BE PURE! BE VIGILANT! BEHAVE!
The British anthology 2000AD started life in 1977 as a comic for boys aged about 12. Its earliest stories were spins on traditional favourites of the genre: war stories, exotic adventures in faraway places, sport strips, and the classic science fiction hero Dan Dare. But even at that point it had a streak of midnight black humour and social satire running through it, as shown most clearly by the comic’s most celebrated star, the lawman with the iron chin, Judge Dredd.
The début of Nemesis the Warlock in 1980 brought with it a lot more weirdness.
Starting in Prog 167, this demented sword and sorcery sci-fi story of a harpoon headed alien’s war against a xenocidal religious maniac owed more to continental comics like Métal hurlant than traditional British ones. Set in a nightmarish future where the promise of technology has given way to stagnation and superstition, the cruel humans of the Terran Empire are the masters of vast galactic empire made possible by an ancient piece and mysterious device built into a former Emperor’s tomb. With it, they may guide their ships far from the mighty hive cities of Terra to anywhere in the galaxy in order to purge it of alien life. Even death cannot stop their leader, the tyrannical Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada.
Only one creature can hope to stop Torquemada: the alien Khaos Sorcerer NEMESIS THE WARLOCK!
If you are even a tiny bit familiar with Warhammer 40,000 quite a lot of that description will seem really familiar. Many of the details of 40k’s Imperium in particular and the setting in general can be traced back to Nemesis, and the stories and characters featured in the comic can in turn be fed into games set in Games Workshop’s Dark Future quite easily. The author of Nemesis, Pat Mills, has even done so himself –his character Klovis the Redeemer, from the old Warhammer Monthly comic, is essentially Torquemada with a slightly different hat.
>>44307075
Technically, Nemesis didn’t start as its own series. Comic Rock was proposed as an ongoing series of stories based (loosely) on pop songs. Nemesis proved so absurdly popular so quickly that the idea was dropped.
As an aside, did you know that you could get a Nemesis for Heroclix? I didn’t until quite recently. Apparantly it was only released in limited amounts in the UK.
>>44307120
>The Jam - Going Underground
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1ct5yEuVY
The bearded man on this page is Kenny Everett, a radio DJ, comedian and TV personality who very popular in the UK at the time this was written.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VImPLTpOnkY
I am monitoring this thread.
James Cameron's film The Terminator came out in 1984. 40k's first edition was released in 1987.
>>44307183
And I'm very grateful. If you don't mind commenting from time to time that would help, as I cannot bump this.
>>44307282
Wow, these are pretty short stories, how long were the magazines on average?
To this day nobody is quite sure what music the next Comic Rock episode, Killer Watts, was based on, or what it had to do with this strip. The best guess is this compilation
http://rateyourmusic.com/release/comp/various_artists_f2/killer_watts/
>>44307318
2000AD tended to be about 28-33 pages, including the front and back cover. Individual stories (or parts of longer stories) were almost always about six pages. It does, however, come out every week.
It still has roughly the same format today, which makes it a bit different from the US style. It does, however, encourage the writers to get to the interesting bits as quickly and efficiently as possible without delay. Google "Andy Diggle Shot Glass of Rocket Fuel" to read a recent editor's thoughts on it.
Although having just said that, Killer Watts is a two part story which breaks down 4 / 3 pages, so I clearly don't know anything..
CREDO!
http://www.mediafire.com/download/tiqjrxnb5x7d054/Book+0+-+prologue.cbr
A year later, as promised, a new full-length serial began. This is that series.
NEMESIS THE WARLOCK: BOOK ONE - THE WORLD OF TERMITE
Get in the bag, filthy xeno.
Thread theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN5AxvjTJhQ
As well as the obvious demonic touches, the designs for Nemesis and Blitzspear were also inspired by motorcycle parts.
There's an easter egg for long-term 2000Ad readers on this page that hints at a later storyline.hint: It's a poster
I love that part on the last page that Terra is so awful that merely looking outside of a window can drive some Termites mad.
Guys, /tg/ is having better storytime threads than /co/. This needs to stop.bump
Oh no!Notice how Torquemada's spirit has changed from its first appearance.
>Most Pure '44
Happy Deviant Day, everyone.
Nemesis is not what you would call a traditional hero.
Wizards: No sense of right or wrong.
I love the bottom panel for all the variety it shows in the various Terminator groups.
Look at all the detail in those borders.
Looking a bit manky there Torquemada.
Based thread, have a bump
CREDO!
http://www.mediafire.com/download/s4c9tireggpenj6/Book+1+-+Termight.cbr
With the death of Torquemada we close Book One. Nemesis and Purity would shortly leave to forge a new alliance of races against the Termite Empire, never realising the horror that awaited them thereIt's Torquemada. Its always Torquemada.
Hopefully I'll be able to do some more of the next books soon, but for now I've got to take a break. Hope you enjoyed it so far!
>>44308543
>mr. PURE
>voted least likely to deviate
I love this stuff Shakaranon.
>>44308946
Literally Sisters of Battle down to the battle-organs.
>>44309099
Good thing he's not wearing the spike-boots.
>>44310663
The next book has a convent of Vestal Vampire battle sisters, just to really hammer home the point.
>>44307075
I have a question about nemesis:
What exactly about it? it feels like an overly edgy atheism/anti-racist thing.Not even /pol/, just un-ironically curious what is about and all that.
>>44311231
It's about NEMESIS, the Warlock!, obviously.
I mean, it's british humor. And it's no different than some possible interpretations of 40k.
