Noelle Stevenson
American
Noelle Stevenson is a comic artist and freelance illustrator residing in Los Angeles, California. She is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art and has done published work for BOOM! Studios, Random House, MacMillan Press, and What Pumpkin Studios, among others. She is the co-writer of Lumberjanes, a comic series from BOOM! Box, and has also written for Frederator's Bravest Warriors.
Noelle has been nominated for a Harvey Award, and was awarded the Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Webcomic in 2012. She is currently working on her first comic, NIMONA, which is being serialized online and will be published by HarperCollins as a young adult graphic novel in the spring of 2015. In her spare time she can be found drawing superheroes and talking about bad TV.
Author's Comment
I think the stories that kids grow up on change their perception of how they see themselves. For kids, characters are very important, because they project themselves onto the protagonists and learn life lessons through them. If a boy grows up reading about people who are like him, going on adventures, slaying dragons, and rescuing princesses, that can affect how he will see himself and what he believes he’s capable of as he grows up. Whereas a girl who sees female characters behave only in a certain way, might not think the same possibilities that exist for a boy can exist for her. The same thing can be said for a kid of color. You’re putting limitations on their imaginations. If kids see someone who looks like them succeeding and failing in the pages of a book and learning lessons, their ideas of themselves broaden.