Big Questions, An Interview with Anders Nilsen

Anders Nilsen: The thinkers are all just foils, though, for my own experience and observation...until the last few months my acquaintance with these big questions of life and death has been theoretical. I have no idea how it will be to return to the story after the last few months.

KA: Could you talk a little bit about the technical side of your medium, in terms of the development process when you begin a piece and what it takes to get to the final product?

Anders Nilsen: My original pages are a mess. I don't pencil a page first, I just start drawing in pen. Which means there is often a lot of white-out and cutting and pasting to get to the final product. I used to pencil first, but I feel like the ink line I get if I pencil is kind of half-assed, like tracing. If I just go in with pen then the line is more likely to be thoughtful, to matter.

Once a book is done I scan the pages into photoshop and clean them up and sometimes move a few things around, but basically by that time the drawing is finished. I still think of them as drawings, as objects. I fill in all the black areas with the pen, for example, even though it might be easier to do in the computer. Coming from a painting background it's important to me that they be finished drawings.

KA: I've noticed that the illustrations in early issues of Big Questions have a busier look to them, but that you're getting a clearer and simpler style, especially by the most recent issue, #7. Has that been a conscious choice or something that's reflected the nature of the storyline or…?

Anders Nilsen: I think I'm just learning how to draw. I'm able to make better choices about when a drawing is done, when enough information has been put down. Although I actually miss some of that busy-ness. Cheryl used to say I had the Horror Vacui--that's an art history term referring to artists just before and during the renaissance who compulsively filled up every inch of space. For a while I was really interested in ornament and density. Sometimes it worked and often it was too much. I love to look at posters from the eighteen hundreds or old engravings, like, say the dollar bill. That stuff is so beautiful, the way lines can be used to describe, so completely, the curves of flesh over a face, or the folds in cloth. The thing is, comics are storytelling with pictures, so there has to be some compromise. You have to convey information and not let too much extraneous marking up get by, because it will interfere with the readers' ability to absorb the information. You have to decide whether you want to make beautiful drawings or convey a story. You can do both, but you run the risk of the two things getting in each other's way.

KA: Dogs and Water was your first full-length work for Drawn and Quarterly, if I'm not mistaken. On its surface it tells the story of a boy on an aimless journey, one which is pointedly purposeless. Intercut with that is a story told in blue hues about the same boy adrift in a boat. The two are clearly thematically related yet their literal relationship is left ambiguous. Their respective locations are a bit of a mystery as well. The first feels like a foreign country (and I think it would feel that way no matter what country the reader was from) and the second has a Little Nemo-esque quality to it. Can you talk a bit, not explain necessarily, about what you were thinking and where you were coming from when you were working on this book?

Anders Nilsen: I'm actually planning on publishing the strip the story germinated from in the next Mome (quarterly anthology from Fantagraphics) it's an experimental thing from a bunch of years ago, white out and ball point on Polaroid's of piles of wreckage from a salvage yard. The story began as a allegory about the absurdity of being an artist. Carrying around this idea from childhood, this childish idea, of making it a life. And at a certain point I'd gotten out into my life with just this idea to hold on to, just faith, and no real good reason to think it would or should work out. I'd gotten far enough that I couldn't really turn back, but I hadn't actually gotten anywhere. When I turned back to the story, to expand it for Drawn and Quarterly other ideas came into it. Other absurdities about being an artist in the world, in particular the war, which had just gotten underway.

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