Skye Nathaniel
The story of a youthful but powerful agent of chaos caught between her trauma and the friendship of her well-intentioned but scorned villainous boss whose compassion she is ill-equipped to accept, Nimona's breezily explosive early adventures belie the comic's ambition. Its characters are never quite who you expect them to be, and it grows darker and thicker with each chapter as the stakes rise and its silly background blend of medieval knighthood and mad science tropes somehow mutates into solid worldbuilding.
I don't know how something that seems like it was conceived as a work of genre parody ended up becoming so original, but Nimona really works—and it's surprisingly affecting in the end. There's a clear throughline from here to the author's popular Princesses of Power series, which spends a lot of its runtime examining the heavily guarded vulnerability of a similarly destructive, closed-off character. I am far, far older than the intended audience for this stuff, but it really hits for me. Nimona is easy to recommend, and I'm looking forward to checking out its film adaptation.
The story of a youthful but powerful agent of chaos caught between her trauma and the friendship of her well-intentioned but scorned villainous boss whose compassion she is ill-equipped to accept, Nimona's breezily explosive early adventures belie the comic's ambition. Its characters are never quite who you expect them to be, and it grows darker and thicker with each chapter as the stakes rise and its silly background blend of medieval knighthood and mad science tropes somehow mutates into solid worldbuilding.
I don't know how something that seems like it was conceived as a work of genre parody ended up becoming so original, but Nimona really works—and it's surprisingly affecting in the end. There's a clear throughline from here to the author's popular Princesses of Power series, which spends a lot of its runtime examining the heavily guarded vulnerability of a similarly destructive, closed-off character. I am far, far older than the intended audience for this stuff, but it really hits for me. Nimona is easy to recommend, and I'm looking forward to checking out its film adaptation.
