Why am I passionate about this?

When I was a kid in the 80s the superhero comics I was obsessed with were beginning to deal with the real world in a new way. And their creators were beginning to push and pull at the boundaries of the medium with a new spirit of play and provocation. I still love comics that seriously deal with real life – its complexities and its profound weirdness – and that push the medium in new directions and reckon with its history. I also want to be absorbed and moved and to identify intently with characters. It’s what I try to do in my own work, and what I look for in that of others.


I wrote

Big Questions

By Anders Nilsen,

Book cover of Big Questions

What is my book about?

A haunting postmodern fable, Big Questions is Anders Nilsen’ magnum opus. This beautiful minimalist story is the culmination of ten…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of One! Hundred! Demons!

Anders Nilsen Why did I love this book?

Everything Lynda Barry touches is earthy human gold.

One! Hundred! Demons! is one part memoir of a difficult childhood, one part comics how-to, and six parts warmth and humor and unruly red hair. It isn’t quite as dark as some of her other work, though it certainly gestures in that direction at times.

It also exemplifies Barry’s knack for finding beauty and delight inside the most difficult, unfair garbage life can throw at you. Such a great book.

By Lynda Barry,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked One! Hundred! Demons! as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Inspired by a 16th-century Zen monk s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full colour vignettes. In Barry s hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you and stay with you: your worst boyfriend; kickball games on a warm summer night; watching your baby brother dance; the smell of various houses in the neighbourhood you grew up in; or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager. As a cartoonist, Lynda…


Book cover of Ed the Happy Clown

Anders Nilsen Why did I love this book?

This book is, to me, one of the true weird masterpieces of human imagination.

It is one of the things that made me want to make comics in the first place, that expanded my idea of what comics and storytelling could do. It’s deeply weird, extremely unsettling, dark, funny, and, at times, a little offensive. And it is unlike anything you will ever read anywhere else for the rest of your life.

One of its delights is how clear it is at the beginning that the author didn’t know what he was getting into when he started. He just followed his imagination, trusting completely, and ended up with something grand and unique. And none of his work after this is anything like it. Which is probably for the best.

By Chester Brown,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Ed the Happy Clown as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A LONG-OUT-OF-PRINT CLASIC BY A MASTER OF UNDERGROUND COMICS

In the late 1980s, the idiosyncratic Chester Brown (author of the muchlauded Paying for It and Louis Riel) began writing the cult classic comic book series Yummy Fur. Within its pages, he serialized the groundbreaking Ed the Happy Clown, revealing a macabre universe of parallel dimensions. Thanks to its wholly original yet disturbing story lines, Ed set the stage for Brown to become a world-renowned cartoonist.

Ed the Happy Clown is a hallucinatory tale that functions simultaneously as a dark roller-coaster ride of criminal activity and a scathing condemnation of religious…


Book cover of Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq

Anders Nilsen Why did I love this book?

This is a book about deep listening. It follows two childhood friends – a journalist and a former American soldier – on a kind of road trip through Turkey, Syria and Iraq in the close aftermath of the U.S. war there.

We watch them wrestle over the meaning of the conflict and their places in it. It’s reportage – the author is a third friend, following along, chronicling their conversation and laying out their arguments, blind spots and occasionally questionable reasoning as they try and deal with something almost too big and complicated to get a handle on.

The characters are not generals, or presidents, or militia leaders, they are just two old friends, trying to reckon with a war on a very human scale. Also the watercolored art is gorgeous.

By Sarah Glidden,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Rolling Blackouts as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Cartoonist Sarah Glidden follows up her acclaimed debut, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, with Rolling Black- outs, which details her two-month long journey through Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Glidden accompanies her two friends reporters and founders of the journalistic non-profit the Seattle Globalist as they research stories on the Iraq War s effect on the Middle East and, specifically, the war s refugees. Joining them is a former Marine and childhood friend of one of the journalists whose deployment to Iraq in 2007 adds an unexpected and sometimes unwelcome viewpoint, both to the people they come…


Book cover of Tintin in Tibet

Anders Nilsen Why did I love this book?

I have probably read this book more than twenty times. Maybe thirty. Maybe more.

I was six or seven the first time I read it and in my mid-forties the last time. And it has only gotten richer and more profound to me in that time. On the surface it is, like any other Tintin book, a children’s adventure comic, and if that’s all you want it’s a brilliant example of the genre.

Funny, exquisitely drawn, a cliffhanger on every page. But you don’t have to dig very far below the surface to find a deep, complicated meditation on friendship and loyalty, on determination in the face of doubt and adversity, and on discovering that the world is more mysterious and remarkable than we are accustomed to think. 

By Herge,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Tintin in Tibet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 10, 11, 12, and 13.

What is this book about?

The classic graphic novel. One day Tintin reads about a plane crash in the Himalayas. When he discovers thathis friend, Chang, was on board, Tintin travels to the crash site in hopes of a rescue.


Book cover of Here

Anders Nilsen Why did I love this book?

This is the most profoundly absorbing experimental art-comic the world has ever produced.

It’s a fun book to sit with someone else and page through, backward or forward, or just ambling around, discovering things. The very simple conceit is that it’s a book that spans millions of years in time, but all happens in exactly one single space. It grew out of a six-page short story that blew people’s minds in the 80’s comics anthology Raw.

I remember hearing that the author had decided, two decades later, to expand it to book form, and wondered if that was really necessary. The short version had been such a perfect jewel of a piece. Turns out he had very good reason. 

By Richard McGuire,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Here as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From one of the great comic innovators, the long-awaited fulfillment of a pioneering comic vision. Richard McGuire’s Here is the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.

"In Here McGuire has introduced a third dimension to the flat page. He can poke holes in the space-time continuum simply by imposing frames that act as trans­temporal windows into the larger frame that stands for the provisional now. Here is the ­comic-book equivalent of a scientific breakthrough. It is also a lovely evocation…


Explore my book 😀

Big Questions

By Anders Nilsen,

Book cover of Big Questions

What is my book about?

A haunting postmodern fable, Big Questions is Anders Nilsen’ magnum opus. This beautiful minimalist story is the culmination of ten years and more than six hundred pages of work that details the metaphysical quandaries of the human and avian occupants of an endless plain, existing somewhere between a dream and an eastern European steppe. A group of birds argue over whether a downed plane is a giant bird and the unexploded bomb that came from it is some sort of great egg. And their interaction with the two sole humans in the area lead to equally fraught questions.

Book cover of One! Hundred! Demons!
Book cover of Ed the Happy Clown
Book cover of Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq

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Book cover of Love Love TV

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Tibet 50 books
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