By Zack Quaintance — All of us living through this moment are undergoing something extraordinary. It’s easy to miss within the day-to-day, but technology has begun to accelerate at an unprecedented, exponential rate. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in human history, and you can tether it to whatever theory you like, with Moore’s Law perhaps being the easiest touchpoint for wrapping your head around it. Another easy touchpoint is to consider that the iPhone was a new product as recently as 2007, and now we walk around tethered to the devices, our abilities to navigate the world influenced by things as small as the debut of new apps, new processing systems, or even small interface tweaks. This, in its simplest form, is what writer/artist Michael Deforge’s Familiar Face HC (published in March by Drawn & Quarterly) is about.

Put simply, the book addresses the rapid and chaotic pace of change, as well as its impact on the lives, hopes, dreams of individuals. Familiar Face is an abstract look at how it feels to be an extant being within that pace of change, and it raises a series of powerful questions that are very much relevant to our times. One of the questions among those that rang most fascinating to me was about power structures. In the beautiful and chaotic world of Familiar Face (and the cartooning in this book is truly a site to behold), our protagonist wonders often about the forces governing her existence. The world and its rules change frequently — often without notice until much later — with information remaining scant about who is orchestrating this change, how they are doing that, and, perhaps most importantly, why.

There’s a bit of nightmare inherent to this, with the world of this book often seeming like a prison of confusion. Change within the world is accelerating so quickly that even the protagonist’s bodily form is liable to alter on a moment-to-moment basis, with past iterations immediately lost into the ether. At other times, the nature of public transit shifts so violently that people try to kill themselves upon subway tracks and find it to be impossible. The protagonist herself loses track of ideas, locations, means of travel, and lovers…all of it vanishing into this tide of dynamic evolution that dictates the very basis of reality.

The way the book is structured speaks to these ideas as well, with its developments not laid out in linear fashion. Instead the force of this work takes hold methodically, disseminated to readers by a series of vignettes about other individuals, depicted via our main character’s job hearing complaints. As a result, the central themes of the book sweep the audience up in a subtle, hazy wave, working their way into the brain in much the same way as the change taking place on the page itself. And, to be sure, this could feel frustrating for some readers, but Michael Deforge’s ample illustrative and storytelling powers keep the experience grounded, tethering readers with the sheer imagination of the visuals on the page.

There is also a choice that Deforge makes here to keep the protagonist’s desires channeled through a romantic relationship with a lover who has vanished into the tide of the development, perhaps even in a way that allows her to dictate in part how some of these changes are made. This means that the stakes of this book are two-fold: the protagonist here is struggling to make clear the world around them in a way that enables them to find something as rewarding and actualizing as companionship, and what could be more relatable than that?

Familiar Face HC Review

Familiar Face HC
Writer/Artist: Michael Deforge
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
The bodies of citizens and the infrastructure surrounding them is constantly updating. People wake up in apartments of completely different sizes and shapes and commuter routes radically differ day to day. There is no way to resist-the updates are enacted by a nameless, faceless force. The signatures of DeForge's work-a vibrant color palette, surreal designs, and self-aware sense of humor - enliven an often-bleak technocratic future. Familiar Face is a masterful and deeply funny exploration of how we define our sense of self, and how we cope when so much of life is out of our control.
Release Date: March 4, 2020
Order It Here: Via Drawn & Quarterly’s Website

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.