Tongues

Tongues is the towering, decade-spanning graphic novel that represents everything Anders Nilsen has built toward as an artist. Begun as a self-published series of oversized issues in 2017 and collected in a 368-page Pantheon hardcover in March 2025, it’s a sprawling, color-saturated retelling of the Prometheus myth set against the backdrop of modern Central Asia—where rival groups war over oil, ancient gods debate the worth of humanity, and three very different travelers converge on a world on the edge of catastrophe.

At its center is the Prisoner (the Prometheus figure), chained to a mountainside in the remotest reaches of an unnamed region, visited daily by an eagle who eats his liver—a punishment for giving fire to humans. Their daily chess games and philosophical conversations form the spine of the narrative, but Tongues branches outward to encompass two other converging storylines. There’s Astrid, a thirteen-year-old East African orphan floating down a river with a monkey and a talking chicken, on an errand of murder assigned by a goddess only she can see. And there’s a young American man with a teddy bear strapped to his back—carried over from Nilsen’s earlier Dogs and Water—wandering aimlessly through a trackless wilderness toward catastrophe.

Nilsen weaves these threads together with the patience of someone building a cathedral, each issue adding layers of mythological allusion, postcolonial allegory, and philosophical meditation. Reviewers have compared the scope to Maus, Fun Home, and Persepolis. Kirkus called it “superb graphic art meets an exceedingly odd tale,” while Max Porter wrote that it is “a landmark book not only in the history of the graphic novel, but in the history of mythic storytelling.” Nilsen’s audacious page layouts—hexagonal honeycomb panels, anatomical diagrams used as structural scaffolding, foldout interstitials—match the narrative’s ambition, creating a physical object as carefully considered as its contents. The New York Times called it “a stunning, hallucinatory retelling of Greek myth.”

What makes Tongues extraordinary is its willingness to sit in ambiguity. Nilsen asks what it means to be human in a world we are simultaneously creating and destroying, without offering easy answers. The gods argue. The humans commit atrocities. The chicken talks. And through it all, the eagle comes back day after day, because that’s what he does.

Volume 2 is underway. The full story is estimated at ten issues.

Perfect for fans of mythic, philosophically dense graphic novels like Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, the sprawling ambition of Bone by Jeff Smith, or the postcolonial allegories of Ho Che Anderson’s X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills.

Created by Anders Nilsen.