Top notch dump, Shakaranon!
>>44311483
I meant that it doesn't feel 40k-ey fun, it just feels generic politic humor-tier, torquemada is evil, nemesis (funny name aside) is good, the end.
>>44311552
If you say so. It's so exaggerated and hyperbolic I can't take any political message it contains seriously. Pretty much like Dredd or 40k.
>>44311552
Are you for real anon? Nemesis is one of 2000AD's landmark series.It also ends nowhere near what you're saying, with both Nemesis and Torquemada essentially admitting they are evil.
This in particular was hugely inspirational to 40k. And it had a big impact on another 2000AD series, the ABC Warriors, which started out as battle robots crushing things and became totally insane, with a mad sorcerer robot with a magic sword urging them to colonize Mars for the forces of Khaos. 2000AD is and pretty much always has been a marketplace of ideas over being any one genre, political leaning or particular tone.
What are the rules for storytimes on /tg/? I'm thinking about doing Freaks' Squeele at some point over the holidays.
I could do it on /co/ but I feel like /tg/ would get a lot more out of it as an audience.
>>44311231
>Not even /pol/
Yeah fucking right. You're bringing a modern agenda into some comic published in the 70s, and trying to work out if you should like it or not based on what you think your/another agenda is.
Please either start thinking like a functioning human being, or kill yourself.
>>44311772
Jesus fuck anon chill.
>>44311663
When is nemesis exactly evil? I remember reading 5~ issues and other than the fact he's named nemesis THE WARLOCK he didn't feel evil at all. Or do anything over the top evil ala torquemada.
>>44311806
He kills hundreds of children in a terrorist attack at one point in the series.
>>44311875
Anon.
Where they eviiiil children?
>>44311906
No. What is your fucking deal, man?
>>44311922
Just reminding you that children don't have the ability to be good.
>>44311946
Of course, children are Always Chaotic Evil. It is Known.
>Shakaranon is back.
Man, you have been my nigga for years.
>>44311231
Those are pretty valid complaints, really. No one would ever accuse Pat Mills of being a subtle writer. He really enjoys undermining traditional portrayals of macho superheroic characters, usually by satirising what he sees as acts of excessive, often brainless violence by taking it to a ridiculous extreme. Have you ever seen those panels from Punisher 2099? "I don't need a jet pack -- all I need is HATE!"? That was Mills. Marshall Law? Mills. The Redeemer? Requiem: Vampire Knight? Also Mills, although the setting and idea of monster characters apparently came from the artist, Olivier Ledroit. All this adds up to a lot of characters that are ridiculously edgy. Purposefully so, but nevertheless definitely well into "ow the edge" tier. Nemesis himself is a satanic biker who uses black magic to torture and destroy his enemies, and that's when he's portrayed at his most heroic! Combined with Mills' tendency when making a serious point to get very preachy, I can fully understand why a lot of people get turned off by his work.
At its core, Mills' work is anti-establishment. You can see it in his work on Nemesis, Slaine, ABC Warriors, more recent stuff like Greysuit, even Dredd to a certain extent. At the time Nemesis was written, the political and social landscape of Britain was very different than it is today. Punk and heavy metal subcultures were still reasonably underground, Mary Whitehouse was influential in ways that today's culture warriors only dream about, and the influence of the church was far stronger. To take just one example, Monty Python's The Life of Brian had been released only a year or two previously to pickets and accusations of blasphemy, and was banned from being shown by several town councils.
Mills claims now that he wanted 2000AD to be a punky attack on the establishment in all its forms from the beginning. That, I believe, is a bit of personal hagiography, but there's a germ of truth there.
>>44313617
What you're reading as atheistic I would interpret more specifically as anti-Catholic, and more generally against organised religion (in his other works Mills is often quite spiritual, in a faintly disturbed kind of way, and Nemesis itself eventually goes somewhere with it). Both Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill were raised as Catholics, and you can see the influence that has on their work even if you don't know the specifics of their histories. Torquemada himself is based on Catholic priests he knew from childhood, more specifically Brother Solomon AKA Mike Mercado, The Swinging Monk
https://patmills.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/torquemada-the-swinging-monk/
It's worth reading in full, just so you have some idea where Mills is coming from in his portrayal of Torquemada's hypocrisy and evil, even if you disagree with his politics entirely.Spoiler alert: think Jimmy Saville
Without giving too much away, Nemesis is always an ambiguous character throughout the series. He is decidedly more traditionally heroic at the start here than he is at the end. You also have to remember that this story is only three years was published only three years after 2000AD started. Its still very much a kid's comic, and the editors, writers and artists were still working out how much they could get away with. "Be nice to people who are different from you" is a perfectly acceptable message to deliver to 12 year olds, particularly if its delivered by space motorbike satan. Later stories, for people who grew up alongside 2000AD, were a bit more complex (as we'll hopefully see).
>>44312084
It'll be five years this April since I did SHAKARA in that one thread, with years before that as an anon and before that a lurker. Where does the time go?
Its nice to be remembered fondly though, and I'm glad to have been able to provide some fun over the years.
To me, Nemesis was never really about Good vs. Evil, it was about Order vs Chaos.
Torquemada is all evil, all the time, because he's an orderly person who knows what he's doing and will not stray from his course for anything. Nemesis, on the other hand, is all over the place, doing nice things here, then heinous things there but always aiming to wreck things and overturn the order of the universe. Nemesis himself is innately unpredictable, which is his real strength when battling Torquemada.
