So perhaps, dear heart, we shall begin at the most logical place: imagine with me the sensation of a great steel pike impaling itself on your skull, piercing between the eyes and poking out from the other side. People do survive such injuries, you know.
Open your eyes then and glance again at Nemesis the Warlock in front of you. Smear away the blood and viscera, focus on the drawings. Focus on the mortification, if you will. The shame that courses like fire through the pistons of the heart. The overwhelming disgust with the obligations of the corporeal. You’ve still got a sharpened pike stabbed through your head. Everything smells sharp, like ozone. Is this shock? The figures on the page seem to have been skinned, fat and flesh pulled back to reveal muscle and chrome. The two most basic textures of the organic: muscle and chrome.
They really were onto something back then, the Brits, when they set off on that miraculous explosion of creativity in the late '70s. Not just comics, I’m sure, but for today we’re talking about comics. One comic in specific for the moment - let’s start with Prog 167 of 2000 AD, dated to 5 July, 1980. Three years and counting into one of the great anthologies in comic book history. The cover features a dark figure riding on rocket skis - a similar contraption to the one Orion rides on the cover of the first issue of The New Gods. This isn’t Nemesis, mind you, but one of the Terminators, the army of zealots sent by the villain Torquemada for the purpose of hunting Nemesis to ground. Just a foot soldier.
Nemesis is on that cover, but he’s not the central figure. On the left side of the image there’s a tall thin panel with what appears to be a serrated arrowhead falling straight down. That’s a space ship, a Blitzspear - not built, but grown, caught and tamed, prior to being refitted for interstellar travel. We don’t actually see Nemesis for the first few episodes of his adventures, just his ship cruising through the highways of Termight, the former Terra. And we don’t meet him until a flashback, the origin of his sword (“The Sword Sinister,” from 1981’s 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special). Torquemada commands a schmuck named Olric to journey into the great wide galaxy in search of a magic sword, and so Olric undergoes a 15-year quest to do just that - only for Nemesis to pop out at the last minute and claim his sword from poor Olric.
Perhaps it might be time to stop a moment and examine that design. It really is a striking bit of character work, Nemesis. The most remarkable aspect from a visual standpoint is that the strip takes for granted that Kevin O'Neill’s most bizarre work should be accepted at face value. It doesn’t really work for any number of reasons - or rather, it shouldn’t work for any number of reasons. In the first place, Nemesis has a nose like a serrated arrowhead, just like his Blitzspear. How amazing to realize that Nemesis has a ship shaped like his own head, an egocentric branding exercise beyond the most toyetic imaginations of Batman. His nose is jutting away from a grate of metallic teeth. His mouth, such as it is, appears to occupy his entire neck.
In practice, the face reminds me of Cerebus’s mouth for being another design that absolutely does not work at all if you try to imagine it in three dimensions as drawn on the page. And yet, when you see it on the page, well - it makes sense there. He doesn’t seem to have any trouble getting around.
What is startling about this enormously finicky design is that many artists other than Kevin O’Neill have taken turns drawing it. The first volume of Rebellion’s new five-part Nemesis the Warlock - The Definitive Edition begins with the earliest Nemesis short stories from 1980 and early 1981, followed by the first “Book” of Nemesis, “The World of Termight,” which ran in the latter half of 1981. These early features are all drawn by Kevin O’Neill, and they are throughout remarkably dense and evocative pieces. The series shifts gears for Book 2, “The Alien Alliance,” drawn by Jesus Redondo. What a daunting assignment, strapping on the shoes of one of the most inimitable artistic talents of the century! Books 3 and 4, which aren't included in the present volume, see O’Neill return before segueing into Bryan Talbot. It keeps going from there.
But then, I haven’t mentioned the other half of Nemesis’ parentage. Pat Mills was there too, and it’s down to him that the series keeps an even keel after O’Neill drifts away. Certainly, Mills and O’Neill were a special tandem. But Mills knew how to adapt to different artists - one of his singular strengths as a writer, I think, and that’s down to the nature of the 2000 AD production machinery.
