About a year or so back we looked at Quality's
Spellbinders #1 reprint book featured "
The Gothic Empire" and didn't start with his first appearance. So I was scratching my head why this one started with the first appearance, but duh, it's an earlier reprint from Eagle Comics: from 1984,
Nemesis the Warlock #1, featuring "The Terror Tube" Written by Pat Mills, art by Kev (Kevin) O'Neill. Originally presented in 1980's
2000 AD and Tornado #167, which also featured Sam Slade, the Stainless Steel Rat, and Judge Dredd in the middle of the "Judge Child" storyline.
I know Dredd's stories also had nightmarish highways, but I couldn't say if they appeared before these. Then again, the underground travel tubes of the planet "Termight" are an even more nightmarish police state, overseen by "your friendly guardian of law and order," the masked Torquemada. "Be pure! Be vigilant!
Behave!" The name's a pretty big red flag, yeah. And unlike Dredd, the fascist cops aren't the good guys here: instead, we have the mysterious Nemesis, head of the resistance group "Credo." While he's behind the wheel of his craft, the Blitzspear; we don't actually see Nemesis in his first episode! Conversely, we see a lot of Torquemada and what would be a recurring pattern for him: going after Nemesis, throwing underlings and bystanders under the bus (figuratively, probably occasionally literally) to save his own neck, then getting killed anyway in a manner esoteric enough for him to almost immediately return the next chapter, often at the expense of any of his underlings who maybe thought they could move up the ladder.
The next chapter establishes the seat of Torquemada's power and Nemesis's rebellion against it: "Termight" was once earth, allegedly nearly destroyed by aliens. That seems dubious, like they were being scapegoated; but humanity had rebuilt itself into a vast, and cruel, galactic empire; intent on exterminating aliens everywhere. Nemesis, of course, is an alien; possessed of strange and unearthly powers. And goals, for that matter: eventually I think the series presented him as not as bad as Torquemada, but not necessarily what we would consider 'good' either. He does have the traditional green and purple color scheme of a lot of villains--and the Hulk. Nemesis isn't my favorite
2000 AD feature, but still worth reading.
Oddly, I think I bought this issue and a bunch of other Mills/O'Neill stuff together, namely several issues of Marshal Law. Who also isn't traditionally heroic either, but is also great!
This one is a classic. I know I've mentioned it before but Kevin O'Neill did some reworking of the art for this version so that it would fit the page dimensions better. That just shows how much this story means to him.
ReplyDeleteSome interesting (to me, at least) things about the stories- the whole Terror Tube concept actually came from a Ro-Busters story that Pat and Kevin had done together and wasn't originally meant to be the start of a new series. That and the next story were part of a series called Comic Rock, which were comics to read while listening to particular albums. They enjoyed doing these stories enough that they decided to turn it into its own series.
Good call on the bus thing (way truer than you may realize) and the Nemesis being the lesser of two evils thing.