Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero is a very funny take on the Doctor Doolittle/Snow White idea of a charismatic and nonconformist protagonist at one with nature. Sticks lives in the wilderness completely at home among animals, understanding their languages, able to relate to them as easily as humans relate to each other. It’s an ideal state of innocent community for all: non-stop jolly and heartwarming lessons about getting along from the wildlife family of feathered and furred creatures, for us to take into our mundane everyday lives of concrete, ready meals and reality TV.
However, our hero Sticks is not an ideal role model to envy or emulate. She’s obsessive, overbearing, self-absorbed, mean and cranky with lots of awful secrets. Her world is no paradise either. The animals occupying this Canadian wilderness are just as venal, unreliable, selfish, confused and greedy as anyone would be who lives as precariously as they do. Plus, they eat each other and would be delighted to murder and eat you too if given the chance.
Michael DeForge’s drawings are an eccentric mixture of naive outsider art and sophisticated minimalist graphic design. They perfectly match the absurdist and ridiculous stories he concocts from mashing together ideas into forms that don’t usually belong together. His pinky-red and black colour palette adds to the feel of children’s book logic evolved far beyond its origins into an unforgiving, remorseless environment where even the slightest mistakes are heavily punished. The deadpan style of dialogue and the odd geometries of the art makes this harshly unforgiving world completely hilarious as the characters enforcing these rules on each other are all generally cuddly or inoffensive. There’s a white rabbit called Oatmeal, two geese who kiss each other incessantly, a moose who steals Angelica’s clothes off her washing line, and many others. Silly, intriguing and with a dark core to all its nonsense, Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero is a fun romp through lots of clichés that DeForge overturns with gusto. You’ll have no idea where it’s going or how you got to the end, but you’ll enjoy the tour.
