The first time I visited Anders Nilsen’s Humboldt Park apartment, back in the spring, he had only two pieces of art up in his living room. One was a Polaroid portrait of his late fiancee, Cheryl Weaver. The other was a large print from a series of photos she’d shot out the window of the treetops across the street. Weaver was an artist, and when she lived here, shooting the park through the seasons was an ongoing project. Nilsen could never convince her to show the photos in public. “She didn’t want to be there and have to hear people talk about what they thought,” he said. “She was sure they’d be critical and think it was stupid. We’d have fights about it. The more I tried, the more she would resist. But then if I didn’t try,” he added, letting out a little chuckle, “we’d fight because she didn’t think that I thought she was a good artist.”
A lifelong comics enthusiast, Nilsen grew up in Minneapolis, where he’d moved at the age of three with his mom and older sister. He started drawing his own strips in high school, when one of his English teachers gave him permission to turn them in as short-story assignments. In college, at the University of New Mexico, he studied painting, but after graduating and returning to Minneapolis he found himself drifting back toward comics more and more. “At the time I was sorta thinking, I’m a gallery artist doing comics on the side,” he says. “But in the back of my mind I knew, no, this is the stuff I’m gonna do. Comics made sense because I could xerox shit. It was more immediately rewarding. When I made Big Questions number one, I was working at a co-op in Minneapolis and brought it in to show a friend. We were eating lunch, and then I left and as I was walking away I heard her laughing.”
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In 1999 Nilsen moved to Chicago to continue his painting studies at the School of the Art Institute. Weaver, also a grad student at the time, had the studio across the hall from his. She was doing experimental film and video, and when she wasn’t around Nilsen would sneak peeks at her work. One day they wound up taking the elevator together and struck up a conversation. Three months later they were dating. Within a year they were living together.
Dogs and Water was published in October 2004 and went on to become Drawn & Quarterly’s most reviewed title of the year, earning near unanimous praise. It was named Outstanding Story in the 2005 Ignatz Awards, which recognize achievement in comics and cartooning at the small-press level, and caught on with readers as well, selling out its initial printing of 4,000 copies. It was Nilsen’s biggest critical and commercial success by far, but it didn’t take him by surprise. “I figured that was just what happened when you have a comic put out by a publisher,” he says.
Weaver’s treatment continued through the summer and into the fall. She and Nilsen decided to postpone the wedding until her health improved. On October 12, 2005, she went to the emergency room with chest pains. She was given a blood transfusion and underwent a CT scan, which revealed that the cancer had spread to her liver. Four days later she was told the disease was terminal. “On the first or second of November, they took out her spleen, and at that point I knew she was gonna die,” Nilsen says. “She bled a lot in surgery; they gave her ten units of blood. She was in a coma for a while–she never fully came back to consciousness. I kept trying to tell her to let go, but she was always very stubborn. She died on the 13th of November. My birthday was the next day.”
A few months later Nilsen assembled the first half of a two-part series he’d agreed to do for Fantagraphics before Weaver died. Still overcome with grief and up against a deadline, he cobbled it together from sketchbook drawings, and the result, The End, was a bare look at his fragile emotional state. One section, with the deceptively blithe title “Since You’ve Been Gone I Can Do Whatever I Want, All the Time,” shows him crying by himself at every point of the day. Another revolves around two featureless figures, one the shadow of the other, spouting impossible math equations while explaining loss. “My past, present and future have all come unhinged and flown off in different directions,” one figure says. “When I reach out my hand to try to get ahold of one or the other of them, my fingers brush against them and just push them further out into space. Of all of them, I miss my future the most.” As the panels continue, one figure disappears, and the other morphs into a giant maze that covers an entire center spread before dissolving into a field of dots. “That’s one of the things you mourn,” Nilsen says. “You miss the person, but you miss your life, the life you expected to have, too.”
