Ant Colony

March 3, 2014
DeForge’s quasi-philosophical graphic novel about a collapsing ant colony begins with dark humor and travels in circular fashion through bleak tragedy and the occasional bout of slapstick. The ant characters are a mixed bunch: a police officer, the queen ant herself, and a child who is treated as a prophet. But most of the story revolves around a pair of male lovers, who resent having to sexually service the queen for no good reason. Their dialogue is deadpan and played mostly for laughs (“I’m extremely uncomfortable around cops. Also, I am a pacifist”). That is, until war breaks out against a marauding band of red ants that have been leaving the savaged corpses of black ants like the victims of a serial killer. The threats are many—marauding spiders and humans wielding magnifying glasses are among the ants’ greatest fears. With an existential crisis spreading through the colony, there’s an echo of Beckett and “I can’t go on. I’ll go on” rippling through these pages. DeForge’s bright, twisted art brings a further uncertain kick to this epic farce. The laughs are many, but they are dry and brittle ones.

Starred review from March 1, 2014
A colony of black ants serves as a vehicle to examine the human condition in this stunningly accomplished graphic novel. As the denizens go about their ant-like activitiesthe males seek food, service the queen (depicted as a grotesque colossus), and wage war on a nearby red-ant colony, while the infertile females tend to the childrenthey fret, bicker, and gossip in a recognizably human fashion. A cataclysmic clash with the red ants results in the destruction of both colonies, with the fate of their civilization resting on a handful of survivorsa homosexual couple, a youngster imbued with strange powers of prophecy from inhaling earthworm particles, a cowardly cop who dodged the battle, and a baby red ant. The story's conflation of the peculiar and the prosaic is reflected in DeForge's artwork, which offsets a disturbingly bizarre drawing style, reminiscent of Mark Beyer but even more idiosyncratic, with straight-on camera angles and a nearly unvarying nine-panel grid. A quietly unsettling, masterfully realized work that marks DeForgewho has a handful of comic books and a stint as a designer on the Adventure Time animated series to his creditas a leading figure in the alternative-comics scene.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)