Lose #4
Michael DeForge
Koyama Press.com, 44pp, CDN$8.00
When you buy a comic described as “the fashion issue”, normally you know vaguely what to expect. If it’s not actually stories about clothes, then it is stories involving fashionable people, stories about the world of fashion, or just lots of pictures of people looking good. With Michael DeForge, you can be certain that you won’t get what you expect.
Lose #4 — the fashion issue — is lead by two stories. The first shows at a teenage boy’s literal metamorphosis into a leather-and-studded punk; the second is an examination of the lives, fashions and mating habits of the Canadian royalty. Neither of them start, or finish, or do any of the in-between bit, quite like any other short story I’ve read before. I mean… look, the very first page of the book features a couple having sex as they watch a porn film featuring newspaper comic stalwarts Dilbert and Nancy. It doesn’t get any more conventional from there.
The first of the stories, “Someone I Know” is most reminiscent of other works, particularly Charles Burns’ coming-of-age classic Black Hole. David, a young film-school student, takes a girl to a new club, Grand Room, to show off. He realises his mistake when he gets in and sees the leather everywhere; Grand Room is a sex club. But when David wakes up the following morning, there’s a metal stud poking out of his arm, and it won’t come off.
The cover of Lose #4
“Someone I Know” is followed by the stranger still Canadian Royalty: Their Lifestyles and Fashions. Presented as an anthropological guide, DeForge explains the life of the Canadian royalty. Not, mind you, Queen Elizabeth and co. The Canadian royalty are, instead, a semi-human race with their own customs, physiology and, above all, fashions. “If a royal ever undresses, he or she is stripped of his or her title. A famous example of this is Princess Charlotte’s public disrobement on national television.”
The common thread between the two stories is the freedom they give DeForge to show off his wonderful sense of design. The studded, buckled and leathered outfits of Grand Room, and the ludicrously elaborate and malproportioned robes of the Canadian Royalty, are both things which you can get lost in, mentally mapping every seam, every change in texture, every safety pin and fold of fabric. For good reason, the Canadian royalty section in particular is broken up with galleries of the royals themselves — Margrave Blunder (1945-2001), Prince Theodore (1987-present), Viscountess Mary Pillow (1952-2009) and so on.
The names should give a hint as to the sort of humour DeForge employs. He has much time for silliness — not just the weirdness of the stories, but also things which would be more at home in a Python sketch. A character, handed an x-ray by his doctor, points out that it’s actually an ink drawing. The doctor ignores him and carries on. The lives of the royals are ghoulish, but Princess Charlotte flopping on the floor after disrobing for the first time in her adult life has a dark edge to it.
But the best piece in the book is the one which is played far straighter. “The Sixties” is the beginning of something out of the Twilight Zone. A teenage girl narrates her perfectly normal life in a town where everything has a disease called stacyface. It only has one symptom: your face becomes Stacy’s. It starts with typical DeForge weirdness, as she meets a deer in the forest with the same face as hers. But the sheer normalcy of so much of the rest of the story — the lack of the over-the-top oddities of the others — gives it a very different, and far more unsettling, feel.
It’s still weird seeing, like, old man bodies with stacyface. Babies, too. Fuck this fucking town!
Content from our partners
Related
