Saga and Nimona Unlocked Permission for Villains
Colleen AF Venable and Stephanie Yue are inverting the moral axis in Katie the Catsitter: Villain Con. This graphic novel sequel features a young woman who now works directly for the antagonists from the first book.
They're betting that an all-ages audience will follow someone actively making destructive choices. That permission came from somewhere specific, and understanding where it came from changes what this sequel actually is.
In 2015, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga spent three years proving something publishers thought impossible — a comic aimed at teenagers that centered a deserter soldier and an alien princess fleeing galactic war became a structural template instead. That same year, Nimona by ND Stevenson published a graphic novel about a shapeshifter helping an amoral supervillain destroy a city. The child audience followed her anyway.
The villain stayed a villain. She was never redeemed. Both books proved that young readers don't require moral rehabilitation of their protagonists — they require honesty about what those characters actually are. Publishers had previously assumed young readers needed clarity about who to cheer for, defaulting to redemption arcs. Saga and Nimona documented permission instead, showing the industry it could greenlight stories where bad people do bad things for comprehensible reasons and the audience stays engaged because the internal logic doesn't blink.
Villain Con walks through a door both books unlocked. Venable and Yue inherit not just a narrative mode but a readership primed to follow someone doing harm if the work that follows them is rigorous enough. That permission structure now extends across the industry. What changes when the premise itself stops being a risk and becomes a formula is that the work has to distinguish itself by something other than moral inversion. The sequel's actual challenge isn't convincing readers to follow a villain. It's asking what happens when they do. When following matters more than judging.
