Noelle Stevenson’s comics memoir The Fire Never Goes Out is a beautiful tragedy

Image: HarperCollins Books

The Nimona creator and She-Ra showrunner offers a window into her world

It’s easy to see comics artist and TV creator Noelle Stevenson as an unmitigated success. As her new autobiographical graphic novel The Fire Never Goes Out notes, she was 25 in 2015, when her award-winning independent webcomic Nimona was published as a book. That same year, she started writing for television, she helped create and launch the comic Lumberjanes, she wrote a Thor story for Marvel and a Wonder Woman tale for DC, and she took over the Marvel comic Runaways. From there, she went on to become the showrunner for Netflix’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which immediately built a strong fandom among young women.

But while Stevenson was developing and presenting this wave of strong, confidently voiced work, she was also quietly posting doodly little comic strips to Tumblr, telling personal stories about romantic rejection and alienation, depression and self-harm. She often drew herself with a giant hole in the middle of her body, which in various strips housed a flower, or emanated a self-hating specter, or filled with flames. In these mini-strips, she tracked her professional successes and personal failures, her hopes for the future, and above all, her struggles with feelings of emptiness and doubt. The Fire Never Goes Out collects those strips, and functions as a spotty diary of Stevenson’s life from 2011 to 2019. It’s partly a peek behind the scenes of her public life, and partly a memoir of mental illness and recovery. But above all, it’s a strikingly personal look inside her head, or inside that gaping bodily hole where she couldn’t figure out what was missing.

Image: Noelle Stevenson/HarperCollins

Noelle from 2016 discusses her life with Noelle from 2011

The book’s many simple, sketchy black-and-white comic strips are a perfect illustration of self-doubt. Given entire pages to play with, Stevenson repeatedly draws herself as a tiny figure who talks in small, claustrophobic lettering. Her self-portraits are chunky and diminutive, with abundant white space dwarfing them. They’re simple and cartoonish, but expressive, with bags under their eyes and strained, sometimes resentful faces. Where Stevenson’s Nimona art or her humor strips re-imagining Lord of the Rings characters as bar-hopping hipsters fill up screens from edge to edge with color and action, her personal comics shrink into the center of pages until they feel like small, interior voices whispering out her doubts.

But the strips also show an artistic life in flux, as Stevenson plays with styles — sometimes drawing herself as angular and bendy, sometimes stylized as a shadow or a pile of ash, sometimes as a fully drawn, perky young woman, happy with her hair and clothes. The drawings come in duotones or color, shaded or in line drawings, in images randomly scattered across a page sketchbook-style, or ordered into boxes like a formal comic strip. They feel like experiments: as Stevenson works on figuring out who she is, she also works out how to tell her story effectively, and how to match images and words in a way that suits the sensation of the moment.

Stevenson is fighting a lot of battles in these strips — figuring out her sexuality, figuring out how to physically present herself to fit the identity she feels, trying to understand why she feels so hollow, navigating art school and the professional world. Fans looking for specifics won’t find many here — there are vague allusions to an ill-advised, doomed relationship, or to a mental-health diagnosis, but they’re generally couched more in poetic and artful language than in concrete facts. (One chapter detailing a relationship is literally a mixtape, with art fitted to selected lyrics telling an emotional story.)

Similarly, The Fire Never Goes Out isn’t the kind of in-depth memoir where behind-the-scenes story fans are going to learn what went into developing She-Ra or laying out the story beats in Nimona. Chapter brackets laying out the transitions from one year to another often list her achievements and check in about how she feels, but much of the rest of the book feels like an emotional highlight (and lowlight) collection from an Hourly Comic Day, focused on shifting feelings and occasional quotidian moments.

Image: Noelle Stevenson/HarperCollins

Older Noelle holds younger, burning Noelle

But the book feels raw and personal in a way that eclipses the usual structure of a memoir. It’s an open admission that an illusion of strength and competence can hide a core of insecurity, and that even the most talented creators can struggle with feeling like frauds. There’s a winsomeness to Stevenson’s version of a confessional — her cartoon versions of herself are nakedly vulnerable and hurting, but they’re also frankly adorably drawn and appealing. And readers who’ve followed Stevenson’s career and identify with her in any way — particularly her most expressive core audience, of young, questing queer people who are similarly finding themselves — are likely to connect not just to the message, but to Stevenson’s distinctive, self-effacing, artful way of communicating it.

A great many of Stevenson’s self-portrait comics revolve around that idea of something unseen inside her. In one strip, it’s an angry monster hiding inside her. In another series, jagged crystals form out of her chest, to represent her heart hardening in ways that protect her, or that stab and wound other people. In another series (“I am on fire … literally on fire all the time” it starts), she goes about her work calmly and with a straight face, while flames jet out from her center, and captions like “aaaaahhh” and “oh my god oh my god oh my god” signal the distress she isn’t expressing. But on another page, the flames at her core are portrayed positively, as a sign of inner ambition and power. The joys and tragedies of The Fire Never Goes Out all come down to that recurring image: the idea of something hidden inside her that she’s trying to process and express. Her memoir is a way of letting other people peer into this unseen personal world, and see themselves there as well.

Source: Polygon