Monologues for the Coming Plague [Paperback]

Anders Nilsen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 12, 2006

An original graphic novel from one of the most exciting young voices in comics.

Monologues for the Coming Plague is the longest and most ambitious work to date by Anders Nilsen, the talented young cartoonist who has appeared in a variety of prominent comics anthologies over the past few years as well as in his own self-published comic, Big Questions, and has emerged as one of the most critically acclaimed cartoonists of his generation.

In 2003 Nilsen went on a signing tour with several other artists for the book Kramer's Ergot 4. The enthusiasm of his fellow artists for drawing in their sketchbooks proved infectious, and he decided to employ the same spontaneous method for a finished book.

"I've always worked in sketchbooks," said Nilsen, but I had lost the habit and my way of working had become very slow and deliberate. While waiting in the airport in New York, after the tour, I found myself absorbed in a series of one panel gags about a woman feeding a bird, brainstorming captions and watching ideas follow."

Taking a cue from the school of Automatic Writing, an aesthetic mode championed by Andre Breton at the beginning of the 19th century that became the foundation of the Surrealist Movement, Nilsen began work on Monologues for the Coming Plague. The process is born out of a stream of consciousness followed by limited editing and rearranging.

The book ranges playfully from riffs on the gag cartoon to paranoid soliloquies of a surrealistic apocalypse, with references to contemporary politics, pop culture, and religion, plays on language, and sequential abstractions. Stories intertwine, branch off, dead end and double back. These are experimental, absurdist art comics, but the book is a page-turner, and some of it is laugh-out-loud funny. Reading it is not so much like reading comics as it is watching the artist make connections between ideas, find patterns, and set down the story as it happens. It's a tour de force, beautifully and uniquely packaged, in black and white and color, by one of the most fascinating new cartoonists of the decade.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The latest offering by the author of the award-winning Dogs and Water is a long series of drawings—almost scribbles—simple enough to be stuck on Post-it notes. Don't let this fool you; these almost-doodles make a deeply funny and moving book. Whether it's a scribble-headed guy spouting poetry or a woman having a conversation with the bird she's feeding, the short, goofy captions provide a spectrum of nuanced and subtle social commentary. Nilsen goes on quiet feet where few pundits go. Topics include terrorism, semiotics, the eight-fold path and Tide laundry detergent, the last two combined. "Nothing ever happens here, yet the impending cataclysm is always right around the corner," says scribble-head. Later he pulls a dinosaur from his pocket, which eventually dismembers him. The bird and the woman also contribute to the discourse, ending with her final "Do you want the terrorist to win?" Nilsen takes the banal catchphrases of contemporary culture and strings them together like a master DJ. Pushing back the boundaries of comic art a second time, the results are hilarious, whimsical and heartbreakingly real. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Nilsen's rite-of-passage parable Dogs and Water (2005) obtained its power and mystery from austerity: no panel frames, and characters rendered with just enough detail to avoid cartooniness. This book is sketchier; indeed, it consists of sketchbook extracts; the lion's share, from one sketchbook, appears on gray stock, the rest on white. The principal figures are abstract humans, a bird, a dog, and a dinosaur. Backdrops, when present, are vestigial. So are the plots. A bird and a woman tossing crumbs discuss their relationship. Two men, one of whose heads is drawn as a big scribble, talk about semiotics and travel to Pittsburgh. Regular-head and a dog talk about the former's job search. Scribble-head tells us about being exiled, it seems from heaven, then counsels regular-head to shoot the Buddha if he sees him on the road. Regular-head does, gets sent up, escapes, and wreaks vengeance. Back to scribble-head musing, and eventually to him counseling the regular-head some more. Piquantly reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's existential absurdist theater, Nilsen's work is not as sad, perhaps. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (July 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560977183
• ISBN-13: 978-1560977186
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,254,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Notes from a Sketchbook Artist, January 7, 2007

By 

K. Nishikawa (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Monologues for the Coming Plague (Paperback)

Anders Nilsen's spare artistry and stream-of-consciousness writing have earned him praise as an absurdist visionary in contemporary art comics. This collection doesn't disappoint, with its series of sketchbook drawings that portray the foibles of characters who struggle to find meaning in their everyday lives. The scenes featuring a woman feeding a bird are particularly poignant. And the section titled "Semiotics" manages to be smart-alecky without foreclosing sympathy for the two characters in dialogue.

