“I’m trying to imagine different ways of existing”: A Conversation with Michael DeForge

In Holy Lacrimony, the newest graphic novel by comic artist Michael DeForge, a musician named Jackie is abducted by aliens because he’s the saddest person in the world. The aliens want to know what sadness is like, and Jackie is tasked with training them on how to perform it—once he’s successful, he is returned to Earth.

As he tries to piece his life back together, Jackie starts a UFO support group, in the hopes of understanding what happened to him. Regulars, like Ellen and Leon, retell their stories to the group every session, while Cindy, who volunteers nothing, leads some to suspect she’s a fed. No matter how much they share and unpack together, no matter how many times they circle around the same details of their captivity, they never get beyond surface level trauma-dumping. That is, until a confrontation forces them to dig deeper.

What really preoccupies the group members is a shift in their lives: beyond the aliens and UFOs, they can fathom that something has changed, but can’t seem to articulate it to people outside the group. And though they aren’t as alone as they feel, they still struggle to connect with friends, lovers, and coworkers. This sense of isolation fulfills their worst thoughts: relationships fall apart, so they isolate even more, wondering if they’ll ever feel happy again.

DeForge has continually explored themes like isolation, depression, and community in his numerous graphic novels, but Holy Lacrimony feels particularly prescient, primed for right now. It’s come at a time of great division, so much so that no one can agree on the same reality anymore. What’s always drawn me to his work is that it exists outside of a storyboard; you can see his posters around Toronto supporting Palestinians, unions, and the homeless. While there’s a lot of self-reflection in his work, there is equally a call for more communal action.

I spoke with DeForge in September about utopias, activism, and rejecting national myths.

Sara Black McCulloch: How did you get started on Holy Lacrimony?

Michael DeForge: It was sort of a lengthy process. The initial seed for it came a few years prior: I had done a short story about a plague that altered the emotional range of human beings affected by it. And it meant that affected humans were kind of operating on the emotional range that is described ultimately by the aliens in Holy Lacrimony: they’re unable to experience grief or despair, things like that. I had this short story, and I wanted to expand it into a full comic. The short story was originally printed in The Fader, and I thought it would make for a good book.

By the end of late 2019/early 2020, I had gotten to about 50 pages or so into it, and then the COVID pandemic and lockdown happened, and it felt maniacal to want to keep working on a comic about a pandemic. Everything about the premise and anything I had to say about it was nullified by the day-to-day news. I didn't really want to write a narrative about pandemics anymore, but I did still have this idea of wanting to write about this different way of interpreting emotion, and understanding emotion, from an angle where some of these very common human emotions are a bit more alien. I thought actual aliens would be a good jumping-off point to that.

Sara Black McCulloch: Do your comics start off written and then illustrated, or the other way around?

Michael DeForge: I don't type out a lot in terms of a script, and a lot of the specific plot events tend to be a little bit improvised. I try to only do one or two pages in advance, but there are a few exceptions, where some comics require a bit more planning. For Holy Lacrimony, I had the structure in mind: I wanted half of it on an alien ship, where it's only in the head of the protagonist, and to mostly take place in one room of the ship, where it's surreal and open in that way.

And then for part two, I wanted it to mostly be about a group in another room, in this community centre. You do see Jackie's apartment, but the main setting to me is these conversations happening in the circle. I had this in mind from the get-go—I wanted it to be two halves in the story. And then I had these certain character beats that I knew I wanted to hit.

The thing is that even though I don't plot everything out, I do have this sense of the journey a person needs to go on. I know I have these certain beats I need to hit, but how they get there requires some improvisation. I like having a sort of pre-existing structure, but then giving myself a lot of room to surprise myself, to draw and improvise. It makes a lot of room for digressions.

SBM: The other thing I noticed was the lack of colour toward the end, when he’s in that support group. Why is that?

MDF: I thought it would be a good way to delineate the two sections. I want to leave it open as to which one feels more real. It’s not like I used a realistic colour palette [laughs]. It might feel more vibrant, or maybe the black and white feels more real. I wanted to leave that a bit open.

