Tongues is a masterpiece, and with it Anders Nilsen fulfills the most ambitious possibilities of the graphic novel as a medium. Rarely have images and words, form and function, been married so beautifully; his pages and panels bursting with innovative, jewel-like complexity and cascading, organic beauty. The story marries the erudite and the bawdy, political and mythical, violent and meditative, in ways that you find only in literature’s greatest: Utopia, Candide, Gulliver’s Travels, The Plague, The Castle, Cosmicomics, The Master and Margarita, White Noise. This book belongs in the pantheon.
Tongues, Volume 1 by Anders Nilsen, (List Price: $35, Pantheon, 9781524747206, March 2025)
Reviewed by Jonathan Hawpe, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky