Holy Lacrimony

by Michael DeForge

The post-alien abduction trauma memoir we’ve all been waiting for

“Ah, there’s that famous lip quiver!” says Jackie’s abductor and student. Jackie has been determined to be the “saddest living person in the entire world” by a mysterious team of alien abductors. His earthly musical celebrity is nothing compared to his emotional superstar status in the eyes of these curious and peculiar shape-shifters. Jackie is forced to perform his sadness over and over again on command, so his captors can study and master this very puzzling, very human emotion. Until just like that, Jackie is returned to his old life. Trying to comprehend what has happened, he joins a support group. It’s a sea of conspiracy theorists, emotional vampires, and simpatico “real” abductees. As each person tells their story, he realizes he may never know.

Holy Lacrimony is classic DeForge–oscillating between shockingly dirty, casually funny and earnestly engaged in the socio-politics of his fictive worlds. Part abstract shape blending and part hieroglyphic storytelling, each image is a discrete and tightly designed object of beauty that never loses the forward motion of the best personal cartooning. DeForge continues to prove that he’s the single most innovative and empathetic cartoonist in the past twenty years.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Science Fiction, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics

120 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 2025

About the author

Michael 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.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy Lacrimony (2025) by Michael DeForge is about a man named Jackie who is abducted by aliens--who call themselves “scholars in the field of human sadness”-- because they want to study him, as they judge him to be the saddest person in the world. Lacrimony is derived from lachrymose, or sad, tearful. And Jackie has much to cry about, to the point of despair. So it’s in a way about our “present moment,” seen both empathetically and amusingly. With characteristic weird fantasy/surreal figures we associate with DeForge. And then there's the post-abduction self-help group where some members dress as aliens.

The publisher writes, “The post-alien abduction trauma memoir we’ve all been waiting for.”

And its raunchy/funny/weird, and unique in the world of comics, as all of his work is.

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jackie is abducted by a group of aliens who are eager to study him. He learns that he is singularly special—he’s the saddest human on earth. He mentors an alien in the art of performing sadness, before being returned home. Alone and confused, he joins a support group for people who’ve survived alien abductions…but finds himself skeptical of his classmates’ stories.

This is a charming but not saccharine book that will be deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever been depressed. The art is quirky, and I like that the artist didn’t resort to a stereotypical depiction of aliens. His aliens are absolutely bizarre looking, like something actually from another world. This is a quick read and well worth your time!

[Drew Canole · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really pleasant short narrative by DeForge, a nice change of pace from reading his daily strip collections. This is about an alien abduction of the "saddest person on the planet". After his abduction he starts a local support group for other alleged abductees. Told with DeForge's usual unusualness.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviously I'm super-excited this is out. It's been a long time since DeForge's last book!

The baroque invention of the first half is again impressive. DeForge's take on alien abduction is dark, absurd, funny, and packed with surprising twists. The 2nd half's return to earth is understandably more than a little depressing, dovetailing into that quiet and sad ending.

[3.5 stars, rounded up]

[Nick LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Deforge’s best work. The longer narrative really benefits his style and lets his typically knotted plots and ideas really stretch out. Most successfully, it stages psychoanalytic transference without ever naming it. Jackie’s encounter with the aliens—who call themselves “scholars in the field of human sadness” functions as a kind of therapeutic mise-en-scène. In classical terms, transference is the unconscious redirection of old, often unresolved feelings onto a new figure—typically a therapist, someone who acts as a blank screen. That’s what the aliens are for Jackie. He performs sorrow for them, projects his need for validation onto them, and tries, futilely, to be understood through them. What at first appears to be absurd or satirical is in fact a really potent metaphor.

