Dogs and Water

Dogs and Water is a dreamy foray for Nilsen while still maintaining the elegance, humor, and tension of his other projects. Less overtly philosophical in the dialogue, Dogs and Water relies on encounters and actions to draw out existential quandaries and ruminations that draw me to Nilsen's work.

It's like a dreamy comics version of The Road. He's on a journey to nowhere in particular, surrounded by nothing, and his company is a stuffed teddy bear who is encouraging him to go on even when he thinks--knows--it's pointless. A bleak but excellent story.

I'm obsessed with this guy's drawing and strange dreamy story-telling. This is my favorite of all his books. Like a fairy tale without a plot, Dogs and Water follows a boy with a teddy bear strapped to his back as he walks through a desert and also is sometimes marooned at sea. The elegant art takes you into someone else’s dreamworld. You can’t explain it; you can only experience it.

Dogs and Water is a challenging work, and constitutes a fine argument as to why modern comics are fully capable of making significant artistic statements. Nilsen delivers a stirring emotional tale with a carefully measured pace, and employs substantial white space and stretches of wordless action that collectively serve to draw the reader slowly, but thoroughly, into this highly original coming-of-age tale. Given the sparse and violent wasteland that his protagonist navigates, Nilsen does a tremendous job of allowing emotions other than fear into his narrative, and ultimately manages to deliver a well-rounded tale that surmounts the apparently simple components from which the whole is built.

ponderous and contemplative

I'm not sure I entirely understood the oft-times cryptic metaphor behind this graphic novel, but I found that it did elicit a fairly strong emotional response. So this man-boy is wandering down an empty, seemingly endless road, with only the teddy bear strapped to his back pack for conversation. He is alone, looking for purpose, confused and angry. He's attacked by strangers and caribou. Bewilderment. Suddenly he is alone in a small boat at sea. No oars, or motor. Adrift and powerless. Beyond the road he is frozen and starving. Unable to move. . . .

i read this over lunch. a very quick read. dream-like, surreal. kind of sad. a good read for Portland in the winter, curled up in a big chair by the window with a hot cup of tea.