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Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero
A Johnson has his Boswell and every Sticks Angelica has her Michael DeForge
Sticks Angelica is, in her own words, “49 years old. Former: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, headmistress, Mountie, columnist, libertarian, cellist.” After a high-profile family scandal, Sticks escapes to the woods to live in what would be relative isolation were it not for the many animals that surround and inevitably annoy her. Sticks is an arrogant self-obsessed force who wills herself on the flora and fauna. There is a rabbit named Oatmeal who harbors an unrequited love for her, a pair of kissing geese, a cross-dressing moose absurdly named Lisa Hanawalt. When a reporter named, ahem, Michael DeForge shows up to interview Sticks for his biography on her, she quickly slugs him and buries him up to his neck, immobilizing him. Instead, Sticks narrates her way through the forest, recalling formative incidents from her storied past in what becomes a strange sort of autobiography.
Sticks Angelica is, in her own words, “49 years old. Former: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, headmistress, Mountie, columnist, libertarian, cellist.” After a high-profile family scandal, Sticks escapes to the woods to live in what would be relative isolation were it not for the many animals that surround and inevitably annoy her. Sticks is an arrogant self-obsessed force who wills herself on the flora and fauna. There is a rabbit named Oatmeal who harbors an unrequited love for her, a pair of kissing geese, a cross-dressing moose absurdly named Lisa Hanawalt. When a reporter named, ahem, Michael DeForge shows up to interview Sticks for his biography on her, she quickly slugs him and buries him up to his neck, immobilizing him. Instead, Sticks narrates her way through the forest, recalling formative incidents from her storied past in what becomes a strange sort of autobiography.
96 pages, Hardcover
First published March 21, 2017
9 people are currently reading
511 people want to read
About the author
Michael DeForge
69 books421 followersMichael DeForge lives in Toronto, Ontario. His comics and illustrations have been featured in Jacobin, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Believer, The Walrus and Maisonneuve Magazine. He worked as a designer on Adventure Time for six seasons. His published books include Very Casual, A Body Beneath, Ant Colony, First Year Healthy, Dressing, Big Kids, Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero and A Western World.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
November 14, 2017
I love Michael DeForge’s bizarre humor and art. This is his most conventional work, in that it is a sustained series of comics strips (taken from his Tumblr, submitted a page a week!) focusing on a woman, Sticks Angelica, who has chosen to leave civilization and live in an Ontario (Canada!) Provincial Park, and live with (and talk with) the birds and animals. She isn’t even sure she likes most of the birds and animals, actually.
Sticks is a kind of arrogant person that “Michael DeForge” is tracking, biographically. Sticks is the object of romantic obsession, a rabbit named Oatmeal, there’s kissing geese, a cross-dressing moose absurdly named Lisa Hanawalt (who is also a cartoonist) (Michael DeForge [or is it “Michael DeForge”, who also comes into the comic from time to time?!] also drops the name of Seth, another Canadian cartoonist, and 3-4 images in this comic seem Seth-like) (inside jokes, DeForge! Augh!). When DeForge tries to interview, she beats him up him and buries him up to his neck. Then tells her own story, including a Very Sticks Angelica Christmas. And more stuff. Bizarre and kind of delightful, I say. Indie comics, alt comix. Way cool.
Sticks is a kind of arrogant person that “Michael DeForge” is tracking, biographically. Sticks is the object of romantic obsession, a rabbit named Oatmeal, there’s kissing geese, a cross-dressing moose absurdly named Lisa Hanawalt (who is also a cartoonist) (Michael DeForge [or is it “Michael DeForge”, who also comes into the comic from time to time?!] also drops the name of Seth, another Canadian cartoonist, and 3-4 images in this comic seem Seth-like) (inside jokes, DeForge! Augh!). When DeForge tries to interview, she beats him up him and buries him up to his neck. Then tells her own story, including a Very Sticks Angelica Christmas. And more stuff. Bizarre and kind of delightful, I say. Indie comics, alt comix. Way cool.
April 8, 2020
So strange and wonderful. Loved its strange-affect storytelling.
The art is perfect for the concept is perfectly illustrated by the art.
Sticks Angelica is a former Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist [the list goes on] who is now living in a fictitious Canadian national park. "The air is so crips and clean that you can see the molecules floating in the space around you--brushing against your face, even," Sticks tells us on the first page. "You can pluck them out of the air and listen to them hum. I leave them in a bowl by my house for nearby deer to graze on. I get along with the animals just fine. I only hunt the ones already marked for death. I provide them with the odd meal, and in turn, they respect me enough not to test any of my boundaries."
There's an overarching storyline, but each of the pages is a strip that can be enjoyed on its own, too.