Initially, when I was working on it, it was all in colour, much more lush, much deeper colour. The whole thing—the spaceship and stuff on Earth—was going to be in these very pronounced and loud colours. I was printing out pages just to test how they looked and scaled. In order to save on colour ink, I was printing a lot of them in black and white, and toward the end of the book, I think I only had, like, 20 or 30 pages left to draw. I was looking at the black and white test pages, and I was like, “Oh, I kind of like the way these images look, more than colour. I might have to go back and consider making the whole book black and white.”

My partner, who is also a cartoonist, and a much better cartoonist than me, suggested I wash out the colours, just to see what it would look like. So, I took a few sample pages and just upped the brightness by like 80 percent, adjusted it, fiddled around with it a little bit. It now looks like I maintained what I liked about this black and white, but still kept both useful design parts of the colour. It also does lend something to the alienness of the spaceship.

SBM: In Holy Lacrimony, Jackie has to perform his sadness for the aliens and especially Kara. This made me think about how the pandemic and other world events have heightened that feeling too, of how removed we are from our own feelings and our grief. At the same time, that sort of sadness is romanticized and performed online, too. The world is very charged right now, but there’s a rift between how we experience grief and sadness now.

MDF: I've written a few comics that address my own relationship with mental illness, and this is one of those comics. With this one, I was trying to make the jump to write about something like depression or despair as something that is collectively felt because, you know, we have this thing where people use the phrase “mental illness,” but the response to it is expected to be so individualized, so pathologized. I'm interested in the idea of this despair being felt more collectively. We as a society are feeling more and more unwell. The back half of the book, with the UFO support group, hints at the possibility of building some sort of community or even solidarity, as tenuous as some of these formations around it might seem.

SBM: There are many horrific things we’re exposed to through our phones now, which is both good and bad in ways. I say bad, because I feel like we’re now desensitized to it; that that kind of violence is now normalized and justified. This is a lofty question, but do you find we’ve generally distanced ourselves from it?

MDF: What people consider a normal type of violence seems to be very different. Over the past few years, most people have been exposed to about as harrowing and gruesome images as you can imagine of dead Palestinians. Most of the world looks at those images and is correctly horrified that that could happen in the world. But there are still people who look at those same images and are cheerleading for that. There are still a lot of other people who will look at that and see that as a type of violence that's normal or justified—that is something that happens over there, to those people. They both don’t see the people it’s happening to as human, and living in Canada, don't see their own state's complicity in that violence.

People's definition of political violence also seems to be very different. We're talking right after Charlie Kirk got shot and people are reacting to that in a very different way, where they find that to be a very shocking act of violence, and the kind of dissonance between the reaction to that being an abnormal type of political violence versus a genocide happening right now. Or, to use something within the imperial core or within North American borders, the type of social murder that happens to say, an encampment resident. There's this very big difference between what type of violence is seen as normal and what isn't. And I think some of that has to do with the types of images we're exposed to, but I think it also just has to do with how two people can look at the same image—the image of a dead child—and see a different thing. That’s a very grim thing to think about. It's nice to imagine that everyone would be able to look at an image of a dead child and see the same, but that’s clearly not happening.

I haven't really known what it's like to organize when it's not under this incredible threat and duress. What would it actually be like to build something that wasn't a response to this intense, constant oppression weighing down on all of us?

SBM: Your work touches on themes like community building, utopias, and dystopias. Do you still feel that it’s possible in some way to achieve that at all? Is that still influencing your work, how you show up for your community and others as well?

MDF: I do think it's always a tension in my work, where a lot of my comics flip from being dystopian to utopian narratives. I often say that if art has a political purpose, one of those purposes can be articulating things that are wrong in the world around you. I've had this experience reading certain books, or taking in pieces of art, where I’m like, “Oh, I could sense something was wrong, and this piece of art has articulated that for me.” I think that is what I’m trying to do in a dystopian narrative. And for utopias, I think of Ursula K. Le Guin a lot, or I try to write ambiguous utopias. It is trying to imagine a different way of existing, whether it's a different way of interacting with people, or a different way of structuring a group or structuring a society—that's something I'm trying to do.

