Big Questions, An Interview with Anders Nilsen
KA: I'm very interested in how comic artists divide up their time between writing and drawing. I imagine a good number of stories come out of a drawing and vice versa, but I'm curious how much you consider yourself a writer versus a visual artist?
Anders Nilsen: When I started Big Questions I very much thought of the stories as growing out of the images. I would get an image in my head, draw it, and then be left with the task of connecting it to another with a story.
As time has gone on, though, the story has become a little more important. They are still image driven stories, but I have found it hugely more efficient (more fun, slightly less labor) if I do some scripting and/or thumbnailing before I start the drawings. Also, just becoming more comfortable with telling stories, I've started thinking in plot terms as much as images.
KA: What were the germinations of this story involving birds, snakes, the 'slow' fellow, and an airplane crash? Why did you decide on the perspective of (mostly) animals?
Anders Nilsen: The main elements of the story actually came out of an automatic writing style exercise I did my last year of college at the D.H. Lawrence ranch in New Mexico. We did a drawing a minute for an hour. I came up with the birds, the plane crash and the lost pilot. I soon adopted the birds and started doing the strips that comprise the first two Big Questions, mostly little gag strips, all involving these birds in a field, eating seeds. Which made me eventually ask the question "where are the seeds coming from" which led to the grandmother and the idiot ("the 'slow' fellow").
Other parts come from all kinds of sources. There was a June of 44 song called 'Sanctioned in a Birdcage' that gave me the image of a bird coming back to his nest to find his whole tree missing. I don't know why the birds hold the point of view. They were talkative before the story evolved to include humans. I suppose the humans are, from their point of view, not understandable. Certainly not their speech. So they just watch. The birds are a great vehicle, in part because they are so very simple to draw. They are blank slates on which I can get the reader to project all kinds of things. It's a lot harder to do that with the kinds of vaguely realistic human faces I draw.
KA: The ability of the reader to project onto characters and drawings in comics is one of my favorite aspects of the medium, so it's interesting that you think the effect is stronger for your animal characters. Is this why the idiot doesn't speak?
Anders Nilsen: Yeah, partly. He's definitely a kind of 'blank slate' character. I actually think of him as part of, and a reaction against, a certain kind of typical comic book archetype: the passive child-man who is the recipient of activity, generally getting dumped on and screwed over, but almost never taking any kind of decisive action himself. Charlie Brown, Ed the Happy Clown, Jimmy Corrigan, Gregory, Peter Parker, Clark Kent, etc. I'm still puzzling out how things will go with the idiot, but I think of him as embodying that character type, but messing with it as well - in a way, he is the most powerful character in the story, because he doesn't care what happens. Nothing affects him. He's fascinated by everything. At times I feel like that, like that's my best self in a way. At the moment, not so much. I think his fascination with the world is something people seem to...not identify with, maybe, but enjoy...through him.
KA:Big Questions also has a weighty philosophical overtone to it, especially for a comic. Do you consider yourself a student of philosophy as such, and are there specific thinkers who have influenced the storyline of Big Questions?
Anders Nilsen: I'm a student of philosophy in a pretty loose, haphazard way. I listen to a lot of audiobooks while I draw (when I'm not doing any scripting or plotting) and I'm just interested. I've listened to some things on the history of thought and philosophy in the west, especially the enlightenment and some about the existentialists and the early history and disputes of Christianity. I'm especially interested in theology and how people make meaning out of their experience of the world, how they interpret their experience. Which is essentially what Big Questions is about: the birds seeing things happening and trying to figure out what it means and how to react. And everyone getting it differently, mostly wrong, as we all do. I named one character after Pierre Bayle, a pacifist theologian in the wars over the reformation and the most widely read author of his time. He's pretty great. Nietsche, Meister Eckhart - a german mystic monk, Johannes Kepler, Philo - a character in one of David Hume's dialogues...
Anders Nilsen: When I started Big Questions I very much thought of the stories as growing out of the images. I would get an image in my head, draw it, and then be left with the task of connecting it to another with a story.
As time has gone on, though, the story has become a little more important. They are still image driven stories, but I have found it hugely more efficient (more fun, slightly less labor) if I do some scripting and/or thumbnailing before I start the drawings. Also, just becoming more comfortable with telling stories, I've started thinking in plot terms as much as images.
KA: What were the germinations of this story involving birds, snakes, the 'slow' fellow, and an airplane crash? Why did you decide on the perspective of (mostly) animals?
Anders Nilsen: The main elements of the story actually came out of an automatic writing style exercise I did my last year of college at the D.H. Lawrence ranch in New Mexico. We did a drawing a minute for an hour. I came up with the birds, the plane crash and the lost pilot. I soon adopted the birds and started doing the strips that comprise the first two Big Questions, mostly little gag strips, all involving these birds in a field, eating seeds. Which made me eventually ask the question "where are the seeds coming from" which led to the grandmother and the idiot ("the 'slow' fellow").
Other parts come from all kinds of sources. There was a June of 44 song called 'Sanctioned in a Birdcage' that gave me the image of a bird coming back to his nest to find his whole tree missing. I don't know why the birds hold the point of view. They were talkative before the story evolved to include humans. I suppose the humans are, from their point of view, not understandable. Certainly not their speech. So they just watch. The birds are a great vehicle, in part because they are so very simple to draw. They are blank slates on which I can get the reader to project all kinds of things. It's a lot harder to do that with the kinds of vaguely realistic human faces I draw.
KA: The ability of the reader to project onto characters and drawings in comics is one of my favorite aspects of the medium, so it's interesting that you think the effect is stronger for your animal characters. Is this why the idiot doesn't speak?
Anders Nilsen: Yeah, partly. He's definitely a kind of 'blank slate' character. I actually think of him as part of, and a reaction against, a certain kind of typical comic book archetype: the passive child-man who is the recipient of activity, generally getting dumped on and screwed over, but almost never taking any kind of decisive action himself. Charlie Brown, Ed the Happy Clown, Jimmy Corrigan, Gregory, Peter Parker, Clark Kent, etc. I'm still puzzling out how things will go with the idiot, but I think of him as embodying that character type, but messing with it as well - in a way, he is the most powerful character in the story, because he doesn't care what happens. Nothing affects him. He's fascinated by everything. At times I feel like that, like that's my best self in a way. At the moment, not so much. I think his fascination with the world is something people seem to...not identify with, maybe, but enjoy...through him.
KA:Big Questions also has a weighty philosophical overtone to it, especially for a comic. Do you consider yourself a student of philosophy as such, and are there specific thinkers who have influenced the storyline of Big Questions?
Anders Nilsen: I'm a student of philosophy in a pretty loose, haphazard way. I listen to a lot of audiobooks while I draw (when I'm not doing any scripting or plotting) and I'm just interested. I've listened to some things on the history of thought and philosophy in the west, especially the enlightenment and some about the existentialists and the early history and disputes of Christianity. I'm especially interested in theology and how people make meaning out of their experience of the world, how they interpret their experience. Which is essentially what Big Questions is about: the birds seeing things happening and trying to figure out what it means and how to react. And everyone getting it differently, mostly wrong, as we all do. I named one character after Pierre Bayle, a pacifist theologian in the wars over the reformation and the most widely read author of his time. He's pretty great. Nietsche, Meister Eckhart - a german mystic monk, Johannes Kepler, Philo - a character in one of David Hume's dialogues...
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