DOUGLAS: One of my very favorite things as a comics reader is when a cartoonist I’ve never heard of before suddenly shows up with a fully formed aesthetic. It doesn’t happen very often–it usually takes an artist about a thousand pages (the “10,000 hour rule”) to figure out where he or she is going. But it sometimes happens. Last year, it was Adam Hines with Duncan the Wonder Dog; this year, it’s Nate Simpson with Nonplayer. When I first saw preview pages of this first issue a few weeks ago, I thought “this is fantastic; what’s this guy done before?” (Like you folks, I also immediately thought of both Geof Darrow and Jamie McKelvie, who are not reference points I’d ordinarily associate as a pair.)
Turned out Simpson hadn’t actually published comics before, as far as I know–although he did work on an abandoned project a few years ago. Instead, he’s been working in game design since 1993 (which makes sense, given the “gamification of life” theme and general design sense of Nonplayer), and his bio at his site says “he is currently taking a year off to learn how to make comics.” I admire that attitude–partly because he was approaching it with a student’s perspective, rather than saying he was just going to jump into doing comics.
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And that kind of preparation shows in the work. Simpson’s visual worldbuilding is amazing, obviously. From the very first panel, he establishes the kind of setting we’re dealing with, and the two outward jumps (from the sword-and-sorcery fantasy to the kind of fantasy antechamber and then to Dana’s “real world” life) both immediately communicate a lot about their respective settings. This issue is full of the little details that demonstrate how fully thought-out everything is: when your lighting design includes sunlight through leaf cover, you can get away with whatever any color effects you want thereafter, you know? (I love the detail of the VR headset changing color as Dana exits her fantasy, too, and throwaway lines like “the Museum of Pre-Incident Tech.”)
Nonplayer actually made me think a bit of one of Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder books, Dream Sequence–they’re both about the idea of VR gaming, but this also seems like it’s going to be about a gifted artist coming to terms with her imagination. That’s not exactly an unusual first-book theme, and as graceful as his writing is, I wish it were as virtuosic as his artwork. Still, I’m happy to see wherever Simpson feels like going with this. I can already think of a bunch of people I know who don’t read a lot of comics but who are going to want to see this one.
MATT: My first-read reaction to Nonplayer is pretty simple: Nate Simpson can sketch, ink, and color like no one’s business. And: Nate Simpson should stick to sketching, inking, and coloring like no one’s business.
Characters walk in, utter slightly idiosyncratic lines, then vanish from scene. Repeat with swords, flying cat-bats, nagging parents, and a ninja scooter. And I’m not sure the slantwise paneling and sequencing work for me during that epic mid-book battle. I get that battles are confusing. I don’t need to get it literally.
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DOUGLAS: See, I didn’t find the writing confusing (although it took me a couple of read-throughs to straighten everything out)–it read to me like the whole story’s pulling back from inner narrative to outer narrative. We pretty much get enough of each level of the story to have a sense of what’s happening, even if not everything’s explained… it seemed to me like the elisions here are intentional as part of Simpson’s world-building–things that don’t add up yet seem to be there to make us say “huh, that doesn’t seem to be acting up.”
MATT: All told, a very pretty book, and I’d pick it up over Fear Itself #1 for Simpson’s art alone, but nothing about the “Sexy geek-girl plays MMOs in some weird Tad Williams Otherland future-world” narrative grabbed me. In fact–call me crazy–I almost wish Simpson wrote this thing word-free. You can linger over a single panel for ages, sliding around the micro-scalloped lines of the fantasy scenes or the sparer symmetric ones of mundane “reality.” The art’s simply packed–reread without scanning the word balloons for the arguably superior experience.