By Pat Mills, Kevin O'Neill, Jesus Redondo and Bryan Talbot

What to expect: Insanity on an epic scale as we join Nemesis the Warlock and his long-running struggle with Torquemada, the most Evil Man in the Universe. 2000 A.D. at its lunatic best.

Buy The Complete Nemesis the Warlock - Book 1

Review by Alex Frith 

It's very difficult for me to attempt to objectively review this series. It was one of the first exposures I had to 2000 A.D., and as I'm sure creators Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill were hoping, it warped my puny brain. Irrepairably.

The set up is simple: In the far future, Earth (now called Termight) is ruled by Torquemada, the ultimate fascist bigot. He hates aliens and all things deviant. He crusades throughout the galaxy killing aliens and conquering their worlds. Occasionally he captures prisoners and takes them back home to torture.

Nemesis the Warlock is the ultimate alien, and arch, er, nemesis, to Torquemada. He is the hero of the story, and we cheer him on as he comes to Termight to help free aliens and help those humans who strive against Torquemada's bigotry, or flies to alien worlds to help them fight against Torquemada and his Terminators.

It's very much part of Mills's ethos to create a story in which the traditional villain (the alien) is the hero, and the humans are the villains. Although of course as a result of reading Nemesis from an early age, I now think of this as the norm, and find stories where humans are the heroes to be odd, disturbing and even subversive, because all humans are clearly evil.

Anyway, that's all you need to know about the story. Nemesis and Torquemada plot against each other and generally fight a lot, across nine books in an epic saga that first saw print in 2000 AD between 1980 and 1990. There followed a few short stories mostly to keep the thing ticking over, before the saga reached its ultimate end in Prog 2000, the final part of Book 10. Mills draws a surprising amount of mileage from this formula, so that each book is memorably different from the last. I guess that's the skill in being a writer for comics, a medium than in its origins is all about recurring characters who never really change.

But of course the story is only half the point. Nemesis the Warlock is yet another milestone in 2000 AD's history of introducing radical and brain-shatteringly great artists to an unsuspecting world.

In the introduction to Volume 1, Mills instantly acknowledges the importance of Kevin O'Neill in the power and impact of Nemesis. It was his 'Tube' design for an older Ro-Busters story that inspired the first Nemesis story, known as 'Terror Tube'. And it was surely O'Neill's design for the Blitzspear (Nemesis's ship, which Mills asked O'Neill to use for the face of the Warlock himself) that earned Nemesis his place in the hearts of children around the UK. Well, the ones who read 2000 AD, anyway.

Nemesis remains the most haunting and just plain weird alien I've seen. He's sort of a cross between a horse and a man, but with a whale's mouth, horns, and an external spine. I don't know if Mills asked O'Neill to make him look like the devil, but in any case that's the overall effect, and Mills certainly plays up this angle more and more as the saga progresses.

But there's so much more to the art than just Nemesis. He's not even seen in the first two stories, and there are many episodes to come in which he barely appears, if at all. Much like Judge Dredd, the joy of reading, re-reading and re-re-re-re-reading this strip is found in the world and the supporting characters - from the Time Wastes to the Tube system to Great Uncle Baal to Brother Mikron to the ABC Warriors (who turn up in books 4, 5 and 6).

And it doesn't stop there! All the artists who followed O'Neill on the strip took his cue to pour as much detail into each episode as they could manage. Admittedly none of them went quite as far as him in illuminating the borders and designing fresh logos, and arguably they couldn't quite think of as many weird bits to slot into the architecture and the character designs, but they don't half try! All of which is to say that Kevin O'Neill is an inspirational genius, and his most intense work is on display all over this epic.

Let's get down to brass tacks. Volume 1 starts with the stories 'Terror Tube' and 'Killer Watt', which set up the basics of Termight and the character of Torquemada. An accident in the telephone lines (a shockingly ignored idea) 'kills' our villain, and he becomes an ironically grotesque phantom (far weirder and scarier-looking than Nemesis). He 'survives' by inhabiting the bodies of corpses, although each can only host him for a short time. It's a neat twist on the zombie genre.

Then follows Book 1, in which Nemesis comes to Termight to liberate thousands of captured aliens. Just summing it up like that fails to do justice to the minutiae of things such as the Pandemonium, or the fate of Brother Gogol, or the timid torturer who can't seem to get into it. I've not mentioned it before, but in the great 2000 AD tradition, Nemesis the Warlock is full of comedy - a peculiarly British comedy, I think.

Book 2 sees Nemesis at his most swashbuckling and heroic, as we watch the galactic battle between the humans and the aliens. Jesus Redondo turns in the artwork (it's very obvious that O'Neill couldn't produce the pages fast enough to meet his incredibly high standards of delight and detail). Redondo does an effective job, although it's not as spectacularly weird as O'Neill. On the plus side, he's got a clever plot to work with, and his storytelling ability unfolds the action of this book at an incredibly satisfying pace. It's a bit of a thriller, rather than a dive into the pit of madness that is books 1 and 3.

Book 3 takes us first to the homeworld of the Warlock to meet Nemesis' family, and then to the world of the basilisks, where our hero tries to help the unfortunate aliens who are besieged by the Terminators. It's by far the most artistically ambitious book, with landscapes and atmosphere oozing off everywhere. I believe the centre spreads where originally printed in colour. They're not in colour here, but the art reproduction is immaculate, the only loss being details hidden in the depths of the spine.

Book 3 introduces robot lunatic Mek-Quake to the series (last seen in Ro-Busters), who provides a good dose of comedy and some spectacular fight scenes against the Torque-Armada, the Terminators' lead siege engine.

Book 3 succeeds more on style and throwaway moments than it does on overall plot, but once again, the plot is itself exciting, tense and actually makes sense. There's betrayal on both sides of the war, and we begin to explore Nemesis's dark side as he terrorises the lead Terminator. The 'skrit skrit' as Nemesis extends a razor sharp nail to scratch his nose has never been more menacing, and indeed the image becomes a shorthand for the rest of the series to remind us that our hero is far from being a 'good guy'.

Which takes us to Book 4, aka 'The Gothic Empire', which, we're told in Mills's intro, was meant to be Book 1. Apparently O'Neill's Victorian steampunk design was considered too way out for an introductory piece. Never mind, as we get to see it in the end! Sadly, O'Neill bows out of the art following two episodes. Happily, he's replaced by Bryan Talbot.

Talbot brings a new sensibility to the series, drawing the reader into the action by making the characters fleshier and generally bigger than O'Neill had done. And somehow, he achieves this without dropping the ball on the architecture and atmosphere that O'Neill has poured his soul into. You can count the bricks on Talbot's buildings, and you can push your finger into the gooey appendages of the goths.

There are parts of Book 4 where Mills seems a bit too interested in referencing Victoriana, from Jack the Ripper to the Boer War, but thankfully the strength of his characters means that this never feels like anything but a Nemesis story. Plus, we get the added bonus of the reunion of the ABC Warriors, with each (bar Deadlock), getting a fully fleshed-out characterisation. The private eye pastiche sequence involving Joe Pineapples is a personal favourite.

And it doesn't stop there! In the vein of the Strontium Dog Agency Files, Rebellion have indulged the completists by digging out covers, pin-ups and stories from Annuals and Sci-Fi Specials, including 'The Secret Life of the Blitzspear' and 'The Sword Sinister'. Unlike the Agency Files, these extras are by the original creative team, and they're great little asides into the weird world of Nemesis. Coupled with an intro from Mills and an outro from O'Neill, there's nothing missing. Frankly, it's perfection in paperback form.

Buy The Complete Nemesis the Warlock - Book 1