Okay, I really hate reviewing books, but I also want to keep track of the good fiction and comics stuff I’ve read lately, so here:

	Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine Not my kind of story, not my kind of style, but a really well-executed, 100-page story. I think Tomine’s a terrific artist, and I love his sketchbooks and illustration work (his New Yorker covers are always great). This book deserves the attention it’s getting. Buy it on Amazon Adrian Tomine’s official site Tasteful PBS segment on the book Tomine on Fresh air — (listen to Terry Gross talk about speech balloons)
	The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd Went to see Chip Kidd talk a couple of weeks ago, so I read his first novel. It’s very funny and a quick read, and anybody who’s been through an art-school critique would appreciate the great classroom scenes. (Kidd modeled the fictional Winter Sorbeck off his own professor at Penn State, the graphic designer Lammy Sommese.) And since so much of the action takes place in the classroom, it sort of functions as a wacky introduction to graphic design. I recommend it. Buy it on Amazon
	Crickets #2 by Sammy Harkham This is a comic book. For $5, you get a bunch of stories, all of them pretty wild and pretty great. Sammy is one of my favorite cartoonists, and I’d been looking forward to this for a while. It didn’t disappoint. Buy it from Drawn + Quarterly Great review by Ken Parille
	Big Questions by Anders Nilsen I’ve been following this series for a while. I found #3 last week in a bargain bin at my local Half Price books—it’s amazing how much Nilsen has grown as an artist. I buy everything he makes, and so should everyone else. Buy from Drawn + Quarterly Anders’ blog Interview My review of Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
	The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch This is bathroom reading: most of the strips are the equivalent of a good dick joke. A good and hilarious dick joke. Buy it from Amazon Read the strip online

On inspiration:

[M]yths, fairy-tales and religious stories like the Bible…They are endlessly interpretable and adaptable. A bottomless source. They’re the template for pretty much all storytelling in the Western world. Whether by design or by stumbling onto them I think there is much to be gained from brushing up against them, borrowing, stealing, rewriting and quoting from them, whether subtly…or overtly…”

On not-knowing:

…when making comics is working, it really doesn’t feel like you are the one telling the story, it feels like the story already exists and you are just doing your best to get it down on paper. It’s like a very carefully attentive manufacturing process. So for the story to change would be like for someone who assembles calculators to start changing the calculators. They probably wouldn’t work.”

On art and religion:

All art comes from religion. From trying to understand and contend with the world.”

On the artist disguising himself in his work:

I’m happy to be back to my usual practice of heavily disguising my life in the stories I tell. Generally speaking, it’s still me in my other work, it’s just that I’m disguised as a bunch of little birds.”

Anders Nilsen - The Metabunker Interview pt. 4 of 4

Chris Ware’s Introduction to The Best American Comics 2007

…lately I find myself frequently torn between whether I’m really an artist or a writer. I was trained and educated as the former, encouraged into the world of paint-stained pants and a white-walled studio where wild, messy experiments precipitate the incubation of other visual ideas— though I’m just as happy to sit at a desk in clean trousers with a sharp pencil and work on a single story for four or five days in a quiet and deliberate manner. In short, I’m coming to believe that a cartoonist, unlike the general cliché, is almost—bear with me now—a sort of new species of creator, one who can lean just as easily toward a poetic, painterly, or writerly inclination, but one who thinks and expresses him- or herself primarily in pictures.

A lengthy interview with Anders Nilsen:

When I set out with a clear idea of what I want to do, it becomes super simplistic and neither illuminating to me nor the readers, so that doesn’t work. It sort of just happens by accident, really. I think it’s because I’m interested in these things, so when I draw the first panel, for me to draw the second panel it will have to have dealt with something. The biggest issue is how to get out of your own way, how to explore issues without forcing it, without forcing yourself to do it. If you do ten pages of comics that are just not interesting, you’ve just got to throw it away.

The Chicago Reader has an article on the amazing, enduring Anders Nilsen:

…just when doors started to open for Nilsen, he entered the most painful period of his life. Two years ago, at the age of 37, [his fiancee Cheryl] Weaver died after the sudden, devastating onset of Hodgkin’s disease. Afterward Nilsen buried himself in his work, creating two raw and intimate books dealing with her final days and his struggle to carry on without her, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow and The End. He was mourning, and he was doing it with more people paying attention to him than ever had before.

