TONGUES: Volume 1, by Anders Nilsen
I’ve been getting TONGUES (Pantheon, 368 pp., $35), a retelling of the Greek myth of Prometheus, in the mail for years now. The artist Anders Nilsen serializes it and self-publishes each chapter, which arrive in big envelopes that often include little zines of Nilsen’s sketches and notes that illustrate his process, like prizes in a box of Cracker Jack. As fun as that is, it’s a relief to have the story so far available in a single codex so that I can give my poor back issues a breather.
I find that the story’s least familiar moments are the ones I wish I could fold up and carry with me in my pocket. Nilsen works hard to ground his story in our seemingly endless war-torn historical moment — and how could you restage stories from Greek myth and not write about war? — but his most vivid images are those I’ve never seen depicted in any medium. They emerge unexpectedly, in much the same way a giant, beautiful seedpod emerges from the ruined throat of a dead soldier while his comrades bicker about what to do with his corpse.
It’s in contrasts like this one that Nilsen guides us into truly uncharted territory, somewhere between the simultaneous boredom and tension of all-too-familiar life during war and the sudden awesome appearance of Gyges, one of the Hechitonchiraes (literally “the hundred-handed ones”).
The hapless mortals in “Tongues” are shunted into and out of danger by a scheming, shapeshifting god called Z and his minions, while Z’s uncle, called the Prisoner, looks down at them from the mountaintop where he lies chained and tries to comprehend the intricacies of contemporary life. In this, he has the help of his dearest friend, the eagle who eats his liver every day.
The names have been tinkered with slightly, but the dramatis personae are obviously the Greek pantheon, with much of their pettiness and vanity intact in Nilsen’s new setting, an anonymous West Asian country. There, Z is amassing a cult of his own militant worshipers for mysterious and almost certainly nefarious purposes. Z fears only one thing: an assassin employed by Athena. She turns out to be a little girl named Astrid, who is kidnapped by cultists during a terrorist attack and then recruited by the gods.
In Nilsen’s revision of ancient myth, the prisoner — Prometheus — is being punished for giving humankind not literal fire, but language. His brother, Epimetheus, visits his prison and berates him for letting humankind run riot, and the pair have a long argument about the relative merits of destroying human beings before we destroy everyone else. Eventually, it becomes clear that this isn’t a dry debate: Epimetheus has already weighed humanity in the balance and found us wanting.
Nilsen needs quite a few different tools to handle all the threads of his gigantic story. Some of his action sequences are ripped from the headlines, such as when he draws an armed assault on a mall that seems to deliberately recall the 2013 Shabab attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi, with one character falling out of the panel grid to his death. When Astrid bravely fights a pair of balaclava’d soldiers in the desert, Nilsen uses a more conventional grid and keeps his backgrounds static, and her movement is easier to track, like the hero of a fistfight in a Tintin comic.
“Tongues” may be action-packed, but it is also about comics and the plastic nature of their language. In one petal-like arrangement of panels, Nilsen draws Prometheus creating an image of Zeus in swan form in the palm of his hand and then burning the image — it seems to take only a few moments. A few chapters later, he uses a denser layout with a similar structure to show the passage of more than 2,000 years in the dynasty of the eagle family, from 1006 B.C.E. until 1942. I can’t remember reading a comic book that shifted so smoothly between so many radically different kinds of expression, or one that made such diverse use of each one.
It’s those imaginative machinations that leave his characters, too, without adequate words. And that failure is more familiar than learned debate, however urgent. It’s comforting to imagine that the gods and their servants might be as overmatched by circumstances as I am.
“How you end up here?” a suspicious soldier asks a blond, callow American, who has been turned into a hardcore conspiracy theory-loving cultist by Z’s charismatic presence on the internet. “YouTube, basically,” answers the younger dude.
Yeah, man. I get it.
TONGUES: Volume 1 | Anders Nilsen | Pantheon | 368 pp. | $35
The post A Stunning, Hallucinatory Retelling of Greek Myth appeared first on New York Times.
