In his 1950 novel Barabbas, Swedish author Pär Lagerkvist uses the titular New Testament figure as the embodiment of a search for faith forever frustrated. Barabbas is given clemency instead of Jesus, and finds himself, through no fault of his own, ‘to blame’ for the crucifixion. He tries to find a faith of his own, and, for a time, almost finds it when he falls in with a group of enslaved miners, one of whom worships Christ in secret, but Barabbas shirks his faith when his life depends on it. He eventually finds himself in Rome, and when the city is set aflame, supposedly by the Christians in an act of rebellion, he joins in in a gesture of maddened desperation, only to learn, all too late, that the Christians were falsely accused — and that, by joining in to prove his supposed Christianity, he has, in fact, condemned his would-be brothers in faith. Again and again, he searches for God; again and again, he comes up empty-handed.
I read Barabbas after seeing Anders Nilsen recommend Lagerkvist in an interview, and the throughline between the two artists are clear: in Nilsen, even more than there is a distinct note of spirituality proper, there is a hunger for it — a deep desire for an all-encompassing myth-filtered sense-making. Sometimes, as is the case in shorts like “Me and Buddha” (2006) or “The Wilderness Part Two” (2004), the cartoonist will reach for a dry, deadpan humor, literalizing divinity into straight characters; elsewhere, like in his God and the Devil at War in the Garden or Rage of Poseidon, it is a more head-on engagement with the myth on the latter’s own terms.
Nilsen’s latest release, the first hardcover volume of Tongues, released by Pantheon this past March, certainly shares this hunger of Lagerkvist’s. Look no further than the book’s epigraph, consisting of three quotes: first Voltaire (“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”) then Bakunin (“If God did exist, it would be necessary to abolish him”), then, finally, Milton (“Thou art my father, thou my author, thou my being gav’st me; whom should I obey, but thee? Whom follow?”). Note the epigraph’s rhythm: the wry, skeptical quip appearing in the middle, creating a momentary suspension of faith that is, one might say, artificial, a rhetorical device more than anything. At most, this ‘sandwich’ approach creates a tone that is completely deferential to a divine power; at the very least, it is aspirational.
Originally self-published by the author over six issues and a seventh ‘supplement,’ Tongues goes back and forth between three narratives: one about a lonesome American traveler in Afghanistan (nicknamed ‘Teddy Roosevelt,’ for the teddy-bear strapped to his backpack) who falls in with a group of American soldiers on a morally-suspect side-venture; a second about the god Prometheus, imprisoned on a mountainside, his liver eaten daily by an eagle; and a third about Astrid, a Sudanese-born girl in Kenya who experiences visions and revelations. The three narratives are connected by ‘The Cult of the Omega,’ a religious fundamentalist group in the process of increasing its sphere of influence and occupying greater and greater territory in Africa and South Asia. The group’s leader, Nilsen tells us, is “considered by some to be the return of the Roman god Jupiter” — the cartoonist makes a point of using this sort of non-committal verbiage throughout, as if to sow doubt regarding the veracity of this belief.
In his previous narrative works, Nilsen has made a point of incorporating an element of distance: Big Questions and Dogs and Water take place in deserts and wastelands that are pointedly vague and nonspecific, unmoored from space and time, thus rendering them halfway to allegory and engaging with their key figures accordingly; Rage of Poseidon is halfway between comics and illustrated prose, with woodcut-like silhouette artwork that, by definition, avoids specifics, while his Monologues comics and The End are drawn almost more or less pictographically, with little in the way of representational background. Tongues, by contrast, is the cartoonist’s most straightforward work yet with meticulously-articulated art and overt anchoring in real-world time and place.
Taking extreme measures by largely exiling himself from society at large, the American traveler epitomizes a recurring theme in Nilsen’s work — lostness and lost souls. When we first meet him — we do not know his true name, only the one given to him — he has been walking for an untold but significant length of time, and, although he sneers at the people who made fun of him for his journey, he himself does not sound particularly aimful. He tries to flag down a military convoy, and one of the cars does come to speak with him; one of its occupants, American soldier Rodney, is bemused, whereas his partner, the laconic Russian Nikolai (Nico), wants to shoot him and move on. Eventually they take him in, but Nico remains suspicious of him. Eventually we learn that ‘Teddy Roosevelt,’ during a psychotic break, murdered his family, and is now “on the run from himself”; his journey is his way of repenting through self-imposed withdrawal.
