by Anders Nilsen
Published by Drawn and Quarterly in August of 2011.
. . .
“You and I fulfilled our roles in the drama. Whether I was right about the egg is not important. The greatness of these events will be born out. We can’t expect our small minds to always get the details right in advance. You must have faith that it’s all profoundly for the good.”
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Why must the finches and crows fight?
Why do humans insist that animals talk in human languages in their stories?
Is it dumb to seek higher spiritual purpose when all you need is material cause-and-effect?
Can you ever trust a talking snake?
Why is the owl so mean?
Are the finches secretly stupid despite all their heady philosophical/religious investigations?
Are the crows using humor to obscure the fact that they’re just callous assholes?
Are donuts really so evil, or are we dealing with strident anti-donut propaganda?
Is it possible for humans not to fuck everything up?
Big Questions is a graphic novel that asks . . . eh, heh . . . that makes some fairly large inquiries about the problems of existence. The answers are a mixture of the amusingly surprising and the punitively obvious. The punitively obvious is that humans are seemingly destined to fuck themselves and the planet to death with their macho insecurities and technological boondoggles. The surprises have to do with the array of chatty animal characters who end up unintentionally replicating much of humanity’s philosophical heritage in an off the cuff manner as they respond to various intrusions, mysteries, and disasters.
There’s a large grassy wilderness area. A bomb gets accidentally dropped on it. But it doesn’t go off right away. Talking finches identify it as a huge egg and regard it with wonder. Wonder engenders intense philosophical/religious speculation among the finches. These speculations continue even after the bomb explodes. Later, a human jet pilot crashes his jet. The pilot survives, but he is tormented by nightmares of swans. The pilot wanders in a daze, perhaps suffering brain trauma from the crash, trapped between sober consciousness and hallucinatory whimsies.
There’s a seemingly mentally disabled man who lives with his grandmother in a small house out in this wilderness. I say seemingly because by the end of the story he actually seems more able to survive in a world of disasters brought about by dangerous military technologies than the allegedly mentally able pilot and the pricey state funded system that permits his Top Gun existence . . . but that’s one of those “large inquiries,” isn’t it?
Big Questions is more of an experience than a thesis statement. The five hundred eighty something pages of black and white art takes you on a cinematic ride through philosophical dialogues, underworld explorations, gruesome violence, and no easy answers. The finches aren’t really able to fully understand humans. Humans aren’t even trying to understand anything except how to dodge responsibility for their latest techno-cataclysm. And there’s no God to pray to for an easy exit strategy, but pray if it makes you feel good, I guess. Finches and humans and crows and snakes and owls and worms and dogs and grandmothers and grandsons and fighter pilots and strange accumulations of black dots that Voltronically form into pants and intermittent mandalas must figure it all out for themselves. Only those of us that actually exist are permitted to take a crack at the Really Huge Interrogatives. It’s an honor, I guess, but also . . . kind of a huge pain in the ass.
