Hello fellow sufferers!

So I just finished reading Nil: A Land Beyond Belief, and it was a fantastic read. I really couldn't put it down. Crisp artwork, great story, and all around great piece of work. It mostly concentrates on death, and the expressed interest people have in it. The main character is Nul, who lives in Nil - a dystopian post-apocalyptic country inhabited completely by nihilists. To actually believe in anything other than nothing is against the law. As you can tell, it's pretty ironic and satirical right off the bat. Nil is at war with Optima, which is populated with, you guessed it, optimists. Many abstract concepts and literary devices are transformed into literal, tangible objects.

Much like the film Brazil, or a Jasper Fforde novel, Nil urges you not to take it seriously. However, lots of laughs and some pretty deep realizations later, and you begin to realize the book isn't just straightforward jokes about people's beliefs, but there's a lot of other things going on under the surface there. James Turner (the author) criticizes everything from religion to restaurants, grinning all the while. And if you can't laugh at yourself, you can't laugh at all - there's many jokes that point right back at his own story. Everything is over-satirized, over-exaggerated and absolutely over the top, and Turner knows it. I think that's one of the things that keeps this book funny.

It's also very hard to talk about this book without discussing the artwork - it's not normal. It's very stylized: black and white, 2-dimensional characters, and over-complex backgrounds with propaganda strewn everywhere complement the writing very much. At a glance, everything looks the same, but look closer - each character is very finely detailed and is vastly different than the next. Each building, every street lamp, the countryside - it's all drawn in painstaking detail, - and little things like lit bombs scattered around, people jumping out of windows, and old-timey flying machines in the distance all beg you to scour each page searching for something new and fun to see.

If you see it in your local bookstore/comic shop, I strongly recommend picking it up. Even if you don't normally read comic books (or "graphic novels" to you snobs out there), Nil is worth taking a look at. It's a hell of a read with a great story and some really interesting ideas. If you're really interested, head over here.