The Prometheus storyline, meanwhile, is one of bidden time. Referred to as ‘The Prisoner’ in Nilsen’s dramatis personae, the Roman Titan and patron god of foresight is bound to a rock and receives a series of visits, predominantly by the eagle that returns daily to eat his liver, but also, occasionally, by his fellow deities. Prometheus, in these sequences, is cognizant of his passivity, as he relies on his visitors to mediate the changing world to him, but passivity does not translate to despair. He remains steadfast that liberation is inevitable, and that it will occur on his own terms. When the Omega visits him and offers him liberation in exchange for knowledge (Prometheus insists that another deity is scheming to betray the Omega, though the latter suspects that this may be a lie fabricated by the Prisoner himself), Prometheus refuses outright. The tone is not one of defeat, merely of victory postponed, in a way similar to Nilsen’s short “The Beast” (2004; my favorite of his short works).
The Prometheus narrative, to me, is the most compelling of the three; explicitly inspired by Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Nilsen retains the stagelike sense of stillness, focusing on the slow-burn build of interpersonal dynamics. As Prometheus details his bonding with the lineage of eagles that serve as his wardens, there is a clear tenderness between both parties: the eagle of the present day says openly that, unlikely though the scenario may be, she would very much prefer to see Prometheus freed. Prometheus leverages this tenderness, not maliciously so much as pragmatically — as the eagle brings him news of the world and explains technological concepts, he has her steal cellphones so that he may study them and slowly increase his power. There is an intriguing, subtle note of politicking here, as the eagle, who we know fearfully reported Prometheus’ increased talk of escape to the Omega, is a willing accessory.
Though I have gone on record numerous times about not being a fan of Moebius — a major influence on Tongues — Nilsen appears to channel the French cartoonist’s greatest strength: knowing when to apply his crisp, precise texturing and when to abstain (a quality a lot of artists who have followed in the Frenchman’s footsteps have more or less done away with, tilting toward one of two extremes — either total, nigh-compulsively-hatched detail or austere, ersatz-spiritual smoothness). This judgment is exercised to particularly great effect in the Prometheus sequences, where some plants surrounding the Titan are carefully drawn as mounds upon mounds of rubbery squiggles (reminiscent, to me at least, of Keith Haring’s cartoon-like simplifications), whereas others are smooth almost to the point of liquidity.
Nilsen’s layouts in these sequences, too, are ornamented with medieval-like marginalia, blossoming flowers and heads of animals poking out of panels to give them an added splendor, as if to offset the stillness of the story’s theatrical roots. Page 200 in the collected edition is a strong display of Nilsen’s more ornate layouts: here Nilsen deftly establishes an intergenerational routine, as every day the mother-eagle brings her children pieces of Prometheus’ guts so these sweet little baby-birds can, in turn, grow to feed their own young from that inexhaustible source of divine nourishment. Though Nilsen’s depiction of the action is contiguous and step-by-step, however, with each panel the montage sequence progresses approximately 72 years, starting in 1006 BCE. (One notes, for added context, that the average life expectancy of a black eagle is approximately 30-35 years, so each panel is, in fact, a skip of not one generation but several.) Instead of arranging the page in a simple grid of increasingly-small panels, Nilsen’s panels are corpuscular droplets arranged in a spiral pattern (bringing to mind French cartoonist Patrice Killoffer), creating a sense of time that does not flow so much as it collapses into itself in its cyclical pattern, endlessly accelerating until it finally slows down in the present day (the last caption breaks away from the accurate dating format, labeling the final installment of this sequence only ‘twelve years ago’). Page 247 operates on a similar conceit, with three tiers of hexagonal panels that obscure one another, depicting evidently successive events but, as Prometheus’ voice-over clarifies, not chronologically congruent. There’s a Muybridge-esque effect to it, playing simultaneously with motion and stillness. It’s noteworthy, of course, that these plays of temporality occur only in Prometheus’ narrative: his is a perspective that exists outside of human chronology, having lived long enough to see it not as a linearity but as recurring and rhyming patterns.
