The first huge collection of the epic in the style of the Dredd case files - with excellent art from Kevin O Niell.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34025 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

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Customer Reviews

Be pure , be vigilant... b.s.
The sparkling reviews on this page are, I suspect, from nostalgic throwbacks or young teens. I found the typical serialised comicbook story arcs in this stretched my patience and the plot substance to annoying extremes. And the fact that each installment is only four pages and then comes a recap made it even harder on me. It's alright, nothing spesh.

Credo!
Pat Mills loves anarchy. Like most British writers of any importance over the last thirty years, he is anti-authority, loving to satire modern life in its vacuousness savagely. Sometimes the satire is so brutal and over the top it overtakes all else in the story he's telling. But that's good. And that's why he is so important.

Interestingly the two most powerful satires Mills has written, Marshal Law and Nemesis (you may disagree, but that doesn't mean this review isn't helpful), are drawn by Kev O'Neill, a strong stylist who is distinctly unsubtle in his art, which some people may not find to their taste. More fool them. Nemesis is like a science fiction version of a Steve Bell or Gerald Scarfe political cartoon.

Nemesis is an alien warlock. His design is surely one of the most unique and endearing in popular culture, horselike with a torpedo nose. He travels the universe battling the forces of Torquemada, a descendant of the Spanish Inquisitor, who runs the Termight (Earth) Empire with a right wing fist, committing genocide on anything outside his view of normal. Torquemada is pure evil, and he just keeps coming back, no matter how many times Nemesis kills him.

This might sound tiresome, but there is a very British sense of humour at work. Like Monty Python, or an episode of Dangermouse, you get a view of a universe cast in the British class system, with chirpy working classes and chinless fops. The sense of humour even feels a bit nostalgic these days which adds to the fun.

The first four books of a ten book cycle are presented here, including the original stories that introduced Nemesis. The writing is anti-authority but playful with it. Kev O'Neill's work is wonderfully overdetailed and matched only by the brilliant Bryan Talbot on the Victoriana parody the Gothic Empire which introduces Nemesis' son and adds the ABC warriors to the cast.

This is a big book and you'll need time to digest the fantastically overdetailled art and bombastic plotting. But if you like things a bit larger than life, if you think the world is a stupid place run by idiots, give it a go. It's an important part of British comics history.

Classic British Comic Storytelling
Nemesis the Warlock is unquestionably one of the more esoteric stories to ever grace the pages of 2000AD. Growing out of the frankly ludicrous "Comic Rock" stories, where a popular song of the day would be transformed into some kind of weird tale within the pages of the comic, bizarrely, Nemesis' roots belong to the Jam's "Going Underground". Quite what this has to do with anything, I'm not sure, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Pat Mills has created so many great stories and characters, but Nemesis is one of the strangest, and the most successful. These early stories collected here capture exactly why the British comics industry of the late seventies and early eighties were so successful. The unbridled creativity that flows through every panel is simply staggering, and one gets the impression that Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill were just throwing everything they had at the page, regardless of whether it made sense or not. They seem to be just lost in the moment, going at it with reckless abandon. And by god, it works!

Ignoring for a moment that the `hero' of the story is a cloven hoofed demon, Grand Master of Terra, Tomas de Torquemada must be one of the greatest comics characters ever created. Malevolently evil, delightfully unhinged, and terrifyingly grotesque, there simply isn't another character like him in the comics world that I can think of. Defying the laws of physics, and dying in almost every story, he best exemplifies how thrilling it is to read the early Nemesis material. As evidence of their unrestrained artistic explosion, Mills has Torquemada repeatedly killed on these pages, but never once decides to give a coherent explanation as to why this can happen. He just assumes that the reader is caught up in the story as much as he is, and also allows us the freedom to try and think about it for ourselves. Nemesis is a comic which treats the reader with a great deal of respect, and never panders to them. Sure it's violent, disgusting and ridiculous, but it's also thought provoking, well written, witty, exciting and smart enough to revel in the whole ridiculousness of comic storytelling.

This volume is an absolute treat, and just shows how easy it is to preserve the history and heritage of these stories. All the archival material is included, covers, interviews, supplementary stories, etc, and nothing is left out. When the last of these books comes out, we really will have the COMPLETE Nemesis collection.