"The End" Week: Nexus #80!

Every year, there's always one issue I'm surprised we haven't hit before! We might have mentioned it, but time to dig in: from 1991, Nexus #80, "Prelude to a Kiss-Off" Written by Mike Baron, pencils by Hugh Haynes, inks by Arne Starr. Cover by Les Dorscheid. 

Dragon lady-type (not literally!) Ursula is torturing her kids' nanny, former interim Nexus Lonnie Loomis, to see if she still had powers: she decides no, but then finds her young daughters Sheena and Scarlett spying on her, and drags them off for punishment. Lonnie did have at least some powers left though, and manages to escape, accidentally killing a guard in the process. Meanwhile, on Ylum, Horatio Hellpop was Nexus again, and kills a corrupt businessman who was buying a condo there. (That seems like a poor choice of location for a murderer to buy a place!) Horatio is a little put off that he had to snuff a guy in front of his wife, but honestly, that was how he rolled: he wasn't going to wait and kill him in the bathroom or anything. Sundra tries to comfort him, but also light a fire under his ass, since they had to go a museum opening, since Horatio had donated most of the exhibits.

A ton of fun cameos there, from Badger and his supporting cast, Grimjack, Skeevo from Dreadstar (a great character I wish could still be used!), Space Ghost, Bruce Lee, and Elvis...Unfortunately, at the opening Horatio has to deal with the new ambassador from Earth and her husband, but when he and Sundra leave, Lonnie is in their car, and warns them the ambassador was actually a spy for Ursula, who was building an army of women. (The women were treated as second-class citizens by their religious zealot men, but were now fanatics themselves for Ursula, who trained them and gave them opportunity to prove themselves.) It's bad news, but then Horatio has to tell Lonnie that when he had to kill the replacement Nexus Stanislaus Korivitsky, Lonnie's little sister Michana had been powering him, and Horatio had been forced to kill her as well. Lonnie says no, she couldn't tell how, but Michana was still alive...

Somewhere, deep in an asteroid belt, Michana has a tea party with a stone copy of her stuffed animal Otis, and fantasizes about her mother and sister Stacy coming for her, and not that rat traitor Lonnie. (The Loomis sisters all got powers in the Next Nexus limited, to avenge their dad, who of course had been killed by Horatio.) Michana's mom doesn't come for her, but Ursula does; which might be biting off more than she can chew. Michana was a formerly spoiled little girl turned stone psycho-killer, with all the Nexus fusion-casting powers and zero compunction against killing...to be continued? 

Eventually! As we mentioned when we looked at Grimjack's last issue, First Comics was trying to transition from monthly comics to squarebound one-shots or limited series. On the creative side, that seemed like a good idea: less burnout, more time to make something a special event. But on the sales side, that sounds like a nightmare: unless you have a lot of books in the pike, you don't have the steady stream of income like you would with monthlies, and pre-internet First would've had to maybe spend more to get the word out? Sadly, First Comics would go under in 1992. But Nexus would return, with original artist/co-creator Steve Rude for the Origin and Alien Justice in 1992 at Dark Horse, although it felt like a much longer gap. The letters page for the last First issue also mentions Nexus the Liberator as a two-issue deluxe, but it would instead also be released by Dark Horse in 1992 as a four-issue mini. Nexus continues, sporadically, to this day: the most recent was Nexus: Scourge from 2024. Oddly, both Baron and Rude are still working on Nexus, but separately! I don't know if there was any animosity, or if they both just wanted to do their own things with the character, or maybe their schedules didn't line up to keep working on it together.