The art is perfect for the concept is perfectly illustrated by the art.
Sticks Angelica is a former Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist [the list goes on] who is now living in a fictitious Canadian national park. "The air is so crips and clean that you can see the molecules floating in the space around you--brushing against your face, even," Sticks tells us on the first page. "You can pluck them out of the air and listen to them hum. I leave them in a bowl by my house for nearby deer to graze on. I get along with the animals just fine. I only hunt the ones already marked for death. I provide them with the odd meal, and in turn, they respect me enough not to test any of my boundaries."
There's an overarching storyline, but each of the pages is a strip that can be enjoyed on its own, too.
March 14, 2020
FANTASTISK.
April 2, 2018
Micheal Deforge does an excellent job with world-building with Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero. In it he creates a "reality" that we accept without explaining any of the rules. There is a feeling of trust, the way that Deforge wrote the book, the way he trusts the readers to understand the bizarre or at least accept it. That tone that Deforge creates makes for an exciting read and of course the art is an excellent use of style. 10/10
May 24, 2017
Deforge, master of inside jokes you want to be cool enough to get but most certainly are not. But you make me look slightly cooler in a coffee shop, so I can't complain too much. INDIE COMICS making you look cooler than you are since 2003. Right? Of course, right.
April 14, 2017
Weird and cute. I loved Oatmeal and I imagined Sticks Angelica to sound like Bee from Bee and Puppycat.
February 6, 2022
i love michael deforge and oatmeal the rabbit.
November 5, 2021
I don't think the rigid comic strip format is a good match for DeForge's approach to storytelling. At least not here.
December 22, 2022
Probably the most conventional comic DeForge has written - and as such a minor disappointment. It's a bit TOO Canadian, and I just didn't really feel much for anything going on in it. :-(.
May 5, 2019
I picked up this graphic novel on a whim while hunting through the adult stacks at the library. I'm giving it a 2 star because it was just okay.
Sticks Angelica is a Canadian woman living in the Monterey Forest. She talks with the animals and lives in a hole in the ground. She is hiding from human society. Each page of this graphic novel is a new story that builds on the stories previous. I found the illustrations just okay. It's not my kind of art. At times Sticks Angelica looks like a walking blow up doll. I found the entire book weird.
I don't know if I should recommend. Maybe if you are Canadian you might find the stories amusing? I'm not sure. Like I said it was just okay.
Sticks Angelica is a Canadian woman living in the Monterey Forest. She talks with the animals and lives in a hole in the ground. She is hiding from human society. Each page of this graphic novel is a new story that builds on the stories previous. I found the illustrations just okay. It's not my kind of art. At times Sticks Angelica looks like a walking blow up doll. I found the entire book weird.
I don't know if I should recommend. Maybe if you are Canadian you might find the stories amusing? I'm not sure. Like I said it was just okay.
October 27, 2025
love Michael deforge, love the deer.
April 18, 2017
Relatively speaking, this is a more conventional story for Michael DeForge. That's not to say that this is conventional, by any means...but it's narrative flow is more straightforward that you find in many of DeForge's comics. This one began as a webcomic...and, in fact, you can still find the complete story up on the Sticks Angelica Tumblr site.
It's always good news to get a new DeForge book!
It's always good news to get a new DeForge book!
March 16, 2020
Börjar bli väldigt kär i DeForge
March 26, 2020
Some of the most profound absurdism I’ve come across. Michael DeForge armors us with humor and the bizarre so his subject matter doesn’t knock us out cold.
January 3, 2020
Podobno to jedna z "najnormalniejszych" prac DeForge. Cóż, każdy ma swoje pojęcie normy, ale jest to nadal wystarczająco odjechane, by fascynować i zadziwiać. Angelica ucieka przed zakłamanym światem własnej rodziny i zamieszkuje w lesie wśród zwierząt. Wszystko co dzieje się potem nie poddaje sie opisowi zbyt łatwo, więc radzę po prostu do tego komiksu zajrzeć. Zawsze po lekturze DeForge rzeczywistość wygląda trochę inaczej.
August 10, 2017
I really went back and forth on this collection but wound up being quite enamored by it. I'm not sure what of the many oddities rubbed me the wrong way in the first half of the book, but I put it down for a while when the character of Lisa Hanawalt appeared (I love Hanawalt's work. Hanawalt in moose form, not as much.) But after a break, I found the strips frequently charming and odd.
September 12, 2018
While I wasn't on-board throughout, the hyper Canadian (particularly Ontario-based) content really got me. DeForge is one of the more unique people working in comics today and collections like this show why. Even when the work is a bit more "conventional", the work is unmistakably DeForgian.
November 15, 2017
Oatmeal is the only literary character I care about now.