I didn't care for the final fifth of the book, materially sectioned off as it is by the use of different stock paper. Don't get me wrong: the folks at Fantagraphics have done an amazing job designing this book, and it's a beautiful volume to have in one's collection. But encountering the different stock is something of a diversion, as it doesn't add a significant layer of literary or graphic meaning to the sketches at hand.

The other issue I have with this portion of the book is that one section, titled "The Mediocrity Principle," is a wee self-indulgent when it comes to the absurdist, existential themes that Nilsen likes to explore. Whereas previous sections muse on the "meaning" of everyday life in a spare, offhand manner, "The Mediocrity Principle" is disappointingly explicit in one character's stated desire to be "average." In reading this section, I wished Nilsen left his themes to the simple, awkward exchanges between the Semiotics characters.

Overall, though, this is a fine contribution to the growing absurdist comics tradition, of which Nilsen is no doubt a trailblazer.

2.0 out of 5 stars Belaboring the Necroequine., July 18, 2011

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Monologues for the Coming Plague (Paperback)

Anders Nilsen, <strong>Monologues for the Coming Plague</strong> (Fantagraphics Books, 2006)

I was fond enough of <em>Dogs and Water</em> (viz. 14Mar2009 review) to go looking for more of Anders Nilsen's work, and the title of this one intrigued me from the first time I saw it; one of the libraries in my system, all of which seem notoriously slow at getting things in, finally grabbed a copy last year, so I put it on hold and waited patiently until last week. What I can tell you after reading it: <em>Dogs and Water</em> it is not, by any means.

While Nilsen mentions in a brief afterword that he did rearrange a few things for the sake of continuity (of which there is a bit, but not much), it is inferred that this is simply excerpts from two sketchbooks, complete with markouts and the like. This does serve in that it seems to fit rather well with Nilsen's overarching existential crisis/semiotics theme, but could just as easily be dismissed as laziness, if you're so inclined. While there are some pieces here that make use of that theme (by far the best of these is "Pittsburgh", an <em>Our Town</em>-esque journey in which one character's head becomes the head of a different animal in each frame of the first two-thirds of the story, depending on how he's feeling and/or what he's doing), too much of the book seems to be just alternate takes on a single joke; there are long stretches containing the same woman-feeding-a-bird setup with variations (sometimes very slight) on a punchline. Two or three wouldn't have been out of place in <em>The New Yorker</em>, but the combined weight of seventy or so is a bit deleterious. For the completist only. **

5.0 out of 5 stars He's excavated the laugh nugget, September 30, 2007

By 

M. Salter "cryptomnesiest" (London, England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Monologues for the Coming Plague (Paperback)

Reading this book is like watching an artist have fun. These are from a sketchbook, I believe, and read fairly quickly. But I find myself laughing alone ALL THE TIME whenever I pick this up. If you want some fun, sardonic and surreal giggles, this is the one.

I believe the work could probably stand up to scrutiny and a fair amount of critical deconstruction... but it's not really about that for me. There's a certain honesty and play involved in this book, that I find myself reveling in that space between the artist's mind and the drawing on the page. Often it's a function of "jeez, how did he come up with this?" or "WHAT IS THAT??" And I love the surprise, and the shifts from competely surreal and non-referential free-association (seeming) cartoons to more complete thoughts that are actually carried out for a while. Both provide a different sort of satisfaction.

The drawings are crude, to be certain, but I don't know if it would work any other way. Again, Anders seems really keen to what a certain seen requires, and what can be left out, and almost always makes excellent choices. Favorite quote: "Great, great. Okay now meditate on the radiant eightfold waterway. I'll be back in a while. I have to meet some friends to watch the game."