high school and college. The one artist conspicuously absent is DeForge himself. Brightly coloured posters paper the walls of Michael DeForge’s two-room basement apartment: dapperly dressed anthropomorphic cats the retina-scorching colours of Montreal art-duo Seripop a full-page vintage Annie comic from 1936, originally published in this newspaper.
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