July 2, 2017
Equal parts strange and delightful and sad and funny. Michael DeForge remains one of the most creative and unique graphic novelists out there today.
March 19, 2017
Darkly humorous, and hands down my favorite book yet released by Deforge.
July 24, 2025
Marvelous! This is dedicated journalism at its hard-hitting best.
July 25, 2021
oatmeal the rabbit has my heart
September 23, 2018
1) "'So! I'm Sticks Angelica. 49 years old. Former: olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, headmistress, mounty, columnist, libertarian, cellist.
I have lived alone my entire adult life, which is my preference. I've never had a home outside of Ontario.
I currently reside in Monterey National Park. I moved here after the scandal surrounding my father's finances came to light. I wanted to spend some time away from the public eye.
The air is so crisp and so clean that you can see the molecules floating in the space around you – brushing against your face, even. You can pluck them out of the air and listen to them hum.'"
2) "'I wonder what my body looks like at this point...'
'How come those plants are growing around you? Fingerplants, mistletoe...'
'The warmth emitted from my body is allowing a small amount of wildlife to grow through the snow.
Many animals have come up to kiss me, despite my protests.'"
3) "On my thirteenth birthday, Christmas Day, a birthday I shared with my brother, I invited Ryan Carbon to our birthday party. I wasn't friends with Ryan. He was very stupid. But I knew he had a crush on me, so I felt bad for him.
He had beautiful, long curls. My father invited press to the party and had expressed concern about his 'look' when vetting the attendees the week before. At the time, beautiful curls were associated with the controversial Acadian separatist movement.
At the party, my brother's imbecile friends were over too. They didn't like Ryan's curls because they once mistook him for a girl and catcalled him at recess, which was apparently embarrassing.
Since he wasn't my actual friend, I ignored Ryan during the party. At some point, my brother and his goons took him to the game room. They held him down and shaved his head. When I walked in on the scene, I saw my father and his cabinet ministers there. They were laughing and filming the incident. Buddy Stone, the Minister of Health, was gluing chunks of Ryan's hair to his scalp, a toupée he still sports today.
I reported this to Élodie, the mounty stationed outside my bedroom since the day I was born. She rounded up the boys and arrested the men.
To avoid a scandal, my father enacted his famous 'No Laws Christmas' policy. In the spirit of the holidays, all crimes committed on Christmas are forgiven by the Crown. Élodie, my first friend, died in a military prison.
Christmas is a holiday for criminal men."
I have lived alone my entire adult life, which is my preference. I've never had a home outside of Ontario.
I currently reside in Monterey National Park. I moved here after the scandal surrounding my father's finances came to light. I wanted to spend some time away from the public eye.
The air is so crisp and so clean that you can see the molecules floating in the space around you – brushing against your face, even. You can pluck them out of the air and listen to them hum.'"
2) "'I wonder what my body looks like at this point...'
'How come those plants are growing around you? Fingerplants, mistletoe...'
'The warmth emitted from my body is allowing a small amount of wildlife to grow through the snow.
Many animals have come up to kiss me, despite my protests.'"
3) "On my thirteenth birthday, Christmas Day, a birthday I shared with my brother, I invited Ryan Carbon to our birthday party. I wasn't friends with Ryan. He was very stupid. But I knew he had a crush on me, so I felt bad for him.
He had beautiful, long curls. My father invited press to the party and had expressed concern about his 'look' when vetting the attendees the week before. At the time, beautiful curls were associated with the controversial Acadian separatist movement.
At the party, my brother's imbecile friends were over too. They didn't like Ryan's curls because they once mistook him for a girl and catcalled him at recess, which was apparently embarrassing.
Since he wasn't my actual friend, I ignored Ryan during the party. At some point, my brother and his goons took him to the game room. They held him down and shaved his head. When I walked in on the scene, I saw my father and his cabinet ministers there. They were laughing and filming the incident. Buddy Stone, the Minister of Health, was gluing chunks of Ryan's hair to his scalp, a toupée he still sports today.
I reported this to Élodie, the mounty stationed outside my bedroom since the day I was born. She rounded up the boys and arrested the men.
To avoid a scandal, my father enacted his famous 'No Laws Christmas' policy. In the spirit of the holidays, all crimes committed on Christmas are forgiven by the Crown. Élodie, my first friend, died in a military prison.
Christmas is a holiday for criminal men."
