Anders Nilson’s much anticipated, new huge graphic novel “Tongues”, published by Panthoen, is now out and The Comics Journal has both a review of the book and an interview with Anders Nilsen himself.
From the review by Leonard Pierce:
There is so much happening in Tongues that cataloguing it all seems like an exercise in futility. But it never seems like too much; it’s not a cluttered event comic and it’s not an exercise in deliberate artsy obscurity. Nilsen lets the events of the story unfold at their own pace – and shockingly for a book so lengthy and jam-packed at over 350 pages, none of which are superfluous. It results in an absolute page-turner that will keep you up late into the night, simultaneously blown away by the book’s deft and sophisticated thematic and metaphorical excellence and its compelling elements.
Read the rest of review here!
Now from the interview by Jason Bergman:
Tongues is Nilsen’s most ambitious work to date. A sprawling retelling of the story of Prometheus, touching on elements of free will, war, and our relationship to the natural world. These are consistent themes in Nilsen’s work, but they’ve all been brought together in a book that also features a more detailed and complex visual style than anything he’s published before.
I met up with Nilsen over Zoom to talk about the many facets of Tongues, including how it builds on the totality of his work to date, and his hope it won’t take another decade to complete the second half. – Jason Bergman
JASON BERGMAN: How would you describe Tongues to someone?
ANDERS NILSEN: [Laughs] When I’m asked what it’s about, the easy answer is that it’s a retelling of the myth of Prometheus. It’s obviously a lot more than that, but yeah, a retelling of the myth of Prometheus, set in the present day Middle East. And the conceit is that thousands of years ago, in the mythology, he was given an eternal punishment. And so in theory, if you spin that out, what if he’s still there? That’s kind of the jumping off point, but the book definitely touches on a wide variety of my interests, and I just threw a bunch of random stuff in there to sort of see what would happen when I mixed it together.
The Toronto Comic Jam 