anders nilsen

Paper is a wonderful technology (part two)

Friday, October 26, 2018

A page from Anders Nilsen’s Grand Canyon sketchbook

“A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.”

“It’s resilient, it’s resourceful, it’s portable, it’s foldable, it’s strong if you want it to be strong.”

“I’m reminded of what we lose in this age of email, texting, and connecting through social media: The handwritten. The mailed by post. The jotted thoughts. The thank-you notes…”

Yes, paper is a wonderful technology. (See also: my “paper” file.)

A FEW GOOD READS

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Okay, I really hate reviewing books, but I also want to keep track of the good fiction and comics stuff I’ve read lately, so here:

	Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine Not my kind of story, not my kind of style, but a really well-executed, 100-page story. I think Tomine’s a terrific artist, and I love his sketchbooks and illustration work (his New Yorker covers are always great). This book deserves the attention it’s getting. Buy it on Amazon Adrian Tomine’s official site Tasteful PBS segment on the book Tomine on Fresh air — (listen to Terry Gross talk about speech balloons)
	The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd Went to see Chip Kidd talk a couple of weeks ago, so I read his first novel. It’s very funny and a quick read, and anybody who’s been through an art-school critique would appreciate the great classroom scenes. (Kidd modeled the fictional Winter Sorbeck off his own professor at Penn State, the graphic designer Lammy Sommese.) And since so much of the action takes place in the classroom, it sort of functions as a wacky introduction to graphic design. I recommend it. Buy it on Amazon
	Crickets #2 by Sammy Harkham This is a comic book. For $5, you get a bunch of stories, all of them pretty wild and pretty great. Sammy is one of my favorite cartoonists, and I’d been looking forward to this for a while. It didn’t disappoint. Buy it from Drawn + Quarterly Great review by Ken Parille
	Big Questions by Anders Nilsen I’ve been following this series for a while. I found #3 last week in a bargain bin at my local Half Price books—it’s amazing how much Nilsen has grown as an artist. I buy everything he makes, and so should everyone else. Buy from Drawn + Quarterly Anders’ blog Interview My review of Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
	The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch This is bathroom reading: most of the strips are the equivalent of a good dick joke. A good and hilarious dick joke. Buy it from Amazon Read the strip online

MORE ANDERS NILSEN

Monday, September 24, 2007

On inspiration:

[M]yths, fairy-tales and religious stories like the Bible…They are endlessly interpretable and adaptable. A bottomless source. They’re the template for pretty much all storytelling in the Western world. Whether by design or by stumbling onto them I think there is much to be gained from brushing up against them, borrowing, stealing, rewriting and quoting from them, whether subtly…or overtly…”

On not-knowing:

…when making comics is working, it really doesn’t feel like you are the one telling the story, it feels like the story already exists and you are just doing your best to get it down on paper. It’s like a very carefully attentive manufacturing process. So for the story to change would be like for someone who assembles calculators to start changing the calculators. They probably wouldn’t work.”

On art and religion:

All art comes from religion. From trying to understand and contend with the world.”

On the artist disguising himself in his work:

I’m happy to be back to my usual practice of heavily disguising my life in the stories I tell. Generally speaking, it’s still me in my other work, it’s just that I’m disguised as a bunch of little birds.”

Anders Nilsen – The Metabunker Interview pt. 4 of 4

TWO BRILLIANT QUOTES ABOUT CARTOONING

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Chris Ware’s Introduction to The Best American Comics 2007

…lately I find myself frequently torn between whether I’m really an artist or a writer. I was trained and educated as the former, encouraged into the world of paint-stained pants and a white-walled studio where wild, messy experiments precipitate the incubation of other visual ideas— though I’m just as happy to sit at a desk in clean trousers with a sharp pencil and work on a single story for four or five days in a quiet and deliberate manner. In short, I’m coming to believe that a cartoonist, unlike the general cliché, is almost—bear with me now—a sort of new species of creator, one who can lean just as easily toward a poetic, painterly, or writerly inclination, but one who thinks and expresses him- or herself primarily in pictures.

A lengthy interview with Anders Nilsen:

When I set out with a clear idea of what I want to do, it becomes super simplistic and neither illuminating to me nor the readers, so that doesn’t work. It sort of just happens by accident, really. I think it’s because I’m interested in these things, so when I draw the first panel, for me to draw the second panel it will have to have dealt with something. The biggest issue is how to get out of your own way, how to explore issues without forcing it, without forcing yourself to do it. If you do ten pages of comics that are just not interesting, you’ve just got to throw it away.

ANDERS NILSEN IN THE CHICAGO READER

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The Chicago Reader has an article on the amazing, enduring Anders Nilsen:

…just when doors started to open for Nilsen, he entered the most painful period of his life. Two years ago, at the age of 37, [his fiancee Cheryl] Weaver died after the sudden, devastating onset of Hodgkin’s disease. Afterward Nilsen buried himself in his work, creating two raw and intimate books dealing with her final days and his struggle to carry on without her, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow and The End. He was mourning, and he was doing it with more people paying attention to him than ever had before.

I buy everything of Nilsen’s I can get my hands on — his work makes me feel like everything I’ve done up until this point is silly, and it makes me want to go deeper, think bigger, work harder. I can’t recommend Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow enough.