February 23, 2018
This is a weird one (which is no surprise, given the creator), but it's pretty fun. Sticks Angelica is a Canadian Renaissance woman celebrity who lives in a nature preserve, where she mostly complains about the annoying anthropomorphic animals and also deals with the weird laws of this world that involve the allowed hunting of animals that have been marked for death because they committed a crime (like forgery or embezzlement). There's a love triangle involving Sticks, a rabbit, and an eel, some annoying geese, a moose named Lisa Hanawalt that wants to be human, Michael DeForge as a woodland reporter who undergoes a horrifying physical transformation, and all sorts of other strange and whimsical stuff, and I'm not sure what it all adds up to, but it's an interesting world to spend some time in and occasionally be disturbed by. That's DeForge for you: you never know what to expect, but it's sure to be memorable.
March 6, 2018
Easily my favorite DeForge book yet. The short, serialized bursts are a preferred form of mine, and one that DeForge does well, not giving himself too much room to get lost in the bizarre world he’s built.
Really, the appeal of all his work is how weird his worlds and people are. The philosophical ideas that offer a tenuous backbone to the work—a trait I noticed in other contemporary comics like this—are slight and secondary when compared to the creativity of the art and feral imagination of the execution.
Sticks Angelica could be seen as a more tame, straightforward book than DeForge’s other work, but that’s not necessarily a slight. It fares better than, say, the tepid “mainstream appeal” of Mister Wonderful by Daniel Clowes or something. It all makes enough sense and the quaint parts aren’t too cute and it’s all just a couple tiny moving parts in what ends up being an enjoyably peculiar book about the sacrifice of solitude and self-awareness about how we function in a system.
Really, the appeal of all his work is how weird his worlds and people are. The philosophical ideas that offer a tenuous backbone to the work—a trait I noticed in other contemporary comics like this—are slight and secondary when compared to the creativity of the art and feral imagination of the execution.
Sticks Angelica could be seen as a more tame, straightforward book than DeForge’s other work, but that’s not necessarily a slight. It fares better than, say, the tepid “mainstream appeal” of Mister Wonderful by Daniel Clowes or something. It all makes enough sense and the quaint parts aren’t too cute and it’s all just a couple tiny moving parts in what ends up being an enjoyably peculiar book about the sacrifice of solitude and self-awareness about how we function in a system.
May 19, 2017
I wish I had the kind of imagination Michael DeForge has. Very few people are as good at creating bizarre mythologies that aren't too different from our own, but where surreal details are introduced in such a casual way that there's no need to ask questions. Pretty much everything of I've read by DeForge has challenged the way I see the world, but often in a pretty dark, heavy way. Sticks Angelica is lighter and more approachable than a lot of his work, but not in a way that sacrifices any of his weird intelligence. It's gorgeous as usual and so much fun to read that I immediately started thinking about when I'm going to read it again. This book made me very happy and hopefully it will make you feel happy too.
February 4, 2020
My low-key fascination with Canada collides with my undying love for Lisa Hanawalt, who cleverly cameos as a moose-turned-high-power-lawyer in this cartoon strip that follows one Sticks Angelica, 49 years old. Former: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, headmistress, Mountie, columnist, libertarian, cellist. She’s in voluntary exile in Ontario’s Monterey National Park, where she fends off the two wild geese who live in her car, a rabbit named Oatmeal who’s desperately in love with her, and her wannabe biographer, Michael DeForge himself. Half whimsy, half snark; fully Drawn & Quarterly.
May 17, 2020
Michael DeForge's Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero is presented as a series of mostly one-page comic strips, so the initial experience of reading it feels stilted. It takes several pages to really get going, but once the book finds its stride, its cast of quirky characters becomes strangely endearing. Many of the vignettes are laugh-out-loud absurd, and many are surprisingly touching and thoughtful glimpses into a variety of lives and relationships. The book explores themes of identity, finding out who you are and where you really want to be in life. Humans become animals and animals become humans. No one is bound by the form they are given as long as they fulfill their inner needs.
May 27, 2022
Bought this book at Atomic Books on a tiny vacation to Baltimore with my husband. I wanted the kind of book(s) that I wouldn't find online but would only discover by browsing a beautiful indie bookstore's shelves. Not for nothing, but I could have dropped a thousand bucks in the comics section of Atomic Books. Anyway, this was a pure delight. A useful reminder that you don't ever need to start with backstory, or even pause a story to share some, because you can just as well drop bits here and there as they prove useful and still build out a wonderful world and compelling character--and you get to keep all kinds of mystery and allow yourself secrets to discover in the future.
May 16, 2018
A humorous, quietly melancholy retreat into the Canadian wilderness. DeForge creates a vivid world inhabited by heartsick rabbits and cadaverous politicians, mysterious outlaws and gossiping geese, shocking death and blooming life. There is no real continuing storyline, just several character arcs weaving their way through the narrative--giving the sensation that the reader is peeking into the vignettes of some far-off dream. This, paired with some of DeForge's most beautiful drawing to date, make this a true pleasure.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews