Artist Profile – Michael DeForge

Ellie the Squirrel, Neville the Dog, Omar the Spider and Lyle the Racoon live in a picturesque
valley by the city, spending their days putting on skits, drawing pictures, and collecting acorns.
Their lives are seemingly perfect, except they’re not allowed to gather in groups of three or less,
drink water after its run through special stones and only draw pictures of Richard, an imposing
broad-shouldered man with long hair and bangs. He is their charismatic leader who promises
them that following these rules will keep them safe from the toxicity of the nearby city.
Everyone in the valley loves Richard, but when Lyle the Racoon gets sick from drinking the
treated water, the friends breaks a sacred rule to save him, and Richard expels them from the
valley.

The ensuing plot makes up the bulk of the book, Leaving Richard’s Valley, which is comic artist
Michael De Forge’s latest work published by Draw & Quarterly. It started as a daily comic strip
that DeForge drew every morning and uploaded on Instagram. Every day for 479 days, the 9,000
followers of the account, richardsvalley, were treated to a day in the lives of the four banished
animals as they navigated the decay, debris and clutter of a city, struggling to find a place to live,
battling forces of gentrification, isolation and inaffordability. It is a city not so unlike his own.

“A lot of what I was trying to write about is the way that cities are becoming less and less
humane,” says DeForge. “I wanted to write these characters who feel like they're at the whim of
all of these forces of capital.”

The soft-spoken, quick-witted 31-year-old takes inspiration from Toronto, his home for the last
22 years, and although readers from the city will be delighted to come across references to Bloor
Street, TK, the issues that DeForge explore are ones that plague any growing metropolitan city.

“I feel like basic functionalities of cities like living close to people, recognizing your grocer,
having a laundromat with job listings are not only going away, but they’re being systematically
dismantled,” he says. “A lot of the accessibility and the sense of community that initially
attracted me to the city and let me thrive here are just not there anymore.”

DeForge believes that unlike New York and San Francisco, which are too far gone, Toronto has
a chance to reverse its course. Through the animals’ efforts to live in different settings like art
spaces, he explores a way to build communities in a capitalist society - by creating alternative,
experimental spaces. One such project from Toronto’s history that DeForge pays homage to is
Rochdale College, an experimental free school where students and teachers lived together in a
cooperative society. The college, which operated from 1965 to 1978 at the corner of Bloor St.
and Huron St., provided communal living space for nearly 900 people and subverted traditional
and paternalistic ideas of education, allowing students to create their own policies, including
conducting experimental classes and printing fake degrees. To most people the Rochdale college
experiment might seem like a failure, but DeForge points to the remnants of the school’s ideas
and work sprinkled throughout the city that continue to have an impact, like Hassle Free Clinic
on Gerrard Street that provides sexual health services to diverse at-risk communities.

The legacy and attitudes of Rochdale are a clear influence in the book, which branches away
from DeForge’s previous work that generally focused on dystopian narratives. Exploring these
dark and political themes, through cute, talking animals, which often border on surrealism - Lyon
the Racoon is depicted as a heart with a racoon tail and two human legs – comes naturally to
DeForge, who learnt how to read through his parent’s comic collections of Peanuts, Calvin &
Hobbes and Bloom County.
“What I like with the daily strip is it mimics the meandering nature of real life, where it's not
always focused on just one set storyline, you go on all these little detours and have these quiet
moments,” he says.

The irony of portraying real life through daily comics on Instagram, a social media platform
often critiqued for depicting a fantastical view of the world, is not lost on DeForge. But to him,
it’s about building up a trust and relationship with an audience by making his work accessible
and free. Before Instagram, he put up his work online or self-published zines, which he
distributed for free or a minimal amount.

“I do hope it connects with people in some way that they recognize something in it or feel a
moment of catharsis or exuberance or grief,” says DeForge, who now has a loyal following of
25,000 Instagram users. At times, his art is pure indulgent therapy, he says, but mostly, it reflects
his views on the world that a reader could resonate with.

“When you come across a piece of art that you feel articulate something about the world, which
you kind of knew intuitively felt but you hadn’t seen it expressed that way, it can be so
illuminating,” he says. “But I wouldn't presume to say that I do that with any of my work. I think
quite frequently I fail.” As someone who has spent the last week immersed in Leaving Richard’s
Valley, I completely disagree.