Nilsen, Anders – Big Questions

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Big Questions

So a little bit of personal history is necessary here. I started reading Big Questions around when the first issue came out in the late 90’s. I liked it quite a bit, although it seemed to be mostly gag strips and birds having philosophical debates. I read the first 7 issues but lost track of it somewhere along the way. Reading back through my old reviews it’s clear that I was loving it, but hey, there are a lot of comic series out there and I only have so much money (meaning: very little). But then some stimulus money came around, I checked out the Drawn & Quarterly shop and hey look, a collected edition of this book came out almost a decade ago. Whoops! Well, a giant book of funny strips and random philosophical discussions could be fun, so I picked up the hardcover version. Revisiting this so much later, I have one main question to start: why isn’t this book in the pantheon of greatest books of the genre? I haven’t seen every top 100 list, granted, but I don’t recall seeing it on the ones that I did read, and after reading this, it seems like a glaring omission. Anders explained in his afterward that he did start off fairly meandering, but the story got clearer to him as he went along, and when he had the chance to put everything in its proper place here, he really nailed it. For the purposes of this review I’m going to assume that you missed this completely when it was around. If you read a few issues back in the day and are just curious if it ever came together: yes it did, and you should buy a copy toot sweet. For the newbies, this is the story of a few dozen birds, a grandmother living with her mentally challenged grandson, a snake, an owl, some dogs, a few crows, a crashed plane and the pilot. Oh, and Greek mythology, the underworld, destiny, free will, and faith. This books takes a little while to get going, and the pace is never frantic, outside of a few fight scenes (in the context of this book, since it’s fights among animals, they’re fights for their lives). If anything it’s closer to the few manga books that I’ve read in that there is no sense of a rush to tell the story. Anders mentions in another note that he takes a perverse pleasure in drawing the same panel over and over again with only slight changes every time, and he uses that to full effect here. The story in a nutshell, and I’m bound to miss a few things: a bird is searching for his missing mate after their tree is chopped down, a giant bird (what they don’t understand to be a plane) has come crashing down into a house, another group of birds has found a giant egg (what they don’t realize is a bomb), and the giant bird has also hatched a human (who they don’t understand is the pilot). Oh, and there’s the family in the woods. Some of these birds fixate on the giant egg, others on the grandson, and others on the felled giant bird, each doing their own thing. They interact throughout the book, try to convince the others of the wisdom of their particular course of action, and just generally try to get by. The art consistently improves throughout (and it amazing for the vast majority of it), the story is completely compelling (I’d recommend starting this when you have a couple of free hours, as you won’t want to put it down), and most of the characters get solid endings. Not necessarily happy, but the only endings they could have had, really. I feel like I missed a major piece of comics history in not reading this book until now, frankly. If you love comics, this is absolutely required reading.

$45 (softcover) $70 (hardcover)