The Review Daemon: Ruby Nation

Synopsis:

Written and drawn by Neil Kapit, Ruby Nation is a dystopian sci-fi tale of nanomachine powered superheros (and villains), evil scientists, and plots to take over the world.  The chief protagonist, a young woman named Ruby, was a normal college-bound student before some mad-science with nanomachines turned her into a 9 foot tall super with electro-magnetic powers.  She ends up leading a group of similar “post-humans” in a resistance against the mad-scientist conspiracy in an effort to prevent them from taking over the world.  They don’t succeed.

Intrigued? Good.

What I Liked:

One of the things that I enjoyed most about Ruby Nation was the time spent developing characters.  Many action movies/comics spend too much time with fights and blowing things up and forget to help us understand who the heroes are and what motivates them, leading to shallow wraiths of characters.  Kapit spends perhaps a little TOO much time developing them, a refreshing fault to have.

We see here that Kapit takes every opportunity to tell us a little bit about his characters.  Here, in Ruby’s first appearance, we are faced with the contrast of her super-human fighting abilities with her desire to avoid violence.  This is marvelous storytelling, conveyed simply and without too many words.

The potential fault I mentioned earlier lies in the fact that with each comic chapter comes a text-heavy several page update, often either a diary or letter written by one of the protagonists.  These updates do come with a few illustrations, which lessens the “wall of text” effect, but Kapit relies a little to heavily, in my opinion, on these narrative asides to tell us what the character is thinking or feeling, especially when he has already shown that he can accomplish that well via the main comic story itself.  However, the prose itself is generally very well done and it does provide a lot of insight into the characters in less pages.

I also greatly enjoyed the thought and development that obviously went into the background of the world.  Kapit has obviously thought about it a lot, from the scientific aspects to the diversity of the cast and their powers.

What I Didn’t:

To me, Ruby Nation does not strike me as that visually appealing.  I enjoyed the story and grew attached to the characters, but the art didn’t quite do it for me.  I am not enough of an artist to note anything technically wrong with it.  On the contrary, Kapit’s style is consistent throughout, he uses shading well to compensate for the lack of color, and has a lot of detail in his line work.  But the style just feels to me almost like it’s messy, almost half finished.  Like these are the pencils ready to be polished, inked and then colored.  I am probably just used to a different artistic style, but the art was not something I particularly enjoyed.

Like I mentioned earlier, there is a bit of a tendency for the characters to overly narrate and tell us what they are thinking and feeling, instead of allowing us to discover it as the story progresses.  They are so free with their thoughts that there is not much in the way of mystery in their motivations or even in the plot, as each character (even the “bad guys”) tell us what they are going to do, why, and then they do it.  The characters have an interesting level of depth, but I feel like I learned about it all at once instead of getting to figure it out bit by bit as I read, one of my favorite parts about reading stories.

Summary:

Ruby Nation is an interesting dystopian superhero story with characters more fleshed out than the average action hero.  While the art style was not to my liking, Kapit is consistent with a high level of detail and good use of shading that conveys his characters actions and emotions well.  An increased emphasis on “Show, Don’t Tell”, something Kapit is demonstrably capable of, would strengthen the appeal of the story for me, as would being less forthcoming with characters motivations to allow for a sense of mystery.

I’d recommend that you check out Ruby Nation, which you can read for free online, and see for yourself the world Kapit has created.

3.5/5 stars.