By Don M. Ventura
Nonplayer #1
Image Comics
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Nonplayer is strikingly beautiful from cover to cover. Artist/writer Nate Simpson has delivered a new piece of work that deserves to be soaked in slowly as each panel is a testament to his skill.
You might wonder where the credits are on the book. There aren’t any. Simpson handles everything down to the lettering on this imaginative piece of obvious labor and the results are impressive for sure. To say that the artwork is superior to the story is not to demean his abilities as a writer, it’s a testament to his capacity to deliver one gorgeous page after the next.
Nonplayer is the story of Dana, who prefers the full-immersion multiplayer online game “Warriors of Jarvath” to real life. There she’s a warrior with a flying cat-thing. Dana and her elf friend attack royalty and about a thousand soldiers before things appear to go glitchy in the machine. Simpson plays up his strengths during this fantastic sequence. While I have an aversion to role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and the like, I found my prejudices did not get in the way of enjoying the book.
I’ll be interested to see more from Simpson in terms of dialogue because the book is somewhat sparse in terms of it, but I liked what I read. When Dana asks her mom not to touch her stuff, her mother replies, “Funny how you make an exception when it comes to your dirty laundry”. It’s clever and sincere exchanges like this that I appreciate in good dialogue.