I do circle back to these different types of communities forming a lot, and I like the idea of some of these communities forming by accident. This is kind of the UFO support group. I did a comic called Leaving Richard’s Valley, which is about a community forming where the thing that bonded them is that they were kicked out of a cult. I did a comic called Sticks Angelica, which was someone reluctantly joining this animal community, someone who thinks of herself as a loner, individual libertarian type, but reluctantly realizing she has all of these social ties that she actually values a lot by the end of the story.

I like writing about these communities, and I do feel like there is a tenuousness baked into them, which is a tenuousness I feel in the world. In addition to other things, I do organizing work, and that's certainly always a tension there. I value these groups. I think of myself as part of a community, but it's also a community that is formed in this very urgent moment. I think about this a lot: I haven't really known what it's like to organize when it's not under this incredible threat and duress. What would it actually be like to build something that wasn't a response to this intense, constant oppression weighing down on all of us?

[T]he Canadian pride, the Canadian self-deprecation as part of this cycle of continuing to solely focus on “Canadianness” ... That is a national construction that I reject—my politics are one of rejecting those national myths.

SBM: Do you ever feel the pressure to participate in CanCon or national canon at all? Or do you ignore it?

MDF: I think at this point, I just ignore it. Earlier in my career, I tried to needle it a bit more. I had a few comics that I think of as my weird Canada stories, where in different ways, I've tried to satirize or needle certain aspects of Canadian identity. I think Sticks Angelica is the big one where I tried to do that. When I read those comics now, I'm not embarrassed by them or ashamed of them or anything, but I think the tone I got at was that gentle ribbing tone of satire. I think if I were to take on that subject matter today, it would be a bit more forceful and direct.

At this point, I almost feel like that type of dissent is baked into the whole nationalist conversation: the Canadian pride, the Canadian self-deprecation as part of this cycle of continuing to solely focus on “Canadianness” ... That is a national construction that I reject—my politics are one of rejecting those national myths. I feel very removed from it in my own work, at least, because the realities of fighting against the Canadian state are one that I end up having to deal with outside of my work. In my own work, I don't want to keep feeding into this dialogue. There's this other Canadian thing of navel-gazing, and the criticism turns into looking inward, and that hall of mirrors is self-reflection. And I don't really want to contribute to that any more than I already have.

SBM: There's also an identity crisis, because Canada does get compared to the UK and US. We’re in the middle somewhere and can hide in there.

MDF: That's absolutely correct. And it becomes a way of avoiding a direct conversation about Canada's own horrifying crimes. It’s a country birthed in genocide and displacement, and a lot of the Canadian-identity-crisis conversation is just a way of deferring that actual reckoning.

SBM: I know you poster a lot in your activism, but I saw that you’ve also started making movie posters for ByTowne Cinema. How does your approach or your drawing style change from posters to comics?

MDF: I started out with posters. In grade nine or ten, I started doing gig posters for punk shows. Postering has remained a big part of my practice, even though it's now actually pretty rare that a band calls me to do a poster. I very rarely do music gigs anymore. Lately it is either film posters for repertory screenings or political posters, but a lot of my comics have felt more informed by my sense of poster design than the other way around. I still have a tendency to think of a comic page as like a fully formed unit, almost like a poster.

I do often think a lot about audiences with postering, and in some cases, it's very important for a poster to be super clear, inviting, and accessible. In cases where a poster should be a little hard to figure out, it’s because I’m trying to speak to someone very specifically. I don't do a lot of graffiti, but you can see that in the visual language around graffiti, where sometimes you want to make a poster that's not speaking to everyone but someone very specific, and it's actually alienating people.

Those are lessons that can be applied to comics, where sometimes the advantage of a comic is that it's super clear and easy to read and inviting, and anyone can pick it up and figure it out. Sometimes it's nice to have a comics page that's actually where you're trying to puzzle out what's happening in this page, and it's a little weird, abstract, and hard to figure out. I think Holy Lacrimony has a lot of sequences that are like that: there are pages that ideally you're not totally sure what's going on, you actually have to piece it together. It teaches you how to read those pages as they're going, so I like flipping back and forth with that in my comics and in my posters. The political posters are a good example: if I'm drawing a cop car on fire, I'm obviously inviting a specific type of audience, or promoting a specific message or bringing people into a specific type of action.

