The Comic Book Club: Strange Tales and Big Questions

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DOUGLAS: Oh God what a fantastic series Big Questions has been. I’m not sure if “fifteen issues about the aftermath of a plane crash, from the point of view of deadpan anthropomorphized animals who live around the crash site” was a concept anyone but Anders Nilsen would ever have attempted, but he’s really bloomed over the course of it.

In general, Nilsen’s not much like any other cartoonist I can think of; between this, Dogs and Water, and the unbelievably emotionally raw Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, he’s triangulated a territory that involves staring straight at a particular patch of mortality from a lot of different angles. Big Questions #15 is maybe the most beautifully drawn of the whole series, which is saying something–it’s a clever touch that the little birds who form most of the cast are totally indistinguishable from one another (except for haunted, echo-y Charlotte and Leroy), but the pointillist landscapes and cross-hatched cave scene and closing mandalas, and the body language of the two human characters are all incredibly distinctive. (I think almost any square inch of Nilsen’s artwork, even if it didn’t have any characters in it, would be instantly identifiable as his work.)

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Also, he’s funny–profoundly funny, really. One of the key sequences in this issue involves a swirling mass of dots that take three pages to cohere into a pair of pants, and another is a pair of geese quibbling about the best way to raise somebody from the dead to lead him toward the afterlife. I loved seeing where Betty and Curtis are building their nest. And I think it’s brilliant of Nilsen to “answer” the biggest question of all–what happens after you die?–by raising a zillion more questions and frame them as if they’re answers.

EVAN: I’ve only ever read about three issues of Big Questions, including this one. Never understood what was going on in any of them, in a strictly linear narrative sense, but the beauty of this book is that you don’t need to. It’s already bound together by a hallucinatory dream logic at its core, so stuff like causality and passage of time barely even matter. (And, just for comparison’s sake, Dogs and Water was self-contained and wasn’t exactly an exercise in point-A-to-point-B storytelling.)

Still, there’s an emotional journey coming to an end in this issue and it happens in beautiful fashion. Man, it’d be just so easy to go to trite for a portrayal of the afterlife, especially when you’ve already got all the birds and nature symbols waiting to be folded in the service of something corny. Dead Pilot could’ve got his wings or changed into a winged creature or something like that. Instead, we get a haunting, original vision. What might it be like, to stop flying, stop flapping, pull off those boots, take a good, long stretch and sleep. Beautiful.

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Equally beautiful is the raw naivete of Feral Boy. That last scene is so touching, when the birds bring him their food. It’s a great metaphor for how good grows in the world. One act of altruism changes person’s path from angry self-involvement to paying it forward. In everything from his linework to his layout style–love those “invisible” panels!–Nilsen comes to his symbolism so idiosyncratically. That makes it even more amazing when there’s something universal when a reader pulls back the lens to take it all in.

GRAEME: Sadly, my store didn’t have Big Questions, so I can’t say anything about it (other than, based on what you two have said, I now want to read it). I did pick up Next Men #1, and – Douglas, did you read it? It’s a weird mix of old school superhero comics – John Byrne may be coming up with the best art he has in years, but the writing felt like it should’ve had characters naming themselves in bold letters every second panel – recycled sci-fi novel ideas and a dated attempt at “mature” comics (calling sex “dancing,” and then making a point of pointing out how much “dancing” took place? Come on). It’s also a really, really oddly paced book – It’s pretty much an issue-length expositionary flashback to recap all of the last series, which doesn’t really give new readers like me any real reason to come back next issue. I’d be really curious to see what the sales figures are like for the first and second issues, because I wonder (a) if that many newcomers picked up the first issue, and if so (b) how many will come back for the second, given this first taste.

DOUGLAS: I did read it! Yes, “a weird mix” is exactly what it is. I never read the original Next Men series, and I’m curious about how much this issue was a recap of the older stuff and how much it was “everything you know is a lie!” On the one hand, I’m always happy to see comics where interesting cartoonists are pursuing their personal obsessions full speed ahead (which is why I love Gerald Jablonski’s Cryptic Wit and Dave Sim’s glamourpuss and so on), and this is obviously essence-of-Byrne in some ways; on the other, I can’t help but wish that Byrne would go much deeper into whatever he’s skirting around here. Yes, all that euphemistic stuff got to me: he could either repress the crazy sex stuff so far that it bubbled up in interesting disguised ways, or express it outright, but this is irritatingly nudgy-winky. Even so, I’d be up for reading this as a trade: I don’t know that I need to immediately know what happens next, but I am interested in finding out where it’s eventually going.

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