First Year Healthy

Locations
Call Number: Adult Graphic Novel / DeForge, Michael
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 1st Floor 4-week checkout	Adult Graphic Novel / DeForge, Michael	4-week checkout	On Shelf

First Year Healthy purports to be the story of a young woman, recently released from the hospital after an outburst, and her burgeoning relationship with an odd, perhaps criminal Turkish immigrant. In a scant forty-five pages, working with a vibrant, otherworldly palette of magentas, yellows, and grays, Michael DeForge brings to life a world whose shifting realities are as treacherous as the thin ice its narrator walks on. First Year Healthy is all it appears to be and more: a parable about mental illness, a folktale about magical cats, and a bizarre, compelling story about relationships.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

A Chilling Picture Book Adventure in Alienation submitted by oriolbt on July 2, 2023, 4:04pm Michael DeForge's comic ouvre practically erupts with formal variation. Far from content with hewing to the traditional comic strip format, he clearly considers how the structural parameters of a given story support the themes and affects with which he so coolly frosts his narratives.

This concise fable in 40 pages (and as many panels!) is a far cry from the author's more recently utopian ideations, instead taking place in perhaps his closest depiction to date of the "real" and brutally isolating world we inhabit. The book maintains a vaguely threatening tone throughout, aided by a brightly sinister color palate of acid yellow and sickly puce - tones lifted from a 1970s dacha. The protagonist is an unnamed woman recently released from the hospital after an unspecified "episode" that renders her the target of much gossip in her British town. Her narrative tone is masterfully flat, with details that jump at you unexpectedly hours after reading, their malign significance floating, now putrescently obvious, to the surface. Here's an example: the woman's love interest and domestic partner is referred to throughout merely as "the Turk", his individuality flattened to his nationality and otherness. The narrative affect maintains this alienation, building a sickly sense of inevitability that DeForge wisely subverts in the final pages.

Seedy criminal associates, familial microaggressions, and a surprising cosmic entity await you here, along with a giddy disquiet that will follow you long after you "close" this book.