He grows up, and we are in this plant/tree world now. The boy in the story has been regularly bullied, beaten up, has been engaging in casual sex with another boy, gets beaten up by his live-in uncle, uncle is kicked out, so a college-age girl (a Big Kid!) moves in, and the kid begins to hang our with her and her Big Kid friends at a pool. And then everything/everyone turns into trees and twigs. This one is a kind of comics coming-of-age story, initially very conventional for DeForge, feeling very memoirish, and very harsh and brutal.

Wow, art comics and alt comics readers, this is the second full length (okay, 96 pages) graphic novel from Michael DeForge, the experimental, surrealistic artist who has done several collections of shorts until now. Like Ant Colony and First Year Healthy, Big Kids is a testimony to the harshness and beauty of being alive. And slowly, the boy begins to change, too.Įerie and perfectly paced, DeForge's Big Kids muses on the complicated, and often contradictory, feelings people struggle with during adolescence, the choices we make to fit in, and the ways we survive times of change. Instead, he hangs out with April and her friends, a bunch of highly evolved big kids who spend their days at the campus swimming pool. The boy's own interests quickly fade away: he stops engaging in casual sex, taking drugs, and testing the limits of socially acceptable (and legal) behavior. She's a college student, mysterious and cool, and she quickly takes a shine to the boy.

When the boy's uncle, a police officer, gets kicked out of the family's basement apartment and transferred to the countryside, April moves in. It follows a troubled teenage boy through the transformative years of high school as he redefines his friends, his interests, and his life path. TEENAGE MISFITS AND ADOLESCENT RABBLE-ROUSING TAKE CENTER STAGE IN THIS DARK COMING-OF-AGE TALEīig Kids is simultaneously Michael DeForge's most straightforward narrative and his most complex work to date.

Big Kids by Michael DeForge