Book review: Birds of Maine

The cover of Birds of Maine, featuring a red bird perched on top of a tall white mushroom. A row of mushrooms is growing out of the word 'Maine.' There are birds flying in the distant blue sky.
Title: Birds of Maine
Author: Michael DeForge
ISBN: 9781770465664
Year published: 2022
Year I read: 2025
Rating: ★★★★★ What even are stars, tbh
Recommended for: Leftists who like birds

The year is... not important. Birds have been thriving on the moon; their time and struggles on Earth are now only distant memories. Naturally, they have formed a utopian, classless society, where food is free and abundant, work is joyfully voluntary, and “economics” is an esoteric, frivilous practice laughed at by most birds.

Colorful, surreal-looking birds fly against a beige sky.

Michael DeForge’s Birds of Maine was a daily webcomic published on Instagram from April 6, 2020 through December 31, 2021, totalling 455 comics. A year later, Drawn & Quarterly compiled the work into a hardcover, so you can read it without having to scroll through Instagram.

I feel this context is important to appreciating Birds of Maine; expect a comic strip, not a graphic novel. The marketing team at Drawn & Quarterly wrote an enticing blurb on the back cover that alludes to an exciting conflict between birds and humans, which “threatens to change everything,” but honestly (spoiler?), you’ll find nothing of the sort.

A magenta cloud parts the gray sky. A tall white mushroom tree extends towards the sky. On a little sandy island, a penguin is taking care of its young. On a cliff in the distance, there is a white shorebird resting. Other birds fly in the distance.
Things are pretty chill here, and they stay that way.

What you will find is dry humor, a leftist dreamland, and some truly incredible psychedelic art.

Tiny moths fly through bright magenta, pink, and white flowers, against a bright green background.

Michael DeForge’s art and world-building is, to me, the highlight of Birds of Maine. DeForge often demonstrates how this society runs by showing us first, and then explaining it later, if he explains it at all. Some comics are completely wordless, allowing you to take in the odd, alien landscape that birds built. Others label and show the sort of tools that birds use, echoing the infamously absurd “Cow Tools.”[1]

Amidst colorful flowers, a starling is fiddling with a convoluted contraption with many holes and chutes. This is what moon-birds call an 'electric keyboard.'
That comparison is not an insult; I love bird tools.

Bird lovers will love DeForge’s take on pileated woodpeckers, magnificent frigatebirds, common grackles, and brown-headed cowbirds. Mushroom lovers and anarchists will love, well, the mushrooms and the anarchism.

A canada goose zooms through a lake. A small yellow gosling trails behind. In the distance, a pink bird swims through another lake.
There’s a lot to love about this place.
Ramil, a small bird, stares at their reflection in the starlit water.

Overall, Birds of Maine appears to be a project where the artist had a lot of fun, and then seems to have stopped when he wasn’t anymore.[2] And I’m very grateful I could come along for the ride.

A tiny bird perches on the back of a much larger bird of paradise, with bright purple and orange plumage, against a vermilion background.

  1. Honestly, the thought of people being baffled by Cow Tools is the joke. It’s a cow. Those are her tools. What’s there to “get”? ↩︎

  2. Moon birds embrace death as part of the life cycle. Content warning for suicide, by the way; moon birds are neutral about suicide, and this is a recurring theme. ↩︎