The third narrative, that of Astrid, essentially functions as the mediator between the earthly and the divine. From fairly early on, her significance as a ‘chosen one’ is vividly telegraphed. A young girl living in Kenya with her father, she is frequently beset by otherworldly revelations, animals speaking to her or statues taking on life — revelations that her surroundings dismiss as merely ‘episodes.’ Astrid is abducted by the Cult of the Omega, but manages to find her freedom, guided by a deity cursed to assume the form of a chicken.
Of the three main plots, Astrid’s conforms most closely to a conventional adventure story; her discoveries are, implicitly, the reader’s as well. Unlike Nilsen’s beloved Tintin, however, Astrid is curious only from a distance; though she embarks on her adventure as instructed, she does so reluctantly and more than a bit skeptically. Simultaneously, she is a ‘chosen one’ and a pawn — the gods look to her in the hopes that she might be able to defeat the Omega, but, at the same time, they are more or less uniformly resigned to the high likelihood that she might die in the process.
A recurring theme in Tongues is the idea of continuity, whether restored or disrupted. The ‘return’ of Jupiter, contrasted with Prometheus’ breaking free; ‘Teddy Roosevelt’ breaking out of the human world, only to find himself pulled back. Astrid, for her part, is both with and without lineage: her father adopted her after finding her floating in the river while on a work trip to Sudan, and her birth-parents remain unknown; all we know about her ‘past,’ if we may call it that, is that, when Nilsen flashes back to prehistory to depict the first emergence of language in humankind, the first person to incubate linguistic skill looks exactly like Astrid.
But if Tongues is about any lineage at all, it is the lineage of Nilsen’s own preceding bibliography: the myth of Prometheus first appeared in Rage of Poseidon, as did several other figures in Tongues. ‘Teddy Roosevelt’ is the same traveler who appeared in Dogs and Water. The setting of the latter’s story, a desolation with foreboding military presence, is evocative of Big Questions. And yet these are not revisitations in the cash-grab sense. Even if one were to operate on the largely-dubious assumption that there is big money to be found in penning a sequel to a Drawn and Quarterly comic from eighteen years ago, Nilsen’s intent here is neither cynical explication nor superfluous expansion — in truth, if Nilsen uses Tongues to comment on his previous works at all, he does so by entirely breaking away from the earlier works’ respective fundamental principles.
Let us, for that matter, look at Dogs and Water. On the narrative level, a key principle of Dogs and Water is that the traveler’s interactions with other creatures (human or otherwise) are, in the long-term, inconsequential. Encounters and allegiances are to be broken, not out of perfidy but rather as resignation to ephemerality. Even the teddy bear, his one connection to his ‘journey,’ is given away in the end. See, too, the traveler’s backstory — though in Dogs and Water we can more or less infer a mental state from the fact that he speaks to his stuffed bear and evidently hears answers (answers which to the reader remain inaudible), in Tongues it is given concrete, worldly roots, and ones that complicate his erstwhile blankness.
Similarly, on the formal level, Dogs and Water is a book dictated by line and spaciousness. Though certainly communicative and handsome, Nilsen’s pen-work is shaggy, rocky, and he purposefully leaves most surfaces sparsely rendered, defined by negative space. The book’s panels, as is frequently the case in Nilsen’s early work, ‘float,’ without delineated borders or gutters. Throughout Dogs and Water, there is a sense of fleetingness, a fundamental lack of anchor.
Tongues, by contrast, is clearly visually delineated: it is richly, smoothly colored, with backgrounds that articulate each and every form in view, and its panels are clearly bordered (in complex arrangements and shapes that pointedly avoid quadrangles). Tongues, then, is both a follow-up to Dogs and Water and a contradiction thereof.
Ditto the Prometheus storyline: the Prometheus of Rage of Poseidon is an entity whose inaction and impotence is absolute; any satisfaction he might derive, any victory, comes not from liberation but from a combination of wry vindictiveness and romance toward humanity: “In the end, things have not turned out so good, but there was the look in that new creature’s eye all those many years ago. And as for the gods who chained you here, the gods are forgotten. And that is the sweetest revenge.” In Tongues, a few years later, that balance between schadenfreude and nostalgia is no longer enough; the world exists continually, and so must the divine, if only so that the two may intermingle.
