Tongues, Vol. 1
Cartoonist: Anders Nilsen
Publisher: Pantheon Graphic Library
Release Date: March 2025
On a purely aesthetic level, Tongues, Vol. 1 by Anders Nilsen is the best-looking comic I’ve read this year. Nilsen’s linework and colors are stylish and pristine, as capable of rendering fantastic sequences as they are gritty windswept war processions in some unnamed desert wasteland. I personally came to this book with no familiarity with Tongues, which come to find out Nilsen has been serializing across five paperback volumes dating back to 2017, and I was stunned from the look of these comics right from the first page. And it’s not just the artwork. Nilsen’s graphic design is also top-tier, using the chunky hardcover format this new volume comes in to offer some really cool physical touches (that I won’t spoil here).
What I did know coming into this book, however, was that it was a reimaging/modernization of the Greek myth of Prometheus, and that it was joined with a pair of other narratives. One follows aimless American hitchhiker abroad, who is wandering (poorly) through the aforementioned desert with a teddy bear strapped across his back. While the third is the story of an orphaned East African girl sent on an assassination mission and joined by a talking chicken. I’m not giving anything away here, as this is all detailed on the book jacket before you even start.
And, really, I don’t think a reader necessarily even needs to know any of that before they start. Maybe it’s helpful if you’re the type of person who struggles with unmoored or ethereal storytelling. In Tongues, Nilsen deploys narrative disorientation, but he does so at the right moments throughout, using it to intrigue rather than frustrate the reader. There’s a confidence to Tongues and a trust in the reader that serves it well. The confidence is that visual touches like a teddy bear on the back or a talking chicken will be enough to hook the audience (they are), and the trust is the audience will connect dots between the various elements in this book as they unfurl.
Indeed, as Tongues, Vol. 1 progresses we start to see that all of these characters are connected by a few crises, including the violent and reckless behaviors of humanity as a whole, as well as Gods moving to stop or protect them. But what I appreciated more was the subtler way this book felt thematically connected, so subtle I missed it the first time through, but picked up on it immediately when flipping through the book after reading. Tongues is one of those well-constructed stories where it’s larger narrative interests are all represented on its earliest pages, like the best literary novels.
The books opens with a bird soaring above an unnamed desert. As it comes into focus, we see the too-familiar trappings of modern warfare, the sort that American has involved itself in for basically all of the current century as well as (presumably) for all of the lives of many of this book’s readers. You can see it in the preview pages included with this piece, but we see sand-colored Humvees on their sides next to craters from the explosions of artillery, and, ultimately, splayed bodies. Soon enough, this scene comes to involve animals picking through the detritus of violence and the remaining, discarded technology. It’s an effective opening scene setting to hook an audience, and it’s also a masterful thematic foreshadowing of many of the events and ideas that are to come.
This is just do indicative of the book to me. It’s good-looking and engaging, but that’s just the veneer. Beneath that is layer after layer of thoughtful storytelling. I also think this sequence and these preview pages is as good an argument as any that Tongues is not quite a retelling of a myth, not really. That’s in there, for sure, but the Prometheus myth is more of a jumping off point for a very modern story. It’s certainly a modernization of that familiar myth, but if I had to guess, I would imagine Nilsen’s full vision for Tongues will push all of these threads to new places, ones that can only be reached with knowledge of the world we live in now.
Nilsen has worked patiently to create this book as well, with its 350-plus pages taking about eight years to complete. This is relevant, in that Tongues is a book about mankind and it’s relationship to technology, as the Prometheus myth was before it. In the time Nilsen has been making these comics, technology has continued to accelerate rapidly around him and it. One wonders if the eventual destination of the book will evolve in real time too, how could it not? (Although Nilsen recently told The Beat the second volume might get here faster.)
Overall, if it’s not clear yet, I consider Tongues to be one of the must-read graphic novels of 2025, a poignant and intriguing and relentlessly good-looking comic that will entertain and question readers in equal turns. It’s a big book too, one you can get lost in as you slowly move through it, savoring the story and letting the creative choices and poetic visual flourishes wash over you.
Tongues, Vol. 1 is available now from Pantheon Graphic Library
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