COMICCRITIQUE

"Mr. Turner's artwork compliments the premise of Nil perfectly. It is stark, precise, and unapologetic in its originality. Each character is similar, but at the same time vastly different from one another. Each inhabitant is pale and dressed in black, almost Victorian in styling. After a short ways into the book, one can tell the players apart simply by the way they speak. That's not to say that there is any trouble, visually, in that department either. Each character has his or her own physical look, personality, and language that separates them from the rest. It is just as delightful to read the artwork as it is the text, which happen to go together like a screw through a nut."

Matt Rawson

Full review here.

BOOKLIST

*Starred Review*

"Impersonal regularity perversely predominates in the visually repetitive black-and-white land of Nil, as it does in the weirdly attractive milieus of classic dystopian novels (Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World) and films (Lang's Metropolis). As becomes, or comes easier to, a graphic novel, Nil is, however, very much a comedy, reminiscent in tone and, eventually, incident of Richard Lester's antiwar movie (featuring John Lennon) How I Won the War. "

Ray Olson

Full review here.

COMIXFAN

"This book mocks everything: from pop culture to religion, from love to logic, and everything in between, all lined with a contempt and disdain for bureaucracy. Topped off with a complete fusion of story and art, where the visuals truly can be read, and often have text on them anyway. This won't be confused for Alex Ross painting over John Cassaday's pencils, but as visually stunning as that would be, that could never achieve what the art achieves here. This is a complete rejection of pin-up art in order to embrace art as a narrative. Which is the greatest strength of this graphic novel, every flaw that I could point out, is made irrelevant. The flaws are elements that are so actively avoided that they, instead, are an atypical storytelling frontier. And as such, there is really only one truly honest question to analyze the book by; did I enjoy it? And to that question, I must answer with an emphatic "YES!" I laughed, almost constantly, and I thought. There aren't many stories out there that can be simultaniously genuinely funny and genuinely thought-provoking. Even leading me to question my own beliefs. I can't say everyone will find the book funny, as humor is constantly and repeatedly subjective. "

Dylan McKay

Full review here.

NEWSARAMA

"Here's why Nil is such a great book and why you should read it. It's intelligent- probably the single most witty and enjoyable political, social and philosophical satire that I've ever read in comics form. Nil is a land of Nihilists. They're at war with the sickeningly cheerful Optimans. Nileans don¹t believe in anything. In fact, in order to prevent the corruption of life (life being, to their thinking, a never-ending state of degradation), Nil's leaders enact a policy of harvesting women's eggs so that they will not be sullied by the influence of sperm. That's funny.

"Read Nil so that you can see political and religious leaders rant at length about the hypocrisy of life, so that you can see our hero Nul reduce true love to basic biochemistry impulses, so that you can see demons unleash the ultimate plan for remaining on Earth. Read it so that you can see what great design work James Turner did when putting together each page of this book. "

Michael C. Lorah

Full review here.

PAPERBACK READER

"James Turner's Nil is a brilliantly executed political satire and a hysterically funny dark comedy. The country of Nil's ideology is nihilism, they believe in nothing. Of course, such a paradoxical belief system can be hard to sustain, so the crews of deconstruction ships, like the Derrida, are dispatched to destroy new belief systems before they can infect the populous."

David Bird

Full review here.