What would make a person interesting enough to be abducted by aliens? For Jackie, the protagonist of Michael DeForge’s new graphic novel Holy Lacrimony, it’s that, after extensive study, he has been deemed the world’s saddest person.

The alien spaceship is shaped like a giant mouth, full of multiple rows of teeth and reminiscent of the classic manga trope, the vagina dentata. Inside, Jackie is greeted by his new apprentice, Kara, who seeks to learn grief and sorrow from him. She also offers her shapeshifting body for him to suck and fuck, since, as she puts it, this is “standard practice in mentor/apprentice dynamics on your planet’s educational and artistic institutions.”

Holy Lacrimony
Michael DeForge

Drawn & Quarterly
$29.95
cloth
120pp
9781770467552

When he is beamed back into his bed with no goodbye, Jackie is upset, and desperately searches for meaning in the aftermath. It is an urge he didn’t have before his abduction and leads him to take better care of himself.  This aligns with DeForge’s approach to writing characters. He describes his method in an interview with  The Comics Journal: “A lot of the characters I write, I try to write them in moments where they’re feeling or pushing up against the edges of some sort of system. I tend to find I write characters who perceive themselves as not having very much agency.” Jackie eventually takes back agency by forming a support group for fellow abductees after his return.

One shouldn’t be fooled by DeForge’s sometimes simplistic lines and shapes, as he can be incredibly vulgar and graphic when he wants to. His particular style is very evocative and far from plain. His depictions of the shapeshifting aliens are mesmerizing: he offers the kind of illustrations that one could stare at for hours, yet still find something new to look at. His use of colour is deliberate in Holy Lacrimony: only the time spent on the spaceship, or Jackie and other characters’ recollections of the aliens, are in colour, while normal life is in black and white. The colourful sections stay true to DeForge’s style, featuring bright, high-contrast, and saturated colours. He clearly has fun with alien imagery during the various support group recollections, showcasing an array of pop culture and folklore depictions of extraterrestrials, flexing his illustrative talents.

Holy Lacrimony is DeForge’s tenth graphic novel, an impressive number for the thirty-eight-year-old cartoonist. He identifies as a socialist (as he tells CBC), and his work often includes his socio-political views and beliefs. In Holy Lacrimony, his socialist optimism is translated into the support group Jackie forms. Even if their stories don’t line up, and some members seem to be lying or making things up as they go – causing some tension in the group –  they ultimately all show up for one another. DeForge shows us that community and camaraderie can be found in the strangest of places.mRb