Anders Nilsen's Blog, page 36

The Nashville Review

Was recently reminded that I did an interview quite a while ago with Matt Baker from the Nashville Review. It's out. Here's an excerpt:

My parents had been in a commune in San Francisco, and before that in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia with some friends. One of them, in his travels, had discovered Tintin and Asterix, and then had his interest in comics bolstered by the underground scene in San Francisco. He had a copy of a cookbook that Crumb illustrated that I found at age six or seven. I remember being fascinated and slightly disturbed.

In Watermelon Sugar

When I began doing these Richard Brautigan covers I'd never read any of his work and had a vague idea that he was a pot smoking psychedelic hippy writer, and that I wasn't going to like his work very much. I was wrong. In Watermelon Sugar is kind of amazing. It is clearly connected to the sixties counterculture milieu Brautigan was connected to, and concerns itself in part with something that seems a bit like a commune in a late sixties, California kind of way. But that is incidental to the heart of the book. There is a wonderful sense of blissful naivete underlaid with a pervasive dread that almost gave me goosebumps. The story feels set outside time in a way, but also has oblique far future, post-apocalyptic tones. In that way it reminded me very much of CF's POWR MASTRS.

Here's a passage from the book that I drew from for one sketch. A second accepted sketch, and something like the final cover are below that.

A Lamb at False Dawn

pauline began talking in her sleep at false dawn from under
the watermelon covers. She told a little story about a lamb going
for a walk.
"The lamb sat down in the flowers," she said. "The lamb
was all right," and that was the end of the story.
Pauline often talks in her sleep. Last week she sang a little
song. I forget how it went.
I put my hand on her breast. She stirred in her sleep. I took
my hand off her breast and she was quiet again.
She felt very good in bed. There was a nice sleepy smell
coming from her body. Perhaps that is where the lamb sat down.

The book's done

Last Monday night, at something like 1am I clicked on the upload button and sent the last remaining bits of the Big Questions collection to D&Q. There will likely be a few rounds of proofs and last minute scouring for stray commas, but basically, I'm done. And it's a huge relief. Here's the cover:
In addition to catching up on the rest of my life – which has been more or less on hold since I started the revision process last October – and sleeping a lot, I'm cleaning up my house which has been strewn with scraps and stray pages from the book. And coffee cups and stray shoes, bills, pen caps, rulers, cereal bowls and grocery store receipts. Some of the book related scraps found their way into the last few posts, without giving away too much of the new material here are a few more:









I plan to do a few more posts in the coming days regarding an upcoming project I'm doing with Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi at Sonnenzimmer, a book cover I did recently and another button piece. Also about the expanded reprint I'm planning of my painted strip, The Game, from Kramer's Ergot #7. And about fifteen other things that I haven't had time to think about for a while. Hello world.

A few new pages

Below are a few new pages I've drawn for the Big Questions collection. The first two are replacements for the covers of #3 and #4, which both featured scenes that didn't otherwise appear in the books' interiors





Above is one of the few pages I decided to completely re-draw. It comes from issue #6. The two pages that follow are a new scene that combines the cover of #6 and a one page image-less passage of text from the end of #5 – Charlotte's Soliloquy.

Corrections

Below are a few drawings I've done in the last few weeks as corrections and/or added panels as part of the editing I'm doing of Big Questions in preparation for the collection. These three are mostly additions to sequences from #9 and #10.



I'm mostly trying to resist the impulse to redraw or add too much. The evolution the story and my approach to it is part of the package. At the same time, I started the book before I had much of an idea what I was doing. So there are some holes in the drawing and the story both, to be filled. I'll post a few more images from the process over the next few days.

What I do when I'm not drawing pictures

My good friend Kyle made this awesome little motion picture in which I am ever so briefly featured. Warning: this has nothing to do with comics or drawing pictures or buttons or the making of books. Awesome song, though.

Take Pictures of Your Food from Edsel Denk on Vimeo.

Some Happenings in the Press

This appeared recently in CS Interiors magazine, here in Chicago.



Not to be persnickety, but a couple of corrections may be in order... the piece is more like 12' x 40', it's only 20% made up of Ogilvy related content, and the show at the MCA is actually coming down on Monday. Thanks to Maia Harms for the photo. More about the piece here (including a time lapse of its construction).

Also, the MCA show was mentioned in the Sun-Times and the Chicago Reader. and even made it onto the teevee news (I'm redirecting you to Paul's blog for that).

New Chicago Comics comes down next Monday

Which means that starting Tuesday all comics in Chicago will be old. You have one more week to check this stuff out. Here are a few photos from the opening January 7.





Me and Paul talking. My Parents in the background wondering when they get to go back to the hotel.



Above, left to right are: me, Paul H, Lilli and Jeff. Many thanks to Sonja for the photos.

Some things to consider (12-10)

In Good Company

Have you smiled today? Watch these for a while and see what happens. Lilli Carre is awesome.