The one word I associate with the British mode of comics production, above all else, is density. These are packed stories, as are just about every feature from 2000 AD, as well as every other British comics publication of that time. A little bit later, when all these British writers and artists started getting work in the United States in the early '80s, what we Yanks would come to call (with our typical paucity of imagination) the “British Invasion” - that density became a type of calling card for the breed. When Alan Moore started writing American comics in the early '80s, one of the reasons those stories took off so quickly was the sheer efficiency of his pacing. A manifest difference when set in the midst of an American comic culture long used to stretching their material to fit a larger monthly allotment: “How am I ever going to fill 22 pages this month?” as opposed to “How am I going to fit everything I want into only six pages this week?”
The trick, of course, is to maintain that density without letting it bog you down. These early Nemesis strips capture that ratio at just the perfect balance. A lot happens, and you have to pay attention, but it goes by in a mighty hurry.
So, we’ve been talking around the subject for about a thousand words, but: just what is Nemesis the Warlock, anyway? We know that Pat Mills wrote it, and Kevin O’Neill drew it first, followed by Jesus Redondo. It’s a sci-fi serial that ran sporadically over the course of the two decades in 2000 AD, and it is one of the most purely misanthropic artifacts in genre comics history.
The premise of the strip is that by the time the human race reaches the stars we have gone absolutely stark raving mad. The existence of aliens elicits a return to the most savage atavism, fueling a crusade of interplanetary genocide under the guidance of a dictatorship modeled on the most punitive chapters of Catholic history. In no uncertain terms the human race is the villain here, led by the sadistic Tomás de Torquemada, an enthusiastic and talented torturer whose duty it is to scrub the galaxy clean of all aliens. He’s also the reincarnation of the original Torquemada, the 15th century Dominican at the head of the Spanish Inquisition, but that’s another story for another day.
Nemesis, the Warlock, is the alien freedom fighter leading the resistance to Torquemada and his inquisitors, a group known as Credo consisting of both alien and human guerrillas. As both a warrior and a wizard, Nemesis is an individual of peerless skill, driven and uniquely talented. Against a galactic empire built on torture, slavery and genocide, Nemesis carries into battle absolute moral clarity. For a space dragon with a metal grill for a neck and a giant anchor for a nose he seems almost a swashbuckler, redolent in his own way of Leiji Matsumoto’s similarly driven, similarly Byronic Captain Harlock.
Although this isn’t the first nor the fiftieth time I’ve noted the stark difference in subject matter for different branches of the comics Anglosphere, it never ceases to amaze. 2000 AD is ostensibly a kids' comic, but Nemesis reads closer to the American underground tradition than so many actual American comic books of the period, still at the time subject to the censorious whims of the Comics Code Authority. The CCA was still a factor in American comics until just after the turn of the century, when they spiked an issue of X-Force with bikini babes drawn by Mike Allred, and Joe Quesada was naturally confused as to why Marvel was still wasting time and money sending its books to be censored. Kevin O’Neill is, incidentally, the only artist whose work was ever wholesale rejected by that organization, in the early '80s. Go back and check: there’s no CCA seal on the cover of the 1986 Green Lantern Corps Annual where Moore & O’Neill outlined Geoff Johns’ later run on Green Lantern, because that shit was too sick.
So too with Nemesis: that shit is too sick, too sick by far. If you’ve ever read Spain Rodriguez’s Trashman there’s a bit of a kinship there, I think: hardass storytelling fueled by nothing so much as audacious disregard for the animating hypocrisies of the epoch. The closest Marvel was capable of approaching Nemesis was probably Mantlo’s & Golden’s early Micronauts, which comparison is both a compliment and not at all a compliment. Visually imaginative sci-fi built on dense toyetic lore, only it hits a little different when you’re actually selling real toys and still running your stories past censors who probably had more in common with Torquemada than Nemesis.
