- Floating World Comics
- Dream Team.
Anders Nilsen’s new collection of comic strips and ink illustrations, Poetry is Useless, contains a little comic where he’s trying to summarize his enormous opus Big Questions (2011, Drawn and Quarterly) to a woman on a plane.
”Six hundred pages. Little birds in the middle of nowhere. A crashed airplane. Life and death and like, fate and stuff,” he says.
The words seem to lose their meaning, falling heavily. He and the woman sit in silence and they look out the window to the dawn’s illumination of islands on the ocean. She says something about god and it sets off a long train of thought inside Nilsen which he keeps to himself out of politeness or privacy. He agrees on the beauty of the view.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Anders Nilsen has become so private, considering the intimate quality of thought he’s put on display for readers over the years. His books Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow (Drawn and Quarterly, 2006) and The End (Fantagraphics, Coconino Press, 2007) cover the intensely personal feelings of losing his fiancée to cancer. Big Questions, as mentioned, concerns ideas of interpersonal perception and god. Poetry is Useless isn’t necessarily more guarded than his previous books, but it is less serious and functions more as an existential gag-strip book. [Ed note: Suzette just described this as a gag book but it contains a first-person account of seeing a man fall from a bridge and die. Suzette, what is your problem?]
- Anders Nilsen/Drawn and Quarterly
- This looks like a page from a sketchbook. It is and it isn’t.
About that: Much of the material in Poetry is Useless is familiar from Nilsen’s long-running blog, The Monologuist, so the heaviest story of the book is something I’ve read before, a first-person account of Nilsen seeing a man fall from a bridge and watching everyone’s attempts at rescue. Another favorite involves a person in a pit trying to cajole someone on the surface to hand down their soda. This tragicomedy shit is my bread and butter. I looooooove it. But there are still more reasons to love Poetry is Useless.
At first glance, Poetry is Useless looks like a scanned sketchbook. Sometimes the imprints of the next page are visible, lending a look that is both authentic and also a little chintzy. That’s an aesthetic choice, though, and I think it really works with this book. A friend of mine compared it to a Jackson Pollock painting. Someone might look at it and say, “Oh, I could do that.” But the actual structure and quality of the visual composition threw me into instant, deep respect for its subtle arrangement.
“If Big Questions is a novel,” Nilsen said recently in this Comics Journal interview, ”and I’ve done some memoir and nonfiction stuff, I think of the short pieces in [this] book as my poetry collection.”
Joining Nilsen on tour and at Tuesday’s book signing is Marc Bell, fine artist, cartoonist and well known creator of Shrimpy and Paul and Friends. Despite Bell’s 20 years of weeklies, Stroppy is his first full-length graphic narrative. I know MUCH less about Bell’s body of work but I liked reading Stroppy. The labor and detail on each page of the novella are intense and occasionally overwhelmed me—reminiscent of Joost Swarte in clean but complex page composition. Stroppy expresses frustration with idiot bosses and the grind of institutional miscommunication. Even if you aren’t familiar with Bell’s strips, he’s had tremendous influence on the Ontario indie comics scene and it’s interesting to see his footprint in the work of basically any Canadian 20-something whose drawings have big feet.
