Michael DeForge (born 1987) is a Canadian comics artist and illustrator.

DeForge grew up in Ottawa and attended the University of Toronto, dropping out after two years. He lives and works in Toronto.

According to DeForge, he has "always been drawing cartoons" and learned to read and draw from his parents' comic strip collections such as Bloom County, Far Side, Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. He has described Peanuts as his all-time favorite cartoon strip. He read and tried to draw in the style of superhero comics until junior high and high school. He has described his early comics as "just these dinky revenge cartoons" in response to having been "picked on a lot growing up". In high school he realized that drawing could be a vocation and started drawing gig posters, initially in exchange for free entrance to concerts until he started charging for his work. He became interested in the work of Marc Bell (which he saw for first time in Exclaim!) and Matt Brinkman and has described Chester Brown's I Never Liked You as his "introduction to alternative comics". He also cites Chloe Lum and Yannick Desranleau's Seripop work as strongly affecting how he wanted to draw for some time. Artists that he cites as having been important during formative points in his life include Hideshi Hino, Jack Kirby, Derek Jarman, Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, Prince, Mary Blair, Saul Steinberg and Mark Newgarden.

DeForge worked as a designer for Cartoon Network's Adventure Time. He has described his work as a "props and effects designer" with "odd bits of storyboard work, character design and concept art" and "the best day job I could have ever asked for".

He self-identifies as a Socialist.

DeForge had been an active member of the regional Toronto comics scene for several years before his Cave Adventure webcomic and the first issue of Lose brought wider exposure. He has said that attending the 2009 Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) and seeing all the work at the festival provided him with the impetus to make his own comic series, Lose. He also met Annie Koyama, who became his publisher, at that festival. Before the 2009 TCAF, DeForge had been experimenting with a variety of short comics and strips. He has described Lose as his first "real" comic.

Lose #1, the first issue of his "one-man anthology series", published by Koyama Press in 2009, won "Best Emerging Talent" at the 2010 Doug Wright Awards. Lose #2, published by Koyama in 2010, was nominated in the 2011 Doug Wright Awards "Best Book" category. All but the last 3 pages of the 24 page comic features DeForge's story It's Chip, described by Koyama as "a stand alone horror comic about two children and the monsters they find in the woods". Rob Clough, writing in his High-Low column in The Comics Journal, described it as combining "sibling rivalry and family/school dynamics with weird anthropomorphic cuteness with some truly disgusting, repulsive images", a "tremendous success" and "a story I'd point to if asked to name truly successful and innovative Fusion comics". DeForge has said that "Fusion comics", a term coined by Frank Santoro to describe a cartooning style that fuses influences from a variety of sources such as alternative comics, genre comics, manga and animation, is an appropriate way to describe some of his comics but it's not something he sets out to achieve when working on a comic.

Spotting Deer (2010), a 12-page full-colour comic described by DeForge as documenting "the biology and behavioural patterns of a fictional species of slug called the 'Spotting Deer,' who are deer-shaped and deer-sized and populate most Canadian cities", won the 2011 Pigskin Peters Award for best non-narrative or experimental work. The comic was developed from the initial idea of "formatting it like an encyclopedia entry".