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“Joe Meno, who’s a friend—I did the illustrations for a book of his stories—was doing a reading and invited me to read, too,” Nilsen recalls. “I felt like doing a reading of comics doesn’t go well, but I had a few stories from my sketchbooks that I could use for a slide reading. They were fragments about gods and Greek myths and Bible stories. The silhouettes came because I didn’t have a lot of time and they were fast. But it turned out they had a very evocative and iconic power to them.”
Some of the stories are lighthearted, like the short fragment about Jesus picking up Aphrodite in a bar in heaven (“Me and my dad run this whole place”). Some are poignant, like the retelling of the binding of Isaac that shows what happens when Abraham and Isaac get home after the abortive sacrifice.
“Taking old stories that are 4,000 years old, you think they’re not relevant,” he says. “But if you bring them into the present day, you see they’re stories about what it means to be human. The story about Athena [“The Girl and the Lion,” in which the goddess becomes obsessed with the story of an early Christian martyr and eventually decides to live as a mortal] is one anyone can relate to, in a way. It’s a story about coming of age, about growing older and losing your illusions.
