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”, “The End”, and “Rage of Poseidon”.
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.
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. The collected version of “Big Questions” was nominated at Angoulême International Festival in 2013, and won many prizes and recognitions. Quite recently, he did published a small pamphlet who points the finger at Amazon, and which makes an refreshing and smart hyphen between the reader and the author. A nice move, who gives another point of view on how involvement could (also) look like. And even more recenlty, he offers us some brand serie called “Tongues”, that you clearly don’t wanna miss.
(Thanks also to Les Éditions Atrabile for this sweeeeeet partneship to get Anders Nilsen with us during both PFC#6 and the Festival International de bande dessinée d’Angoulême)
Online : andersbrekhusnilsen.com
Bibliography :
• Tongues #2 (2018, self-published)
• Tongues #1 (2017, self-published)
• A walk in Eden (2016, Drawn and Quarterly)
• Poetry is useless (2015, Drawn and Quarterly)
• Conversation Gardening (2014, self-published)
• God and the Devil at War in the Garden (2014, self-published)
• Rage of Poseidon (2013, Drawn and Quarterly)
• Big Questions HC (2011, Drawn and Quarterly)
• The end (2007, Fantagraphics/Coconino press)
• Big questions#1-11 (1999-2008, Drawn and quarterly)
• Monologues for the Coming Plague (2006, Fantagraphics)
• Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes (2009, Fantagraphics)
• Don’t go where I can’t follow (2006, Drawn and quarterly)
• Dogs and water (2004, Drawn and Quarterly)
• The ballad of the two headed boy (2000, Airplane Books)
Collectives/zines/anthologies :
• PFC5 (2015, ChiFouMi)
• ChiFouMi & Cie (2014, ChiFouMi)
• Kramer’s ergot#4, 7 (2003-2008, Ginko press, Buenaventura press)
• Mome#1-7 (2005-2007, Fantagraphics)
• Bile Noire, spécial 10 ans (2007, Atrabile)
• Canicola #4 (2006, Canicola)