And, indeed, of all Nilsen’s works, Tongues, with its specific settings, is the most ‘of the world,’ the most interested in commenting on a specific broader context. The yearly publication model of Tongues lends a curious aspect to the political present it seeks to comment on: to me, the religious fundamentalism of the Cult of the Omega initially scanned as a response to ISIS (indicative of when Nilsen started working on the project, in 2015), though later on in the book an exchange between two new initiates — one American, the other South Asian — reveals the organization’s ‘recruitment tactics’ to be, at least in some parts of the world, more akin to the life-guru-for-the-alienated-young-man strain à la Jordan Peterson, a rabbit-hole that starts with ostensibly-harmless life tips before snowballing into fascism. The movement toward the end, where Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus reveals that he has instigated a plague to rid the world of the scourge of mankind before that same scourge destroys the world entirely, calls to mind the nature is healing, modernity is the virus-type rhetoric that pervaded certain contingents of the COVID-19 denialist movement. Through no fault of its own, the book attempts to comment on a present moment while political acceleration affords the present moment a nimble escape.
In 2011, Nilsen said of the recurring motif of lostness in his work, “If you strip away all of our conventions and assumptions and really let yourself question everything, take nothing for granted, you’re sort of lost. […] How do people […] locate themselves and the world around them if the former markers are gone? Or prove untrustworthy?” In Tongues, that lostness is brought to the fore. Thousands of years after the dawn of lingual civilization, humanity has grown, in the eyes of the gods, autonomous, unruly, making the very existence of the gods a power struggle. Astrid’s chicken-companion tells her outright that even the Omega cannot compete with the whole of humanity’s power, he can merely bring it under his control. At a point in time that feels too big to properly understand, the cartoonist looks to mythology — a narrative sensibility of which aetiology is a foremost purpose — and finds it in just as substantial an impasse as the human realm. (Note the state of disarray among the gods: while the objective of the Omega’s cult is to subjugate humanity, Epimetheus operates to destroy it outright, and there is little indication of any interaction between the two plans, let alone overt conflict.)
It is precisely because of how divergent Tongues is from the rest of Nilsen’s works, formally and aesthetically, that I find myself struggling to articulate the precise point of its appeal; works like his Monologues or The End (the latter being, to me, among the very finest of 21st-century alternative comics) operate as more or less hermetic systems, blunt tonal–emotional communications that either de-prioritize conventional narrative construction or else side-step it entirely. Rage of Poseidon, a furthering of the same strain of work, foregrounds its narrative sensibilities a bit, but still focuses on tone and point. Tongues, by contrast, would be too easy to dismiss as another straight genre work; it is the sort of book that a decade ago might’ve found its place in the Image Comics catalog.
And so, to find Tongues’ distinctions, I am brought to search for the old amidst the new. Toward the end of Prometheus’ storyline, he speaks to his brother Epimetheus, the patron god of hindsight. “If this age of humans really is at an end,” he says, “I would ask of you one thing before it is done. Something I have been unable to do since my long imprisonment here and have often wished for. On an evening, visit some dwelling, sit in a room with a human mother as she puts her child to sleep, and listen to the song she makes to quiet her child. […] And maybe you will better understand what this ending means.” There is much turbulence immediately after this — Prometheus uses his newly-acquired command of technology to set himself free, while Teddy Roosevelt is captured by the Cult of the Omega, while Astrid gains a better understanding of her mission, her enemy, her place in the world — but to me it is that monologue that, amidst this sweeping narrative, brings out Nilsen’s true authorial character: a soft but pathos-laden appellation, a testament to the romance of human tenderness, so difficult, even for the author himself, to reconcile with the pain of the world. Nilsen himself offers no answers, no quick-and-easy guide — only a gaping absence, filled instead by frustration.
With Tongues, Anders Nilsen finds himself torn, once again, between connection and destruction, and the phrase ‘Vol. 1’ on the cover reminds us that there will be some time before any resolutions are offered. Whether or not the cartoonist will succeed in making sense of the world is open to question; for such a lofty task, no one will quite blame him for failing. But there will be a passion there, at the very least, a hunger — and sometimes that is its own reward.
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