The inescapable xenophobia at the heart of human society is the enemy at the center of Torquemada’s empire; an all-encompassing fear of the Other is the only sensation strong and sharp enough to break through the comfort of a population for whom the most important principle must at all times remain unrestricted use of commercial highways. Those earliest Nemesis stories introduce Torquemada as the Chief of the Tube Police, after all - he’s given a promotion later. Although the series changes slightly in the transition from the early short features to longer narratives, these very first stories are more insightful than their flippant tone might otherwise convey. If freedom is simply being able to drive where you want to drive, there’s no greater sin than blocking traffic. Blocking traffic is, perforce, worse than Hitler. A familiar lament.
Kevin O’Neill was a distinctive and idiosyncratic presence on the page. His understanding of texture was acute like a nightmare: he was good at drawing flesh and metal both, and he could make both human meat and gleaming machinery seem positively putrid with illness. Nemesis is a tightly drawn strip, and the pictures are unerringly nauseating: vast towers of bone and tendon reaching into the sky, indistinguishable from the metallic armor of the Terminators, refulgent in their carapaces. It’s a universe of vast grotesquerie, from the torture pits in the deeps of the Termight empire to the alien lanes haunted by mature Blitzspears. The British mode of production meant that a single six-page Nemesis strip would have all that magic compressed into a series of half- and third-page splash panels, with heaps of didactic narration to carry the reader along the way. Both Mills and O’Neill get to have their say in the finished product here.
Reading through this collection it might seem natural to wince at O’Neill’s departure, but Jesus Redondo deserves a round of applause as well. Certainly, there’s less in the way of the sheer gonzo invention that animates O’Neill’s pencils, but in its place there’s a refined sense of deadpan. O’Neill’s first “Book” of Nemesis is essentially an extended battle between Nemesis and Torquemada, while the second is a story about politics, and Nemesis’ role as the head of the confederacy of aliens opposing Earth’s xenocidal crusade. Any skepticism I had over Redondo’s ability to carry the feature evaporated the moment giant spiders appeared to take a load of prisoners to the planet Arachnos. Imagine, for a moment, giant spiders flying giant spaceships shaped like spiders to take their prisoners away. Would O’Neill have managed to nail these giant spiders with the same uncanny, trembling fear as Redondo? Undoubtedly he would have made it memorable and grotesque, but Redondo’s spiders actually look like real spiders, and they’re awful.
Redondo can’t help but treat the material with slightly more seriousness than O’Neill. Even when drawing the grimmest, most macabre scenes, O’Neill somehow managed to keep that tongue firmly in cheek. There’s no mistaking O’Neill’s and Pat Mills’ Marshal Law for anything but satire, of course, but O’Neill also drew a few pieces for Marvel’s Hellraiser around that same time, as well as a Marshal Law crossover. Hellraiser is not a franchise with a reputation for particularly funny stories, yet O’Neill’s Pinhead was a reminder of the ultimate absurdity of a character whose main visual gimmick is being openly flayed. Such a very British profligacy: a deep commitment to splatterpunk as a way of life.
There are a handful of color pinups scattered throughout the present volume, action poses for Torquemada and Nemesis and their various accoutrements. There’s a piece from Prog 195, 17 January, 1981, of the “Official Gundola,” a bright red mobile tank with a pulpit for Torquemada and seats for various Terminator underlings. It looks for all the world like a toy advertisement from another universe. This was just before the dawn of the Real American Hero era of G.I. Joe and the debut of Masters of the Universe, after all, and there’s something so very charming in imagining a series of 3 3/4” plastic dolls based on this story of intergalactic genocide and the hideous aliens dedicated to toppling humanity. It would be a great setup for a toy line if it weren’t for that fact that the humans are the bad guys.
At its deepest, darkest core, Nemesis is a story about how xenophobia is so central to the human experience that disgust over the existence of aliens would derail literally every other political program. This disgust enables the species to be run into the ground by the whims of authoritarian sadists running a literal torture cult, a vast religious infrastructure dedicated to maintaining the rule of a literal revenant spirit. Torquemada dies in that very first run of stories but throughout the rest of the saga his disembodied ghost has no qualms about killing an immense number of people to maintain his grip on the world of the living. You can’t say they didn’t hit it right on the nose with that one.
The post Nemesis the Warlock – The Definitive Edition Vol. 1 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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