The Pantheon Graphic Library will be expanding in 2025 with the recent announcement of Anders Nilsen’s Tongues. This new graphic novel duology is a modern retelling of the story of Prometheus. Set in a version of modern Central Asia, it follows the captive god’s friendship with the eagle who carries out his daily sentence of torture and chronicles his pursuit of revenge on the god that has imprisoned him. Created by the three-time Igantz award-winning artist Anders Nilsen, Tongues is both an adventure story and a meditation on human nature in our present fraught, historical moment.
Read some early praise for Tongues:
“Tongues is an extraordinary reinvention of some of our oldest stories. Nilsen brings these old gods to an electrifying new life, and gives us a new sense of humanity as well, drilling into what we forgot to be afraid of and why we would have made ourselves forget. And the art of comics is reinvented as well in the process. It’s as if to tell this story, Nilsen had to remake everything he knew.”
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“Tongues is absolutely astonishing. A psychedelic collision between our most degraded contemporary realities and some of the oldest mythologies known to our species, written with a granular insight into both, drawn with beautiful savagery in a style that at times recalls Moebius but is utterly Nilsen’s own. Some passages made me cry, and I didn’t want the story to end. This book feels momentous.”
—Leela Corman, author of Unterzakhn and Victory Parade
“#$&@ing awesome!”
—Charles Burns, author of Black Hole and Final Cut
“A genuinely mind-blowing achievement. I think Tongues is a landmark book not only in the history of the graphic novel, but in the history of mythic storytelling. A dazzlingly innovative feat which surprises and delights on every page, across the epic whole and in every strange detail. My favorite comic by a living artist.”
—Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
“Mind-bendingly good. It’s up there with Maus, Fun Home, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan.”
—Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Check out Tongues below and stock up on other great titles in the Pantheon Graphic Library:
