Familiar Face

January 6, 2020
This allegorical tale from DeForge (Leaving Richard’s Valley) follows a woman who spends her days reading the minor and major complaints of the public, offering a searing, surrealist critique of the culture of technological customization, and an ode to love in the face of overwhelming power. The reality of the unnamed heroine, from the architecture of her city to her own body, is subject to constant “optimization.” (“Maps would rearrange themselves with every update. The street you were driving on would fold in on itself without any warning.”) Her body becomes more and more abstracted as the panels progress. An automated system fields citizen complaints about all of this, and the protagonist is tasked with reading them, but she “never was told when or if a complaint was resolved.” Then her girlfriend Jessica disappears, forcing her to question the very nature of her ever-shifting world. DeForge’s loopy artistic talents are on full display: roads spiral dizzyingly; bodies mesh in tangled heaps of bright, flat color; and subways rush along on fleshy, veined tracks. It’s profoundly disorienting, yet skirts the edge of cuteness. The climax, involving a radical group of cartographers and a massive social protest, however, feels pat and stands out against DeForge’s otherwise staunch refusal of sentimentality. This is a kaleidoscopic vision of the strength of human connection, another artful and clever volume for DeForge’s many indie comics fans.

Starred review from February 1, 2020

An unnamed narrator living in a city where geography, architecture, and bodies are all subject to constant radical changes they refer to as "optimizations" is left adrift when her girlfriend vanishes without a trace. Unsure whether her solitude is owing to optimization or having been dumped, she searches for answers. Discerning the truth in a world where your computer attempts to distract you with pornography or jazz music before declaring it's in love with you, and where city streets suddenly change direction or fold in on themselves and there's no way to tell how many limbs you'll have attached to your body from one day to the next proves difficult. It doesn't get any easier when a terrorist cell hijacks the system and begins implementing changes of its own--unless these acts of terrorism are in fact signals from said narrator's girlfriend, meant to explain where she's gone and why. VERDICT DeForge (Leaving Richard's Valley) pushes his ability to wring pathos out of surreal situations further than ever in this dazzling satire of technology run rampant that doubles as a meditation on the sense of alienation that often grows out of heartbreak.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2020
In the futuristic, technocratic society depicted in the latest graphic novel by the wildly imaginative DeForge, both the inhabitants' bodies and the infrastructure of the cities they live in undergo a continuous process of updating: streets rearrange themselves, trapping drivers in cul-de-sacs for days; doors in apartments suddenly lead to rooms in other buildings; and one may wake up a foot shorter or without arms. The story's narrator works in the complaints department, reading the grievances of frustrated residents but forbidden to respond to them; she's just there to allow them to vent . After she awakens to find her apartment rearranged and her girlfriend Jessica missing, she begins to rebel against the dystopian system. In DeForge's near-abstract visuals, highways twist and loop crazily, interiors approach incoherence, and his squiggly, vague characters seem constantly on the verge of transformation. In his usual oblique fashion, DeForge offers a searing indictment of the gig economy and the unrelenting pressures it places on its victims.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)