Tongues, Vol. 1

Comics writers have said "superhero books are our modern myths" so often that doing so should result in, at the very least, a heavy fine and widespread censure. You know what still work perfectly well as modern myths? Ancient myths! We aren’t any smarter than the Greeks and Romans who saw in the petty disputes and monstrous punishment of their deities a reflection of the cruelty and caprice of their own countrymen, but we aren’t any dumber than they were either and don’t need to stick people in Spandex tactical outfits and shoot lightning at each other to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the present age.

Enter Anders Nilsen, the celebrated cartoonist who has already racked up Ignatz wins for Dogs and Water, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, and the outstanding Big Questions. Tongues, Vol. 1 collects the first six issues of his phenomenal and barrier-pushing series in which a thinly veiled Prometheus (here called “the Prisoner,” in an echo of another pop culture achievement the book resembles in more than a few ways) overseeing a fallen mankind not as a haughty superior curious about how humanity has used his hard-granted gift, but as a weary observer of men and women who have achieve godliness only in their venality and mystery.

If it has become trite to say that a work of art has managed to re-invent an old sort of storytelling in a way that makes it immediately and powerfully relevant to the current moment, the daring and confident way in which Nilsen revives the framework of these old myths to shine a dizzying light on the wandering and seeking of humanity thousands of years along dispels the stink of mere nervous influence. There is nothing in his dialogue or settings that rests on the laurels of anyone’s previous efforts, and even in a field that contains examples of similar approaches, from Miracleman to Bacchus, Tongues arrives with a boom, and unfolds with a steady but sprawling impact that makes it instantly identifiable as a whole new construction, not merely a new wing of an old mansion.

High on a mountaintop, somewhere in the western part of Asia, the Prisoner rests. His life is uneventful, his peers long gone, his time marked only by the daily savage violence inflicted on him by an eagle who rips out his liver (that the tormenter is trapped in the same cycle as his victim is shrewdly made clear in Nilsen’s subtle storytelling). War is coming, and the details of who is visiting hell on whom is neither explicit nor particularly important.

Other figures wander the wasted terrain: Nikolai, a Russian mercenary; an American kid named Teddy Roosevelt;  and a young girl named Astrid who is, like the others, on a death trip with an unclear destination. The narrative is oblique but never opaque, and every bit of conversation – between humans and nonhumans, between people who understand their fate (or think they do) and people too damaged or burned out to care, and between animals and the natural world – unspools new mysteries while still providing ambiguous light on the old ones.

There is so much happening in Tongues that cataloguing it all seems like an exercise in futility. But it never seems like too much; it’s not a cluttered event comic and it’s not an exercise in deliberate artsy obscurity. Nilsen lets the events of the story unfold at their own pace – and shockingly for a book so lengthy and jam-packed at over 350 pages, none of which are superfluous. It results in an absolute page-turner that will keep you up late into the night, simultaneously blown away by the book’s deft and sophisticated thematic and metaphorical excellence and its compelling elements.

Those elements are a lot more far-ranging than it might seem given the deliberately non-specific way in which the book unfolds. It is simple enough, early on, to detect its foundations in Mediterranean myth, but it slowly unspools itself into much more arcane sorts of mysticism of both the Eastern and Western varieties. There's a religious awe and wonder that is as easy to associate with Islam or Hinduism as it is Christianity, and a psychedelic – please forgive me for saying shamanic, but it’s the only word that really delivers the sense of it – tonal quality that evokes the feeling of a drug trip that is part of a ritual or a revelation than a mere recreation (though it’s often drily and absurdly funny as well). Tongues is about language – what isn’t? – but a language that was never really the sole property of humans, handed to us by the gods, and disseminated to the beasts and the spirits of nature. And everywhere we find it in the story, it’s important.

I normally don’t wait until this long in a review to mention the visual elements of a graphic novel, but believe me when I tell you it’s what needs to close this review out. Tongues is flat-out stunning work. It elevates the medium on every page, and the audacious formal qualities are on full display on every connected page and interlocking panel. Nilsen is not without precedent as a cartoonist; one can see bits and piece of Adrian Tomine in his work, as well as James Sturm. And I don’t think our own Edwin Turner is wrong to locate it adjacent to P. Craig Russell in its layout and color. It is also clearly influenced, given Nilsen’s history as a painter, by a number of late-20th-century painters. But the overall feel of the art is so specific, and so specifically in tune with the writing and the flow of the book, that it arrives like a swooping eagle: you may have known it was there, but you never saw it coming.

Tongues is not over. Its curious and chilling ending tells us as much, as does the more obvious clue in the title that this is the first volume. The collection, majestic as it is, is part of a far more epic story that has yet to conclude. But it arrives in the new year like a thunderclap, and if, by choice or circumstance or the caprices of fate that saturate its pages, this turns out to be the last of it, well, an unfinished masterpiece is better than none at all.

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