Tongues

In the remotest reaches of Central Asia a minor god is chained to a mountainside. Tongues follows his friendship with the eagle who comes everyday to eat his liver, a young girl on an errand of murder and a young man with a teddy bear strapped to his back lost in a wilderness and heading to a crossroads.  

Set in a version of modern Central Asia, Tongues is a retelling of the Greek myth of Prometheus. It follows the captive god’s friendship with the eagle who carries out his daily sentence of torture, and chronicles his pursuit of revenge on the god that has imprisoned him. Prometheus’ story is entwined with that of an East African orphan on an errand of murder, and a young man with a teddy bear strapped to his back, wandering aimlessly into catastrophe (a character readers may recognize from Nilsen’s Dogs and Water). The story is set against the backdrop of tensions between rival groups in an oil-rich wilderness.

Tongues is loosely based on a trilogy by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, of which two plays are lost and only dimly reconstructed by historians. Key to the story of Tongues is Prometheus’ role as creator and protector of humanity. In flashbacks and in Prometheus’ conversations with the eagle and others, the book will touch on humanity’s deep evolutionary past and its complicated prospects for a future. Tongues is both adventure story and meditation on human nature in our present fraught historical moment.

Tongues will be serialized in large-format full-color comics and self-published over the next few years by the artist himself, making it his most ambitious work to date. Issues 1-6 + supplement are collected in Vol 1 here or in individual chapter form here. Chapters 7 through 10 will be released individually before compiling into a Vol 2.

Upon the series’ completion collected editions will be published in the U.S. by Pantheon Books and in the U.K. by Jonathan Cape.

 

$18.00

Tongues 5
Tongues 5
$18.00

Tongues’ fifth chapter has arrived! The packed, 56-page issue is framed by an extended, contentious, three-part conversation between the Prisoner and a certain Unexpected Visitor about the fate of the world. Their talk takes us back into the ancient past and then ends explosively, altering both parties' prospects and the course of the story generally. In between, we go underground with Astrid, witnessing an encounter with an adversary, and Teddy Roosevelt and Nico have a rendezvous in the desert that ends… badly. A few other small beginnings and endings are folded in as well, one of which floats us slowly to distant corners of the earth. We can't say much more than that without spoiling things. There's some good stuff here.

Subscribers are first in line and will receive a special, limited edition print with their copy.

“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. 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.”
— Leonard Pierce, The Comics Journal
“Nilsen works hard to ground his story in our seemingly endless war-torn historical moment — and how could you restage stories from Greek myth and not write about war? — but his most vivid images are those I’ve never seen depicted in any medium. ”
— Sam Thielman, The New York Times
“We live in a fallen world, but perhaps we can take some comfort in the knowledge that that’s nothing new. Millennia ago, Aeschylus wrote of humanity’s inherent fallibility and venality, and today, the brilliant Anders Nilsen is bringing us a rendition of three of the Greek tragedian’s tales in one utterly gorgeous comic. ”
— Abraham Riesman, Vulture