I’ll explain: transference isn’t just repetition, it’s a misrecognition structured through the Other’s desire. Jackie’s sadness becomes legible only through the gaze of the alien—his identity, his trauma, his emotional value are filtered through a logic that isn’t his. In teaching Kara how to cry (and feel sadness) he’s staging his own brokenness in the fantasy that it might make him real. But the aliens don’t want Jackie, they want sadness. They want something abstracted, stylized, and repeatable. He is an object, a case study, and is discarded as such. Even after returning to Earth, Jackie can’t break the loop. The support group he starts—supposedly a space for recognition and mutual aid—is just another performance hall. Everyone’s projecting, no one’s listening. The therapeutic frame has collapsed and healing isn’t taking place.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. In the last scene, after witnessing another group member seemingly abducted—a group member who violated his trust and who actually had not had the same abduction experience the others claimed to have—Jackie lies in bed wearing an alien mask muttering to himself the first thing the alien said to him: “Take a few moments to yourself and attempt to get your bearings.” Jackie has unconsciously begun to self-recognize and adopt the psychoanalytic model. He has integrated and is on the path to becoming whole. A hint that the structure that once imprisoned him might now offer a way through. Growth and change are possible in the face of hopelessness and sadness.

Read on a library hardcover borrowed through MA Commonwealth Catalog. Will be purchasing.

[Rick Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meet Jackie - the world's saddest man - if his alien abductors are to be believed. A small time musical talent, Jackie's calling card is his unending ability to be sad which a group of shape-shifting aliens find to be fascinating enough to study the human capacity for sadness, an emotion that is quite foreign to them. After Jackie presents his unique brand of depression to the aliens in a series of bizarre trials, the aliens return him back to his regular existence whereby the disoriented Jackie tries to come to terms with his abduction by joining an emotional support group for other people who profess to have been abducted by aliens themselves. A truly oddball narrative that isn't anything new for Michael DeForge, Holy Lacrimony offers an engaging and quick read that also packs a rather hefty emotional punch. It's a tough line trying to weave the strangeness and humor into a narrative laced with weighty themes, but DeForge manages in a way that is almost effortless. Jackie's melancholy should be subdued, but something about having the sobriquet "world's saddest man" can be quite amusing when done with nuance.



The artwork is as distinctively DeForge as ever - an collective jumble of squiggles - and it works perfectly. The combination of mundane and eclectic moments all look kinetically charged no matter what, adding a level of dynamism that is simply engaging. Despite its brevity, the strangeness of the story and the captivating artwork makes Holy Lacrimony a DeForge book worth revisiting a couple times over.

[Ags · Rating 3 out of 5]

Appropriately gross (especially in the drawing style) and bizarre (very contemporary). Sad but also so bizarre that I didn't feel too sad.

This feels like it's in two parts, which sort of but not entirely came together for me. I appreciated that the first part is all about individual mood disorder and then the second part turns to being more about finding purpose in social conection - but, then, it ends at the individual level again. Hmmm. I was most entertained by reading the first part as a critique of therapy that doesn't target change but, instead, is just listening and probing for descriptives).

[Cail Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really solid DeForge. The alien body morphing is genius design, he makes me want to draw.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody creates weird depressed microverses like Michael DeForge does.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! I love this so much. It's strangely relatable... Although, to be clear, I have NOT been abducted by aliens

[r. fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

SCREAM 4 MENTIONED!!! 🖤🖤🖤🖤

[Jack-Henry Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite artwork from DeForge so far. A master of shapes and colors. The narrative didn’t resonate with me as strongly as some of his other work, but I still found it touching/engaging/interesting/personal. Inspirational to me, visually, thematically.

[Sole]

Excelente, otra vez.

[Bryan Burton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the art in this but why were there so many typos?

[Chris Brook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another thoroughly weird Michael DeForge book - my fifth if I'm counting correctly? - maybe his weirdest yet?

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sehr sonderbares Buch über eine Entführung durch Aliens, und wie die Person nach ihrer Rückkehr auf die Erde einer Support Group beitritt und wen sie dort trifft.

[tinaathena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like it when aliens are interpreted in a unique way. Surprisingly tender given how silly it was. I am a Deforge fan though and think the wiggly style does it for me.

