Review: Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Tue May 28 21:32:58 PDT 2019


Nimona
by Noelle Stevenson

Publisher: HarperTeen
Copyright: 2015
ISBN:      0-06-227822-3
Format:    Graphic novel
Pages:     266

Ballister Blackheart is a supervillain, the most notorious supervillain
in the kingdom. He used to be a knight, in training at the Institute
alongside his friend Goldenloin. But then he defeated Goldenloin in a
joust and Goldenloin blew his arm off with a hidden weapon. Now, he
plots against the Institute and their hero Sir Goldenloin, although he
still follows certain rules.

Nimona, on the other hand, is not convinced by rules. She shows up
unexpectedly at Ballister's lair, declaring herself to be his sidekick,
winning him over to the idea when she shows that she's also a
shapeshifter. And Ballister certainly can't argue with her
effectiveness, but her unconstrained enthusiasm for nefarious schemes
is rather disconcerting. Ballister, Goldenloin, and the Institute have
spent years in a careful dance with unspoken rules that preserved a
status quo. Nimona doesn't care about the status quo at all.

Nimona is the collected form of a web comic published between 2012 and
2014. It has the growth curve of a lot of web comics: the first few
chapters are lightweight and tend more towards gags, the art starts off
fairly rough, and there is more humor than plot. But by chapter four,
Stevenson is focusing primarily on the fascinating relationship between
Ballister and Nimona, and there are signs that Nimona's gleeful
enthusiasm for villainy is hiding something more painful. Meanwhile,
the Institute, Goldenloin's employer, quickly takes a turn for the
sinister. They're less an organization of superheroes than a shadow
government with some dubious goals, and Ballister starts looking less
like a supervillain and more like a political revolutionary.

Nimona has some ideas about revolution, most of them rather violent.

At the start of this collection, I wasn't sure how much I'd like it.
It's mildly amusing in a gag sort of way while playing with cliches and
muddling together fantasy, science fiction, faux-medieval politics,
sinister organizations, and superheros. But the story deepens as it
continues. Ballister starts off caring about Nimona because he's a
fundamentally decent person, but she becomes a much-needed friend.
Nimona's villain-worship, to coin a phrase, turns into something more
nuanced. And while that's happening, the Institute becomes increasingly
sinister, and increasingly dangerous. By the second half of the
collection, despite the somewhat excessive number of fight scenes, it
was very hard to put down.

Sadly, I didn't think that Stevenson landed the ending. It's not
egregiously bad, and the last page partly salvages it, but it wasn't
the emotionally satisfying catharsis that I was looking for. The story
got surprisingly dark, and I wanted a bit more of a burst of optimism
and happiness at the end.

I thought the art was good but not great. The art gets more detailed
and more nuanced as the story deepens, but Stevenson stays with a flat,
stylized appearance to her characters. The emotional weight comes
mostly from the dialogue and from Nimona's expressive transformations
rather than the thin and simple faces. But there's a lot of energy in
the art, a lot of drama when appropriate, and some great transitions
from human scale to the scale of powerful monsters.

That said, I do have one major complaint: the lettering. It's
hand-lettered (so far as I can tell) in a way that adds a distinctive
style, but the lettering is also small, wavers a bit, and is sometimes
quite hard to read. Standard comic lettering is, among other things,
highly readable in small sizes; Stevenson's more individual lettering
is not, and I occasionally struggled with it.

Overall, this isn't in my top tier of graphic novels, but it was an
enjoyable afternoon's reading that hooked me thoroughly and that I was
never tempted to put down. I think it's a relatively fast read, since
there are a lot of fight scenes and not a lot of detail that invites
lingering over the page. I wish the lettering were more uniform and I
wasn't entirely happy with the ending, but if slowly-developing
unexpected friendship, high drama, and an irrepressible shapeshifter
who is more in need of a friend than she appears sounds like something
you'd like, give this a try.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-05-28

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-227822-3.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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