Review: Monologues for the Coming Plague

Monologues for the Coming Plague
Written and Drawn by Anders Nilsen
Published by Fantagraphics Books. $18.95 USD

I was really surprised to open this book up and find not Nilsen's usual painstaking art but a couple hundred pages of very simple strips, often with just a couple sketchily drawn guys talking. Sometimes the guy had a squiggly blur of ink for a head, sometimes he wasn't a guy at all but a pigeon. It's apparently a couple of sketchbooks' worth of material, which makes it all the more impressive how well it all hangs together. Nilsen is loose here but the cumulative effect of his long stretches of deadpan exchanges matched with absurdly shifting visuals is very rewarding. A woman asking the pigeon she's feeding if those are Bugle Boys he's wearing isn't funny on its own, but when it's preceded by 20 completely different punchlines in as many almost identically drawn strips, it's intoxicating. Nilsen bends the reader to his will with skill but no malice or higher point to make, aside from just the general ridiculousness of life, the human comedy. The characters here, who reappear at surprising times, are all grasping for something, be it a happy relationship or escape or enlightenment, and the humor--so close to tragedy--is that no one really gets there. The very title of the book is lofty and reminiscent of another great absurdist, Samuel Beckett, but Nilsen is a lot more laughs.