I buy everything of Nilsen’s I can get my hands on — his work makes me feel like everything I’ve done up until this point is silly, and it makes me want to go deeper, think bigger, work harder. I can’t recommend Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow enough.

This beautiful little book came out sometime around when Meg and I got married. It is a document of Anders Nilsen’s relationship with his fiance, Cheryl Weaver, who died of hodgkins lymphoma in 2005. It reads somewhat like a heartbreaking, full-color issue of FOUND magazine dedicated to a couple: there are scanned postcards, hand-written letters on notebook paper, ticket stubs, photographs, and of course, Nilsen’s wonderful comics.

For obvious (or not so obvious?) reasons, I stayed far away from this book until a good time had passed since our wedding. (It was difficult — until now, I’ve read every work of Nilsen’s as soon as I could get my hands on it. He is one of my favorites.) About a month ago, I read THE END, which is actually something of a sequel to DON’T GO. DON’T GO finally came in the mail today (yes, it arrived with the steaks), and I read it tonight in one sitting.

What to say about this book? What you say about all great books: as little as possible.

Buy it. Read it. It does what great art does best: makes you stop and look around. Makes you want to keep on living.

All day I had been thinking about Kurt Vonnegut, and after reading this book, I thought of a little something he asked of all of us: “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

From “On Whaling,” by Anders Nilsen, from MOME, Winter 2006

Nilsen goes on to outline his automatic writing exercise:

First, you need a clock. Then: get a notebook or about 40 to 60 pages of paper. Draw one of three things, an animal, a robot, or your mom’s boyfriend. Make it very simple. Stick figures are fine. Okay, now you have 60 seconds to think of something for it to say or do. When sixty seconds is up you have to turn the page and start on the next one. The next one is the next panel, and you only have 60 seconds to draw it, so think fast. If you can’t think of something for one panel, that’s okay. It’s just a pause in the action. You change every 60 seconds for an hour. When you are done you will be surprised.”

Sometimes I think it’s helpful to step back from the things you’re reading, the influences you’re absorbing, and have a look at what threads they have in common, and then try to figure out why they’re resonating with you and what it means. So much about life is timing, and sometimes things just magically gel together. Sometimes the link is really dumb and arbitrary, but ends up revealing something.

For instance, two of my favorite contemporary artists right now are both from the Midwest, work in short, almost sketchy forms, and are named some form of “Anders.”

ANDERS NILSEN writes/draws comics. His stuff appears in MOME, D+Q, and his own series, BIG IDEAS. He has a new book coming out, called MONOLOGUES FOR THE COMING PLAGUE. Here is a nice long interview with him, in which he says:

Why comics? I think when I went back to comics it was because, as a kid comics were the art form I identified with the most keenly. They say if you don’t know what to do with your life, try to remember what you loved most when you were twelve and do that.

When asked why so many cartoonists live in Chicago, he responded:

I really have no idea. It’s been suggested that comics may be in some way particularly suited to the Midwest, but I can’t quite recall the reasoning. Humility. A lot of time inside in the winter, might as well draw. The protestant work ethic. A distrust of/lack of entre into the bi-coastal Cultural Establishment. How do those sound? Comics is definitely not about impressing people. which I would say is a kind of midwestern characteristic. We tend to not be very impressive. All those skyscrapers downtown were built by East-coasters and Europeans.

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ANDER MONSON writes short stories and poems, teaches in Michigan, and edits THE DIAGRAM. His book of poems, VACATIONLAND, and his novel-in-short-stories, OTHER ELECTRICITIES, are about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he grew up. A great interview with him is here.
He has this to say about writing your home:

I can only think that the place in which you grow up has a significant effect on you. How can it not? Growing up in Michigan’s UP — with its history of boom and bust, of the rise and the fall of the mines, with its 6-month winters, and with the constant presence of tourism (the UP as a place in its way devoted to visitors, not to its residents) — has turned my work somehow. I’m interested in loneliness and in isolation, in the effects of living under extreme weather, and how those who choose to live there bear it. Of course they love it, or they wouldn’t live there (though many of them have no choice, have never gotten out). I’m gone from the place now, living ten hours away downstate, but even when I lived in Alabama, I thought of snow.

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