[4] 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.

[11] 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.

[7] 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.

[12][24] ComicsAlliance described it as a story where "teenage superheroes flee the scene when powers they can’t fully control melt one of their teammates into a puddle of sentient water".

[25][26] Frank Santoro's Riff Raff column in The Comics Journal included DeForge's Intermission Funnies, a weekly gag strip, from August to December 2011.

[34] In 2010, they co-edited Prison for Bitches, described by DeForge as "a Lady Gaga tribute zine full of artwork, writing, and comics".

[34][35] Thickness #1 featured work by Katie Skelly, Jonny Negron, Ze Jian Shen, Derek Ballard, True Chubbo.

[35] Thickness #2 featured work by Angie Wang, Brandon Graham, Mickey Zacchilli, Lisa Hanawalt, True Chubbo, Jillian Tamaki and included DeForge's College Girl by Night.

[35][36] Thickness #3 featured work by Lamar Abrams, Jimmy Beaulieu, Edie Fake, Julia Gfrörer, William Cardini and Sean T. Collins, Gengoroh Tagame, True Chubbo, Andy Burkholder and HamletMachine.

[25][37] The anthology included work by Jon Vermilyea, Derek M. Ballard, Dan Zettwoch, T. Edward Bak, Robin Nishio, Ines Estrada, Lizz Hickey, Mickey Zacchili, Jesse Jacobs, Jason Fischer, Hellen Jo, Angie Wang, Greg Pizzoli, Joe Lambert, Bob Flynn and Chris "Elio" Eliopoulos.

[38] Although DeForge has said that he has "never actually had much interest in being an editor", he co-edited Thickness and Root Rot because he supported the idea behind each book, and enjoys working with Ryan Sands and Annie Koyama, who he said did most of the "heavy lifting".

[46] Douglas Wolk, writing in The New York Times, described it as a collection of "perverse, funny, haunting stories" where DeForge "warps and dents the assured, geometrical forms of vintage newspaper strips and new wave-era graphics into oddly adorable horrors".

[50] It includes All About the Spotting Deer which Wolk described as starting as "a dry parody of nature documentaries" that "mutates into a vignette about an unhappy author, then into a routine about Canadian self-celebration, and ultimately folds in on itself".

[50] The fifth issue of DeForge's Lose series was published by Koyama in June 2013 and debuted at the 2013 Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE).

[4][59][60][61] Drawn & Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros described DeForge as "one of those rare talents who emerge, out of the blue, with a fully formed and singularly unique vision" and a "striking visual sensibility and peculiar sense of humor...entirely his own".

Exploring how the children would learn to "live together and get along with each other in this unsupervised, anarchic society" was the central theme to the series, DeForge explained, with "all the cliques of the school branch off into their different storefronts".