SBM: Would you ever, or have you ever, considered going back into film or animation at all?

There's sort of an uncomplicatedness to just drawing a short comic that I think would be hard for me to ever get away from. I don't have to ask anyone's permission. I don't have to think about someone else's input. I just draw the comic and it's out there.

MDF: I really love film, and I really love animation. I watch and think about film more than I read and think about comics, sometimes—it’s a different medium and my head is always in comics. The idea of taking on film or animation in a more serious way appeals to me, and I've done the odd sort of small animation before, but it's so daunting to me. I also feel like there's still so much that I haven't accomplished in comics as a medium—there are still ways that I want to push myself with the formal aspects of comics. The idea of moving on to another medium when I’m still in comics brain all the time feels very difficult for me to wrap my head around.

None of this has materialized, but every now and then, I’ll get the odd offer of someone who wants to take an aspect of my work or adapt my comic into that medium, and I like the idea of it being someone else's vision, provided it's an artist I can get behind and believe in. With film, for the most part, you do need to collaborate. That adds this whole other dimension, like bringing in collaborators, which I'm not used to. I love a lot of movies that are made on a $50 budget, but depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you are, in ways, more beholden to investors or distributors.

There's sort of an uncomplicatedness to just drawing a short comic that I think would be hard for me to ever get away from. I don't have to ask anyone's permission. I don't have to think about someone else's input. I just draw the comic and it's out there.

SBM: What movies are you currently watching? Or which ones have had the most influence on you or your comics?

MDF: There are certainly filmmakers that have been big influences on me. In Holy Lacrimony, I tried to shout out one of the big ones. I talk about Scream. There’s also a poster on Jackie’s wall of the film Communion, which is an alien abduction sort of horror movie based on a memoir by Whitley Strieber. It’s an alien abduction memoir, or supposed memoir, depending on how you feel about him as a figure. It has this great scene of alien abduction survivors that ended up being a big influence on Holy Lacrimony; while it's not a huge scene, there is this circle of survivors talking about how they should feel about their abduction experiences, and how they have all of these different ambivalent takes on it. It's very interesting because some of them like the idea of feeling ownership over this thing that happened to them, while others don't. This incredible scene is maybe only six or seven minutes in the film, but I was like, “Oh, this is my comic, this interaction is so rich.” That definitely had a huge influence on it.

There was also another movie that was a big influence called Suroh: Alien Hitchhiker, which is a shot-on-video movie. It’s a very weird, queer science fiction film that's mostly just filmed with really lo-fi video effects, and a guy in a rubber mask alien suit that looks like you could have bought it at Spirit Halloween or something. It's these bizarre philosophical conversations between a man and an alien who are having a lot of gay alien sex, in a desert for 80 minutes.

SBM: We’re at a weird point now where we’re discovering that aliens may actually be real. I was also reading somewhere that some people believe that alien abduction beliefs are tied to a kind of sleep paralysis, or this idea of feeling both removed from and trapped in your body. Have you read any interesting theories on alien abductions?

MDF: It's something I think about a lot, because I haven't had an abduction experience, and I do say this sincerely, that my view on aliens being real or not is sort of agnostic. But I have read a lot about it throughout my life, and engaged a lot with people who've talked about seeing UFOs or abduction experiences. What I find interesting about it isn’t whether or not it's real, but how does this experience change you? How does the experience change the way you interact with the world? Because any abduction story is about seeing an alien, but it's also a story about belief and disbelief, and victimhood and agency, and all of these other things. That's what I find very compelling and appreciate about it. There are definitely a lot of grifters in that world looking for attention and whatever, but in a lot of cases, you are reading someone who knows that by relaying this experience, it will change the way everyone in their life looks at them.

That has also been the experience I feel when experiencing certain mental health episodes in my life. Like, going forward, everyone's looking at me weird, you know? Nobody is going to look at me the same way. That was the connection to abductions: these events in your life where there was a before and after, and that's not just a before and after for you—it's a before and after for all of the people around you.