[Jeroen Swinnen · Rating 5 out of 5]

❤️‍🩹

[KileyV · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hope you make so many more books <3

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vibes of a fucked up existential cartoon that you were too young to watch but spotted late at night on YTV, then totally forgot about until it popped up 15 years later on early YouTube.

[Lake Scherr · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded down—this book is weird and I mean it in a good way. From the drawings to the plot, Holy Lacrimoney is a really weird story about a person named Jackie who entangles with an alien species that does not know what sadness is like. Of course, Jackie, the saddest person in the world, cannot fathom what it is like to feel no depression.

Overall, the book ended too early and I there was not enough content with the aliens. Half the book is about what Jackie’s abduction is like and then the second half is about what happened afterwards. The scene where the alien talks about its father’s suicide is incredibly powerful and I wish there was more development between the aliens and Jackie, which is why this graphic novel is only getting 3 stars.

[Justine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now i gotta watch scream 4!

[Sam Hughes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been sitting with this one for awhile because it was so all over the place with its themes. Starting off as one’s bird eye view into the the inner workings of depression and how an alien race understands its dynamics, is then catapulted into a alien abduction tell-all group/borderline cult looking to reason with their sudden exit and return from and to planet Earth.

I read this one digitally, but would love to further break it down in physical formatting, so I can better understand it.

Thank you to Drawn and Quarterly for the advanced access before this one hits shelves on March 11, 2025.

[Tim Rooney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn’t work for me on any level. At least it was trying something so I can’t write it off completely

[Alanna Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh wow the take on sadness that this is and the focus on mouths as places of despair really got me. Also what a great sex scene 🤩

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous, immersive, and thought provoking.

[drown_like_its_1999 · Rating 3 out of 5]

An accomplished but anxious musician is abducted by aliens, not as a subject for physical experimentation, but as a test study for human emotional capacity which the aliens do not possess. After weeks aboard their craft, the protagonist is deposited back on earth and struggles with a conflagration of confusion and emotional loss.

This was my first Deforge and I had a pretty good time. There's a lot of great comedy mined from this, especially from the first half, with the protagonist being selected for being the most miserable human on the planet and adored by his captors for his pathetic disposition. Plenty of quotably meme-able lines like "By the end of our sessions, I hope to be as soggy as you" and "I time myself crying in the shower" that made me laugh out loud. The abduction support group full of crackpots also yielded some good laughs.

While Deforge's wiry and somewhat sparse aesthetic is not really my jam, he did a fantastic job depicting aliens in a physically distinct way which added a lot of visual character and the mix of color and grayscale sequences also added some appreciated variety.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I love the distinction between the first and second half of this book. In the first half, visual storytelling takes the stage in a way that Michael DeForge is known for, yet continues to perfect nonetheless. The performances between Kara and Jackie resonate deeply, evocatively, and beautifully. In the second half, we reenter a dreary, cold reality. Jackie seeks connection and validation that do not exist in their world, leaving them yearning for their time with Kara: more connection, more art, more peace. What is left at the end is a palpable feeling of longing that we've all experienced to some degree. Really well done!

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting WTF and darkly humorous exploration of how aliens might view the emotions of those we deem mentally ill. To an alien outsider, they might seem fascinating and confusing. Many mentally ill people can disassociate from their pain and loneliness and imagine what others might perceive them as, perhaps as a way to reel themselves back in or punish themselves for feeling how they do. This book explores that to the extreme—but then, what happens after the abduction? Abductees often ask themselves, “why me?” Which in this context feels like impostor syndrome for the “success” of being chosen as the most miserable person on Earth.

Thought provoking, odd, and curious.

[Estibaliz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really loved the quirkiness of 'Birds of Maine', but 'Holy Lacrimony' hasn't worked for me at all.

I didn't particularly enjoy the art in this graphic novel, especially in the first part, which I found a bit too long and too sex-centered at times, without any real good motive for it.

The second part (the therapy part) I did enjoy a bit more, but still not enough to put this beyond the 2 stars, and it probably rests at 1.75 for me. And a lot of it has to do with the fact this is a pretty short book, so...