What do you think?
Rate this book
The End No. 1
Number 17 in the Ignatz series.
32 pages, Softcover
Published February 14, 2007
About the author
Anders Nilsen
76 books245 followersAnders Nilsen is an American illustration and comics artist. He is the author of ten books including Big Questions, The End, and Poetry is Useless as well as the coloring book A Walk in Eden. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Kramer's Ergot, Pitchfork, Medium and elsewhere. His comics have been translated into several languages overseas and his painting and drawing have been exhibited internationally. Nilsen's work has received three Ignatz awards as well as the Lynd Ward Prize for the Graphic Novel and Big Questions was listed as a New York Times Notable Book in 2011. Nilsen grew up in Minneapolis and Northern New Hampshire. He studied art in New Mexico and lived in Chicago for over a decade. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 15, 2010
Read this after "Don't Go Where I Can't Follow" if at all possible.
September 8, 2025
I can feel your pain in this and I'm glad you made something with your grief. very relatable to me right now.
February 28, 2009
Your loved one is dead.
The person to whom you had committed your entire life is dead, and all you can do is... whatever you want. You cry as you stumble through the rest of your life. You try to hold it together when the world's external complications refuse to hold up a moment for you to privately compose yourself. You cry, and you commemorate - even commiserate for - the soul no longer living. And eventually, you stop crying, little by little. The clouds are still there, raining as heavily as the day of death. But you see that they can't possibly rain forever.
You are far away from your hometown. You size, memorize, memorialize those little details you experience along the way - not such specifics as the nuances of the Brandenburg Gate or the apocalyptic frost upon the Pergamon Altar... but of the patterned ceramic teapot of an acquaintance, or the miscellany scattered on her kitchen counter top. And you live, and you mourn, and you keep on living.
The End #1 is not so much as an investigation or examination so much as it is an experimentation of such a scenario. Anders Nilsen grants his readers a look inside what could easily be a non-linear representation of his own personal turmoil - one which came to a rolling boil after his fiancée died from Hodgkin's Disease in November of 2005. He is not wasting away in his own despair, nor is he dragging others along with him into this desolate place. Quite the contrary, in fact, since Nilsen seems to deliberately convolute his iconic humanoid narrator-figure (through increasingly labyrinthine graphic depiction, nonsensical mathematics, and obsequious verbiage perhaps intended to perplex, even baffle, persistent analysis) to the point where the reader is not quite sure as to what is being shown, or stated.
There is pain. There is a touch of self-awareness clouded by shades of despair. And in The End, the entire miasma is mixed with a subtle serving of sanguinity.
"I think that it's disingenuous to say that yeah, the world sucks, everybody dies, there's violence, and you're going to be betrayed," says Nilsen to publisher Gary Groth in a 2006 interview. "I feel a responsibility to acknowledge that, but also to point to the fact that there is a lot more. There is the possibility of connection between people and growth and transformation."
In the span of 32 pages, Nilsen attempts to do just this. Or perhaps the intent is not there, but this cannot detract from his accomplishment of same. For as much philosophy as it serves out, The End #1 is not just an $8 comic book.
It brings a reader to face a stark reality: about half the world will outlive the other person in their romantic lives... and there will still be a blue sky up there somewhere, sometime, for everyone. Even if just for a living moment at a time.
The person to whom you had committed your entire life is dead, and all you can do is... whatever you want. You cry as you stumble through the rest of your life. You try to hold it together when the world's external complications refuse to hold up a moment for you to privately compose yourself. You cry, and you commemorate - even commiserate for - the soul no longer living. And eventually, you stop crying, little by little. The clouds are still there, raining as heavily as the day of death. But you see that they can't possibly rain forever.
You are far away from your hometown. You size, memorize, memorialize those little details you experience along the way - not such specifics as the nuances of the Brandenburg Gate or the apocalyptic frost upon the Pergamon Altar... but of the patterned ceramic teapot of an acquaintance, or the miscellany scattered on her kitchen counter top. And you live, and you mourn, and you keep on living.
