BIOGRAPHY:

Anders Nilsen (1973- ) grew up in Minneapolis, and thanks to his understanding parents, he grew up on a steady diet of comics, including Tintin, X-Men, Raw and Weirdo.

"I started to draw ever since I could remember. I don't remember not drawing."
Anders Nilsen

After a year in San Francisco, in 1999 he moved to Chicago to attend The School of Art Institute, but dropped out after only a year, shorly after the release of Big Questions #3.

"Mostly really I just felt out of place. The place is kind of geared toward the fine art and high art way of dealing with things. My teachers liked what I was doing and they were very supportive - it just didn't seem like they could talk about it in an interesting or helpful way. They couldn't tell me anything about comics that I didn't already know."
Anders Nilsen

He is also a member of The Holy Consumption, the Chicago based art collective formed with Jeffrey Brown, John Hankiewicz and Paul Hornschemeier.

"It's also really good to have friends in the same city who are sort of going through the same stuff at more or less the same time - figuring out how to deal with publishers, for example, or trying to figure out how to draw stuff right."
Anders Nilsen

He received two Ignatz Award nominations for Big Questions #4 in 2002 for Promising New Talent and Outstanding Comic. In 2004 he received a further Ignatz nomination for Big Questions #6 for Outstanding Mini Comic. Don't Go Where I Can't Follow won the 2007 Ignatz award for Outstanding Graphic Novel in 2007.

Interviews:
Mome #7 (2007)
Book By Its Cover (2007)
The Metabunker (2007)
Chicago Reader (2007)
Contemporary Lierature (2006)
Inkstuds Radio (2006)
The Comics Journal #270 (2005)

Resources:
The Monologuist Blogspot
Anders Nilsen at The Holy Consumption
Anders Nilsen at Drawn & Quarterly
Anders Nilsen: What Good Is Art?
Beasts
Penguin Classics

Reviews:
Sammy Harkham: Big Questions et al
Sequart: Dogs & Water

Don't Go Where I Can't Follow
Drawn & Quarterly, 2006
In November 2005, artist Cheryl Weaver, girlfriend and partner of Anders Nilsen, died. Don't Go Where I Can't Follow is a collection of travel stories and minor disasters, of dealing with illness, and of a farewell.

"This story is, obviously, very personal, but ultimately I think it isn't exclusive. It feels incredibly particular to me, still, but it's just love and loss. And everyone, for better or worse, can relate to that."
Anders Nilsen

"Cheryl, my girlfriend and partner of the last five and a half years (we'd planned to get married in September, but put it off due to her condition) was ill all last year with hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system. Her prognosis was good at the start, but she didn't respond to treatment as expected. She died on November 13. Her absence is very palpable for me and probably will be for a long time. I can't talk about much without it coloring the conversation... Cheryl was an artist, very prolific, brilliant, but not very good about getting her work into the world. I would press her to let me take her work to small press shows and it would sell out instantly, but she would still resist, sure it was a fluke, or that no one would appreciate it."
Anders Nilsen

"Artist statement: I know this boy named Anders. He makes my heart ache and stomach flutter."
Cheryl Weaver, September 2000

Dogs & Water
Drawn & Quarterly, 2004
Dogs & Water is the story of wild animals, armed confrontation, an oil pipeline and swimming to Asia. It follows a boy and his bear as they wander further into the middle of nowhere and away from everything they think they know.

"Nilsen uses spare renderings to create a haunting narrative that will leave you wondering whether you've read a book or walked through a dream."
Washington Post

"...Dogs & Water is a journey best undertaken alone, on rainy day, when a touch of wonder and heartbreak seems like just the thing."
Readymade

"For inner quietude, try Anders Nilsen's Dogs & Water. The Chicago artist spins a cryptic, alluring tale of a man, his teddy bear, a confrontation over an oil pipeline, and a fierce, sympathetic wolf pack. The carefully drawn Dogs & Water works a fine magic to take you where you've never been."
Boston Globe

"During the time after I started it and before I finished it the war in Iraq started, so that started to percolate a little bit. The original strip I started with was more about just being an artist and figuring out how to make it through the world and how to hold on to what a sort of ridiculous idea that is, but to hold on to it and persevere. When I started [the book] it was a symbol of leaving school and being in the middle of nowhere but having this notion of childhood that I'm still carrying along with me. I'm using a childhood notion to navigate the world. I'm hanging on to this idea that I'm an artist, even though it's not an adult thing to do... We constantly imagine that there is a purpose or a higher meaning, a plan for all of us. It's the thing that gets us out on the road, doing stuff, feeling like what we do matters. But I don't actually believe that there's something there, but it's important to have that sort of motivation."
Anders Nilsen

Big Questions #1-12
Self Published/D&Q (1999-2008)
A group of birds discover an unexploded bomb and mistake it for a giant egg. Philosophical discussions between the birds ensue as they try to comprehend the deadly object... and then it explodes.

"The series is fascinating because Nilsen keeps everything on level with the small scale of the birds' world. Anything relating to the bomb is dramatic and exciting, because Nilsen's drawing pulls away from this minuscule world to reveal tantalizing glimpes into a much larger (and more complex) world. Because he so rarely draws the outside world in Big Questions, and glimpes into it is a revalation, as much as a revalation as it is for the birds."
The Comics Journal #266

"Best known for his acclaimed mini-comic series Big Questions, Anders Nilsen's clean drawing style and aborbing sense of narrative has made him one of the most closely watched cartoonists to emerge in the last few years."
The Comics Journal #259

Books:
The End #1 (2007)
Don't Go Where I Can't Follow (2006)
Monologues For The Coming Plague (2006)
Dogs & Water (2004)
Ballad Of The Two-Headed Boy (2000)

Comics:
Big Questions #1-12 (1999-2008)

Short Stories:
MOME #1-7 (2005-2007)
Hello in Kramer's Ergot #5 (2004)
Sisyphus in Kramer's Ergot #4 (2003)