The summer of 2015 was a big one for me.

I graduated from my undergraduate institution, was preparing to move overseas for my first postgraduate degree, flying hither and yon as my sister did her own graduating and preparing for an international hop (in the other direction), and somewhere in the middle of that, in the middle of an airport, my Mom asked me about a book.

More specifically, she asked me if I’d heard about this little (what do you call it? An internet comic?) that was being published as a book, Nimona.

I had not heard of the webcomic by ND Stevenson that had apparently swept a corner of the internet I did not then live in by storm, been turned into a physical, purchasable object by Quill Tree Books earlier that summer, , which my mother listened to while driving one day not too long before we found ourselves in that airport.

The airport newsstands did not have copies of Nimona for immediate purchase, and I wasn’t very “into” digital books at that point, so the copy that I purchased, read once, enjoyed, and then promptly put on my bookshelf and forgot about came from the Texarkana Books-A-Million rather than anywhere as exotic as Glasgow, or Dublin, or even the DFW airport.

Nimona hasn’t really crossed my mind much in the years between then and now. It was a quirky story about a girl, who’s more than a girl, becoming the sidekick to a notorious villain (who isn’t so villainous) and the regime they work to topple. The art is cute, and deliberately a bit rough, the chapters are short, the jokes tend toward slapstick, the big questions are “What makes a monster?” and “Who decides?”

For those of you who have missed the many, many hints I drop all over my research and creative work – those are questions I am very interested in. Questions I did not connect back to Nimona until my re-read earlier this summer.

After eight years, a Masters, a PhD, many years living abroad, a little heartbreak, a lot of love, a global pandemic, a minor existential crisis about my own version of monstrosity, and Nimona brings a lot more to the table than I gave it credit for back in 2015.

What prompted this reevaluation?

Nimona’s a movie!

Nimona’s a good movie!

And it is so, so much more itself now than it was when it was first published.

Let’s do a little history – the initial premise for Nimona was a college class project, a few-panel comic that went viral, as the kids say, and turned into a full-blown story. It was the work of a very young creative (Stevenson was born in 1991, making them a young twenty something when Nimona first started publishing online in 2012, and not much more than that when the book came out in 2015), who had not yet wholly come into their own because no one is wholly themselves at 21 or 22.

So the original book is fun, asks the kinds of questions I’m interested in, and explores some deeper themes than I originally thought, but the movie? The adaptation?

The adaptation is gleeful.

Gleeful without being glib, there is real heart in the story and hard decisions were made when it came to adaptation (in particular a helpful lady scientist with an oblivious bent was lost in the shuffle, and I am sad about that), but what came out after all those hard decisions?

It’s pure, bubblegum joy.

It is unabashedly queer, and if a couple of pretty boys holding hands on screen is enough to put you off a delightful kids’ movie then that’s your business.

My business is storytelling and when it comes to character backgrounds, world building, setups and punchlines that land, logical story-beats, and a truly dire conclusion that feels earned… Nimona does it all.

And does it all in a brisk hour and forty minutes.

Not to mention, it’s beautiful!

Visually stunning.

And yet, incredibly, they have not lost the bones of the original comic. The art is far more refined, but Nimona on the page and Nimona on the screen are still recognizably the same character, as is Ballistar (the supervillain Nimona hitches her wagon to) and the world itself.

There’s a lot of nuanced, and not so nuanced, debate on adaptations vs originals. I take them on a case by case basis, and in this particular case – Nimona is a property I’m very happy to see adapted.

If it hadn’t been, if this little movie had died somewhere in the production process, the richness of my life would not have been noticeably lessened. But now that it’s here, now that it’s available and out in the world… I’m just happy it is.

I am happy these stories are being told.

Stories that wouldn’t, couldn’t, have been made, and made to this quality, when I was a kid.

I’m happy that we can have a gay couple and an action adventure story and the conflict isn’t about the fact that they’re gay.

I’m happy that we can have a delightfully brutal, shapeshifting, outcast girl as a protagonist, who is also a beautiful and blatant trans metaphor.

I’m happy that found family is what this story is built on.

I’m happy there’s a whale that falls through the ceiling at one point.

Right this instant there is a battle being raged over who can create what for Hollywood. There are real people who create the things we love, people who are necessary to create great art. Yes, the Nimona comic could have been fed into a computer and an AI writer could probably crank out a “workable” adaptation.

But workable shouldn’t be what we strive for in our art.

It shouldn’t be what we want, it shouldn’t be what we desire, or pay to see.

We should want heart, complexity, expansion.

We should want to think a little bit about the world created on the screen, and how it reflects, or effects, the world we live in.

We should want glee.

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Nimona is out now on Netflix. Rated PG. 100 minutes. English.

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Thank you for your patience in the year since my last post. My life did a thing and things changed and I’m still working on finding my balance as a member of society, and a creative.

If you like my writing, check out my latest novel, Heretic (Wild Wolf Press, 2021). There’s a sequel in the works, I promise.