Dogs and Water

Comics are often compared to movies, which is reasonable. Among other things, they often suffer from a main fault of many movies: while the story may be interesting, or the visual style interesting, it is very rare to find an artist or moviemaker with an innovative visual style that fits an innovative story.

Honestly, I’m not sure I have any idea what’s going on in Anders Nilsen’s Dogs and Water. The protagonist wanders around with his teddy bear in what appears to be a no-man’s-land in a war zone (possibly Afghanistan), running with wild dogs from time to time, and dreaming about being adrift in a lifeboat without a paddle. (Either that, or he’s adrift in a lifeboat and hallucinating about wandering through a war zone.) The human figures, deer, and dogs are very simply drawn and set in flat, featureless landscapes; Nilsen creates a floating, hallucinatory feeling with the simple device of eliminating the border of the single panel, allowing each scene of action to dissolve at its edges into the white space of the rest of the page.

I dig it.

One preview below.





Tags: comics, comic books, Anders Nilsen, Dogs and Water