Nate Simpson on Nonplayer
Originally published on Hopscotch Friday, this is my interview with Nate Simpson on his series for Image Comics Nonplayer.
Nonplayer #1 opens with a snapshot of the fantastical land of Jarvath, filled with strange flaura and fauna. The issue has visual cues to European fantasy literature, manga, anime, even Korean MMOs.
A caravan of armoured soldiers appears, walking along a forest path. A noble king named Heremoth and his wife Fendra are introduced. The marriage is implied to be in trouble. There are hints of an affair. A suggestion of black magic somehow being involved is made.
And then two American gamer avatars attack the royal couple in an attempted assassination, bantering sardonically as they slaughter the soldiers. King Heremoth desperately fights to protect his injured wife — while tamale delivery-girl Dana snarks to her friend about the experience points they’re about to earn in the video game Warriors of Jarvath.
This is the world of Nate Simpson’s Nonplayer, a beautifully illustrated comic published by Image that explores the divide between fantasy and reality in a world where video game AI has become so advanced it is difficult to tell what is real anymore.
Nonplayer is also known for its long delays. Since the first comic was released in 2011, Simpson has only produced two issues in total.
To his credit, Simpson has been open with his readers as to the circumstances behind the delays, while at the same time ensuring Nonplayer continues to be published to a high quality standard. The second issue released in June this year not only advances the plot, revealing more of the near-future setting, but continues to feature beautifully detailed art.
Simpson’s response to the comic industry expectation that creators produce content month to month on schedule is typically candid.
“There just isn’t a way to make a living at comics if you’re not producing work quickly”, Simpson says. “And I just didn’t really have an interest in making comics for the money — I work in games, and they’re a much better bet for an artist who needs to make ends meet. Since Nonplayer has been decoupled from the financial imperative, I have a lot more freedom to play around and polish until I feel the work is done. That said, four years is a really long time. I think there’s a happy medium, and I predict #3 will take significantly less time to make. Knock on wood.
“There is a significant subset of the comic-reading community who feel that a slowly-made comic is worthy of derision. They feel like I should be dismissed just because I’m not fast. I don’t really have much to say about this. We’ll see how the book does in collected form, I guess.”
Interestingly Simpson used this period of delay to open a discussion with fans of Nonplayer about his creative process and the difficulty of being an independent comic creator.
“Oh, I think my book would be completely dead in the water if I hadn’t gotten a chance to share the journey along the way” he says. “At the very least, the blog served to remind readers that I hadn’t given up. And there are a lot of people who are trying to do their own projects under similar circumstances — people who have day jobs or kids — and there’s an ongoing discussion about how to make room in a busy life to advance your creative endeavours. So I guess I’ve shown one path to getting a thing out into the world in spite of the setbacks that life throws in your way.
“And of course it’s a two-way street. Through the blog, I’ve gotten to meet a lot of very kind, talented people who have shared ideas, techniques, and inspiration along the way. It’s been a wonderful thing!”
Simpsons raises an important point though. Comics have faced an uphill battle as a medium deserving of artistic recognition. But what does it mean if the commercial imperative overrules any concerns with artistry, or even a particular vision?
Therefore it is significant that Simpson went with Image as a publisher, a company that has in recent years gambled on properties with a wide variety of creative visions. Its success has helped leave long behind the company’s own reputation for lateness and dropped books.
“They have, hands-down, the best contract in comics”, says Simpson. “Eric Stephenson is a visionary guy who has cultivated a stable of great, original titles, and I feel that Nonplayer benefits from rubbing shoulders with all that greatness! Image has so much cachet right now — I remember back in 2011 when the first issue came out, the Image rack was still usually somewhere in the back of the comic shop. That has completely changed.”
In turn Simpson’s own return to comics shows how the medium’s creative cachet has increased.
“There’s no other way for a single creator to bring a world into being and to be in control of every detail. The whole appeal is that I get to be uncompromising — or at least there’s less compromise than in any collaborative medium. And I’m interested in storytelling — I’m really still a very new student of writing, and it’s fun to try things and to see what works and what doesn’t work. It’s just very exciting to take all of these static lines and combine them into something that feels alive. That’s a very magical feeling.
“All my influences — Moebius, Arthur Rackham, William Stout, Geof Darrow — have been around for a while. I fell out of comics in the early nineties, and now I find myself trying to recreate the same feeling that I got when I first ran across Hard Boiled or the Airtight Garage. So my aesthetic sensibility has been on ice for a couple of decades, and that might translate to a sort of freshness, ironically!”
Nonplayer’s story takes inspiration from much of the discussion surrounding our immersion in online fantasy worlds and use of everyday technology. Dana, who briefly appears in the second issue in her day job role, is shown to be apathetic towards her own future prospects and wakes up following her assassination attempt on King Heremoth in an untidy room cluttered with takeout packaging. When she leaves home to go to work, she uses a ‘skin’ so her perception of the world around her resembles the fantasy of Jarvath.
Simpson’s take on this customisable escapism is less alarmed than most, but still concerned.
“Well, one of my rules for this book is to put judgement aside” Simpson says. “Jarvath is treated as a parallel reality, the inhabitants of which are as alive as we are. But there is also clearly this abandonment of the real world, and that begins to reveal itself through how dilapidated everything has gotten — even when people are spending time in meatspace, they’re able to put a custom overlay on top of their surroundings to cover up the graffiti and filth.
“Personally, as a parent, I definitely have concerns about the increasing allure of virtual worlds. I’ve seen people disappear into World of Warcraft and never really come back out, and that bothers me. And that’s an extremely rudimentary world, compared to what’s on the horizon.
“When every dream, every sensation, and every ambition can be satisfied digitally, I don’t know what that’ll mean for the future of our society. I suspect the streets will be a lot quieter.”
Emmet O’Cuana
Nate Simpson can be found on Twitter @NatSonofSimp and at www.nonplayercomic.com
