What you missed if you’re not local enough to hang with Anders Nilsen

Last Friday night (August 17, 2012), cartoonist Anders Nilsen, creator of the astonishing brick of a book Big Questions, appeared at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, Illinois to do a reading/slideshow and talk about the exhibit of his works that has been on display at the museum since June 2012 (and which ends on August 25, if you’re in the area and haven’t had the chance to check it out). It was definitely worth attending, since any chance to see an artist talk about his work is bound to be fascinating, and seeing the art in person is always a treat, especially when it’s presented at a scale which is impossible to replicate in reproductions.



The centerpiece of the exhibit was the drawing which shared its name, Adam and Eve Sneaking Back into the Garden to Steal More Apples, a 5’ x 8’ monstrosity that Nilsen said he struggled with for quite some time, often feeling that it defeated him. It’s a marvel of detail, from the dense tangle of thorns which the couple (who are presented as adolescents) are climbing over, to the various animals and creatures populating the garden, to the anachronistic implements of modern life (a computer keyboard, a tire, etc.) scattered on the ground, to the tiny blades of grass that provide the signature Nilsen texture to the image. Nilsen described the image, and some of the others that he worked on, as ones that he doesn’t fully understand, presenting several possibilities, including a post-apocalyptic world, which, along with mythological/religious stories, was a theme that several of the exhibit’s works shared.



It’s an impressive work, one that can be studied and pondered endlessly. That’s true of several other works as well, including the above study for Adam and Eve, called Jesus and Satan Playing in the Garden of Eden, which depicts the pair as children romping through the same thorny landscape, which includes a huge chunk of concrete that, again, suggests some apocalyptic ruin. Nilsen spoke of trying to reinterpret or adapt mythological or religious stories, filtering them through some of his own interests and incorporating modern details, while still retaining some ambiguity.



Another large piece, which Nilsen drew while taking a break from Adam and Eve, is Last Remnant After the End of the World, although he says that the title is kind of incidental, and it was more of a study of the root ball of a tree that he found interesting. It was also an expansion of another drawing that was more of a simple rock, adding details and making it much more dramatic. It’s another marvel of detail, packed with texture and palpable dirt and decay, yet including a hint of life after death with the branch sprouting from the top of the stump.



For the slideshow presentation, Nilsen read from an “accordion book” which he had on display called Rage of Posiedon, which takes the form of a series of silhouette images accompanied by text, making for a series of short stories that continues the theme of reimagined or recontextualized mythology. The title story follows the god of the sea as he struggles to understand the modern world, while other stories included a take on the Biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac from the boy’s perspective, a poignant look at the fall of Lucifer, and an amusing scene in which Jesus hits on Venus in a bar in Heaven. The simple art style is a bit of a change for Nilsen, who usually packs imagery with palpable details, but it frees him to focus on the text of the stories, which incorporate the dry humor of his sketchbook work in books like Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes.





The book itself was also on display, making for an interesting artifact, a 28-foot series of images that could be compressed to fit into a cover. Drawn and Quarterly will be publishing a version of it that will include a few more stories in the fall of 2013.



Other works on display included a few pages from Big Questions, and a scene of Batman, Wolverine, and the angel Gabriel all lying unconscious around a hole in the ground, suggesting some sort of unknown catastrophe and inspiring any number of stories in viewers’ minds.



Another drawing shows what the title says is a prototype for human life, presumably created by God, and it’s another lovely accumulation of weird detail, inspiring a story through its title and suggesting all manner of narrative around it.

As a collection of an artist’s work, the exhibit is fascinating and inspiring, a testament to the artistic skill and ambition that Nilsen has coming out of his pores. Whether he continues along this path, creating gallery-presented images, or makes more comics and narrative works, it will be a treat to follow him and experience what he has to show us.

Anders Nilsen makes a "Big" debut in Chicago

Tonight, I attended the release party for Anders Nilsen's collected edition of Big Questions, which is just being released by Drawn & Quarterly. Taking place at Chicago's Lula Cafe, it was a really fun event, not limited just to Nilsen signing books, but featuring readings, a Q&A, and some surprising added value from some of Nilsen's artist friends. Dozens of pages of original art from the book lined the walls, providing a close-up view of the work that went into the 12-years-in-the-making, 658-page book.

The event portion of the evening kicked off with a reading of a story by Kyle Beachy, who Nilsen described as his first intern, and whose new book The Slide features a cover illustration by Nilsen. His story was a really affecting piece about a man imagining the reason his father did something horrible in his youth, in a nice David Foster Wallace-influenced style. I'll have to look into more of Beachy's work.