The End #1 is not so much as an investigation or examination so much as it is an experimentation of such a scenario. Anders Nilsen grants his readers a look inside what could easily be a non-linear representation of his own personal turmoil - one which came to a rolling boil after his fiancée died from Hodgkin's Disease in November of 2005. He is not wasting away in his own despair, nor is he dragging others along with him into this desolate place. Quite the contrary, in fact, since Nilsen seems to deliberately convolute his iconic humanoid narrator-figure (through increasingly labyrinthine graphic depiction, nonsensical mathematics, and obsequious verbiage perhaps intended to perplex, even baffle, persistent analysis) to the point where the reader is not quite sure as to what is being shown, or stated.
There is pain. There is a touch of self-awareness clouded by shades of despair. And in The End, the entire miasma is mixed with a subtle serving of sanguinity.
"I think that it's disingenuous to say that yeah, the world sucks, everybody dies, there's violence, and you're going to be betrayed," says Nilsen to publisher Gary Groth in a 2006 interview. "I feel a responsibility to acknowledge that, but also to point to the fact that there is a lot more. There is the possibility of connection between people and growth and transformation."
In the span of 32 pages, Nilsen attempts to do just this. Or perhaps the intent is not there, but this cannot detract from his accomplishment of same. For as much philosophy as it serves out, The End #1 is not just an $8 comic book.
It brings a reader to face a stark reality: about half the world will outlive the other person in their romantic lives... and there will still be a blue sky up there somewhere, sometime, for everyone. Even if just for a living moment at a time.
April 9, 2009
After reading Anders' "Don't Go Where I Can't Follow" I took a break from his work for a while. Watching him read from the book was painful. His blank face was painful. I don't need such pain in my life. I was in a rococo state of mind and not ready to go back there, so I took this break.
When I returned, I did, like an idiot, read The End, written somewhere around the same time as "Don't Go...". Four or five pages in I had to stop. I finished it the next day. I might read "..Black Holes" soon. I'm not sure.
Anders is my favorite cartoonist at the moment. He reminds me of a less industrial Chris Ware. I'm sick of Ware's thinly veiled autobiographical narratives retelling, over and over, through symbols, the same personal problems. Anders' work is similarly personal but I guess the difference is that his work is sentiment whereas Ware, at this point, dabbles solely in sentimentality. That is tremendously difficult -- to do personal work that is not bathos. Ware once had it in him. Anders is more immediate and both visually and literally more honest with his work, I think. All hail the new prince of Chicago.
When I returned, I did, like an idiot, read The End, written somewhere around the same time as "Don't Go...". Four or five pages in I had to stop. I finished it the next day. I might read "..Black Holes" soon. I'm not sure.
Anders is my favorite cartoonist at the moment. He reminds me of a less industrial Chris Ware. I'm sick of Ware's thinly veiled autobiographical narratives retelling, over and over, through symbols, the same personal problems. Anders' work is similarly personal but I guess the difference is that his work is sentiment whereas Ware, at this point, dabbles solely in sentimentality. That is tremendously difficult -- to do personal work that is not bathos. Ware once had it in him. Anders is more immediate and both visually and literally more honest with his work, I think. All hail the new prince of Chicago.
April 26, 2008
I read this right after Don't Go Where I Can't Follow, his story about the romance between him and his fiancee and her subsequent death from cancer. This book shows in graphic format what happens after that, after you've lost the love of your life.
I still think about it--- since you've been gone, I can do whatever I want--- a drawing of him in tears. Yes, when someone you love is out of your life for whatever reason, you're free to eat whatever you want whenever you want or listen to the stereo at any volume, but it somehow seems like cold comfort.
An honor to the various forms that grief takes.
I still think about it--- since you've been gone, I can do whatever I want--- a drawing of him in tears. Yes, when someone you love is out of your life for whatever reason, you're free to eat whatever you want whenever you want or listen to the stereo at any volume, but it somehow seems like cold comfort.
An honor to the various forms that grief takes.
August 16, 2011
I want to give this to somebody who has broken my heart, like a vindictive mix tape, because it is so eloquent about heartbreak, but I won't, because clearly the main character was living with the one who broke his heart before she broke his heart, and because of that I feel I haven't earned the right to pretend my heartbreak is on the same scale as his, even if all the symptoms are identical, like he's zoomed out on the heartbreak fractal.
July 20, 2013
This is my favorite graphic novel of all time. It is devastatingly sad and even if you've never lost someone as close as a spouse this book will make you feel like you have. It is something I read and re-read when I feel like I want to experience emotion. I don't often buy books, as I work in a public library, but this is one that I had to buy.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews