Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero

This collection of the psychedelic webcomic from Canadian cartoonist DeForge (First Year Healthy, Big Kids) follows the titular celebrity hero—“former: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist,” among other things—through a series of one-page adventures. In the first we’re told that after a scandal, Sticks has decided to live in the forest with a group of talking animals, and the rest of the book explores the dynamic between hero and fans in surreal episodes. In one strip, a rabbit confesses a desire to be Sticks’s pet; in another, a moose (named after cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt) steals Sticks’s sweaters in a ploy to get closer to her. A character named Michael DeForge even gets in on the action, as a magazine reporter looking to interview the arrogant and impetuous Sticks. As a meditation on fame and as a beautiful, disturbing daydream in pink-and-black ink, the book marks a successful shift for DeForge after the sometimes detached body horror of his earliest works. (Mar.)