Beachy was followed by a pair of readings by Zak Sally and John Porcellino, who chose to read from each other's comics, claiming to attempt to make fun of each other. Interestingly, Sally's reading of a section of Porcellino's King-Cat Comics was kind of flat, mostly consisting of verbally sounding out the sound effects and trying to describe the images (with Porcellino occasionally attempting to act out parts of the scenes), with any fun-making toward Porcellino already present in the story, which was about him working so hard on his comics that he didn't do any laundry, eventually wearing pajama pants and knock-off Crocs, his car breaking down on the side of the road, and him later lining his hole-filled shoes with newspaper. But then, when Porcellino read from Sally's Sammy the Mouse, he brought the house down with his hilarious rendition of the dialogue, doing different voices for the characters and making funny faces and gestures. Who would have expected Porcellino to be the better entertainer of the two?

And then it was time for the man of the hour. Nilsen did a slide show along with his reading, showing a large number of images from the book (and some of his other works), giving a mini-history of his career, and reading a few short sections of the comics themselves. It was really interesting stuff, with Nilsen describing how he ended up falling into comics after his art school professors, coming from more of an abstract expressionist school, frowned upon his attempts at narrative in his art. His first real attempts at comics were in pamphlets for a short-lived band in which he performed as the singer, and later a picture book he made for his younger sister about a turtle trying to make a cross-country trip to his little sister's birthday.

After art school, Nilsen moved to San Francisco and was mostly doing installation art, but he also had some sketchbooks, many of which quickly filled up with drawings of birds eating seeds and talking to each other, making for short comics leading to quirky punchlines. Later, he moved to Minneapolis to attend grad school at the Art Institute of Chicago, and he decided to make a minicomic of his bird cartoons, which became the first issue of Big Questions. He didn't seem to think it would lead to anything, but some people reacted well and found it rather funny, including a coworker and an employee of Minneapolis's Big Brain Comics. This reception led Nilsen to do a second issue, which sold well at conventions like SPX, encouraging him to keep going.

The second issue is notable in that the cover features some inset panels of a bird flying, which was the first "strip" without a punchline, making it the point at which Nilsen decided to weave more of a longer story around these conversational comics. He started to add human characters, such as an old woman who scattered the seeds the birds were eating, and an "idiot" who was inspired by an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem which described spring as "and idiot scattering flowers".

The cover of the third issue was also the first one in color, and it sparked an interest in design, which, due to art school prejudices, Nilsen had previously considered to be a sort of ugly step child to "real" art. He began experimenting with ways to present ideas coherently, marking a big leap forward in storytelling. He started figuring out how to string the strips together into a longer story, such as a bomb falling but not exploding, leading to birds deciding it is a large egg which they need to help hatch, or a bird being dragged underground, an unfamiliar situation for a creature of the air. Unfortunately, this turned out to be very inefficient storytelling, with the big images forming plot points that turned out to take years to resolve. For instance, Nilsen was worried that people would consider the plane crash that takes place in the story as a commentary on September 11, but since the issue where the crash happened didn't come out until 2005, nobody said anything.

Nilsen went on to read some portions of the story and discuss other aspects of his work, such as his interest in "old-timey" illustration, and answered questions from the audience. A comment on cliffhangers led him to mention how much he liked Tintin, which he noted ends literally every page on a cliffhanger, which is a great way to build tension. From a question about how he learned storytelling, he revealed that he basically taught it to himself through making the series, remarking that self-publishing lets you pretend nobody is actually paying any attention to what you are doing, so you can figure things out as you go.

When asked about his influences, Nilsen blanked, but he was able to come up with several names, including Tintin creator Herge; Chester Brown (especially his earlier work in Yummy Fur); Porcellino, Sally, and audience members Paul Hornschemeier and Jeffrey Brown; Sammy Harkham; and Linda Barry. He also draws influence from non-comics sources like music and film, and always tries to pay attention to other subjects, like history and philosophy. Another audience member noted an Edward Gorey similarity, and Nilsen agreed wholeheartedly, noting the artist's facility with cross-hatching, weird, dark stories, sense of sexuality, and ability to blend the funny and the devastating to make his stories work on multiple levels.

One person asked whether he had done any study of birds, or based his bird characters on any actual bird behavior, but Nilsen stated that he had little interest in birds, and if anything, the crows in the story were influenced by the similar characters in the movie Dumbo. However, after he started the series, he began to notice birds more, and started paying more attention to them. He remarked that Chicago's Humboldt Park is a great place to bird-watch, recalling a time that he saw a heron catch a fish and then play with it, letting it drop repeatedly out of its mouth and catch it before it entered the water. He encouraged everyone to become bird watchers as well.

That marked the end of the questions, leaving plenty of time to browse, socialize, buy material from the table that Quimby's Books had set up, and request signatures from Nilsen. It ended up being an excellent evening, fun and funny, informative and fascinating. Myself, I haven't read Big Questions yet (my copy is in the mail), but after this, I can't wait to do so.