by Jared Gardner

Anders Nilsen is one of the more promising and adventurous young comics creators out there today. No question. His Dogs and Water (a selection of which was reprinted in Harvey Pekar’s Best of American Comics) is a moving and abstract meditation on landscape, love and travel from a compulsive traveler who has himself had many misadventures on the road (although none so apocalyptic as those described in Dogs). Monologues for the Coming Plague is a series of surrealist exchanges between scribbled-headed people, nasty pigeons and whatever else made sense to Nilsen at the moment. In both cases, Nilsen demonstrated an affinity toward an approach to graphic narrative that put extreme pressure on our expectations of both “graphic” and “narrative”—offering hope for a medium that is hovering dangerously on the verge of mainlining the insatiable book-club appetites for memoirs of personal disasters and self-discovery. And then the world fell apart for Anders Nilsen, as it usually does, in the blink of an eye.

In early 2005, his partner, Cheryl Weaver, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. By year’s end, she was dead. Suddenly absurdist dialogues over semiotics or symbolic adventures in virtual landscapes seemed irrelevant, irreverent, and impossible to continue. And so for the past year, Nilsen has been turning inward, exploring the nature of his own loss and grief. But not surprisingly, his turns to the autobiographical and the personal have not led him down the same paths as the flock of graphic memoirists who have so dominated literary comics for the past several years. Even in the depths of his mourning, Nilsen’s work remains iconoclastic. But the nature of mourning, it seems, is such that it inevitably remains incommunicative and necessarily solipsistic.

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow is something closer to a graphic scrapbook than a comic. It pulls together a range of documents from Nilsen and Weaver’s love and loss, including letters, postcards, sketches, and snapshots. We get a deeply personal look into some pieces of their life together and the experience of Cheryl’s dying. Indeed, it is so personal—so specific—that it is not an easy text to connect with. The experience of reading it is a guilty one, as if one is reading someone else’s love letters or, more appropriately for the case at hand, crashing a funeral. The panels that recount the first-person experience of Nilsen consigning Cheryl’s ashes to the water is incredibly beautiful, but even here the reader cannot help but feel like an outsider, a spectator, a rubbernecker. The letters and postcards keep us in many ways further away, as if Nilsen used this most personal of forms and experiences not as an invitation to the reader to share but as armor to keep his readers as far away as possible.

This sounds counterintuitive until one thinks further about the nature of the graphic narrative form and the properties that have made it so especially powerful for autobiography and memoir in recent years. As Scott McCloud and others have argued persuasively, the comic form has the unique ability to be both intensely personal and to open up space (in the iconic nature of the images and in the closure the gutter requires of the reader) for the reader to insert her own personal experience and meanings. What makes Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow so ultimately resistant to the reader is that there is nothing iconic about the images, and the idea of intruding one’s own personal experiences on this intimate shrine seems decidedly unreasonable. As a model of how love and death are for each and all of us always-already interdependent, Don’t Go is a moving monument. But it is as a monument and not as a book that Don’t Go does its work.

Now Nilsen has begun a series for Ignort’s Ignatz series, published in this country by Fantagraphics. The first issue of The End is about what comes next—about the daily grief left after the funeral, after the friends have moved on, after it is no longer socially acceptable to cry in public, after the publishers have started inquiring, gently at first, about new projects, deadlines. “The first issue of The End”: one cannot help but enjoy the telling irony of a serial comic that is at once about endings and about new beginnings. And the title itself, or all the sadness at the core of the book, promises that the black comedy at the heart of Nilsen’s work is still with us.

The book alternates between difficult conversations and transformations of iconic figures—one perhaps representing the author before his loss and the other representing him transformed by death, challenging fractals and mazes, and whimsical sketches and comics of life after death. Perhaps the most moving is a sequence entitled “Since You’ve Been Gone I Can Do Whatever I Want, All the Time,” which describes Nilsen celebrating his new freedom by crying on the couch, lying on the kitchen floor, making dinner for one. But the book as a whole, for all of its refusal to let grief go gently into that good night, is a hopeful one about the new and fantastic shapes life can take after it has been mangled and twisted by death. And one cannot help but believe that as The End continues to chart this journey, the shape of things to come will be unbearably beautiful indeed.