Don't Go Where I Can't Follow
Six years after its limited first edition, Nilsen issues a general edition of his very affecting, quirky, and beautiful memorial of his fiancée, Cheryl Weaver, who died too young and too quickly of cancer. It is a mixed-media composition, beginning with some postcards she sent him and his hilarious letter to his sister about a weekend camping trip fraught with tiny disasters. Then come photos and anecdotes from an accidental New Jersey stopover, a comics account of a trip to the Angoulême comics festival, plenty of photos from his and Cheryl’s subsequent French travels, his journal entries about her hospitalization, the portrayal in comics of scattering her ashes, four of his drawn-upon postcards to her, an old note to her envisioning her surviving him, the hand-lettered first edition afterword, and the typeset author’s note for this edition. The climax of the book is the scattering of her ashes, to which Anders gives maximum impact and concentration by never attending to a single face, though many panels are crowded with people. A gem of modest, ordinary sublimity. --Ray Olson