Nov 14, 2011
This week: Richard and Duncan talk with Anders Nilsen.
Anders Nilsen was born in northern New Hampshire in 1973. He
grew up splitting his time between the mountains of New England and
the streets and parks of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was weaned on a
steady diet of comics, stories and art, from Tintin and the X-Men
to Raw, Weirdo, punk rock, zines, graffiti and regular trips to art
museums.
Nilsen studied painting and installation art at the University of
New Mexico in Albuquerque, also making comics and zines mostly
outside class. In 1999 he started photocopying strips from his
sketchbooks, self-publishing them as Big Questions #1 and #2. That
same year he moved to Chicago to do graduate work at the School of
the Art Institute. In 2000 he turned an artists book he’d done in
undergrad into his first properly printed book, The Ballad of the
Two Headed Boy, with a grant from the Xeric Foundation. The same
year he took advantage of an offset lithography class at the Art
Institute to print the third issue of Big Questions, with all
original material. In 2000 he dropped out of graduate school to do
comics on his own. He received grants from Chicago’s Department of
Cultural Affairs to publish the next three issues of Big
Questions.
Anders’ comics have been translated into a number of languages. He
has exhibited his drawing and painting internationally and had his
work anthologized in Kramer’s Ergot, Mome, The Yale Anthology of
Graphic Fiction, Best American Comics and Best American
Non-Required Reading, as well as The Believer, the Chicago Reader
and elsewhere. Other titles by Nilsen include Dogs And Water, Don’t
Go Where I Can’t Follow, Monologues for the Coming Plague,
Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes, and The End
#1.
Nilsen keeps a blog at themonologuist.blogspot.com where he posts
occasional new work, and a website with examples of past work and
various illustration he’s done at andersbrekhusnilsen.com.
He currently lives with his cat in Chicago, Il.
Anders Nilsen also received Ignatz Nominations for Outstanding
Artist for Big Questions #7 & #8, Outstanding Series (Big
Questions), and Outstanding Comic (Big Questions #7) at the 2006
Small Press Expo. Dogs and Water won an Ignatz for Outstanding
Story in 2005, and his graphic memoir Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
won an Ignatz for Outstanding Graphic Novel in 2007.