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Nimona is an impulsive young shapeshifter with a knack for villainy. Lord Ballister Blackheart is a villain with a vendetta. As sidekick and supervillain, they make an impressive team. Their mission: prove to the kingdom that Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin and his cohorts at the Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics aren’t the heroes everyone thinks they are.
However, as mischief escalates into a vicious battle, Lord Blackheart realizes that Nimona’s mysterious powers coupled with her unpredictable wild side might make her more dangerous than he is willing to admit.
In preparation for Netflix’s new adaptation of Nimona, I decided to revisit the graphic novel I’d come to love as a teen. I started following the story when it was still a web comic being posted online page by page. As such, it carries quite a bit of nostalgia for me.
The first chapters read like short episodic comic strips that quickly hook readers with classic punchlines and a visually intriguing world. However, the book quickly transforms into a complex story that delves past surface action sequences and cool one-liners into a character-driven story that balances melancholy with laugh-out-loud moments.
N. D. Stevenson has a way of twisting stereotypes to craft strong, unique characters then placing them in genre-cobbled settings that shouldn’t work but somehow do. It’s knights meets supervillains. Magic meets science. Medieval meets cyberpunk.
Thrown into the mix is a love/hate relationship between friends-turned-nemeses (a romance that completely went over my head as a teen) and an endearing father/teen daughter dynamic between Blackheart and Nimona.
Overall, Nimona is a heartfelt, personal, and bittersweet graphic novel that is impossible to put down.
Rated: Mild, for 5 uses of mild language. A few vague, crude jokes are made by guards. Violence includes skirmishes, heists, and battles, and some cartoonish death, blood, and magical torture are depicted. A character’s tragic back story gives readers a glimpse into emotional abuse suffered as a child.
