The film had its beginnings in 2015, the same year the book was published, and is that rarest of Hollywood literary makeovers. For decades, gay characters and relationships in literary classics were straightwashed on the big screen, whether in “The Maltese Falcon” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” or “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “The Color Purple.”
In “Nimona,” the story became more queer friendly on its way to Hollywood, not less.
For Stevenson, much of the book spoke to his own upbringing and experiences. “Coming from a really conservative family and the evangelical church in the South,” he said, “the story is definitely a reaction to that.”
On a recent afternoon, Stevenson was at the Netflix Animation studio in Burbank discussing how his film came to be. Dressed in a green “Big Sur Monterey County” sweatshirt and flannel trousers, his red hair cut short, Stevenson talked about his background, his beginnings as an artist and how the story morphed — much like the shape-shifting Nimona — on its way from book to screen.
Stevenson, 31, was born and raised in Columbia, S.C., the middle child of five siblings. After years of home-schooling and two more at the local high school, he went to the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he began posting Nimona comics online in 2012, a project that became his senior thesis. “When I first started making the comic, I didn’t consider myself a writer,” he said. “I was in school for illustration. But comics was kind of my way of tricking myself into thinking like, no, I am a writer.”
Online, the series quickly gained fans, and in graphic novel form, “Nimona” won several awards including an Eisner, the comics industry’s most prestigious honor, and was a National Book Award finalist. Stevenson was 24. That year, Fox Animation acquired the rights to make an animated feature based on the comic, and called on Blue Sky Studios (the “Ice Age” franchise) to make it.
The next five years were busy and creative ones. In addition to adapting “Nimona,” Stevenson collaborated with several others in creating and writing “Lumberjanes,” an Eisner-winning comic book series set in a summer camp for “hardcore lady types.” He also became the show runner of the DreamWorks series “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,” a fantastical, queer-friendly reboot of the 1980s cartoon, which went on to win an Emmy and a GLAAD Media Award.
