By: Mark Millar (writer/creator), Steve McNiven (art/creator), Dave McCaig (colors), Clayton Cowles (letters) & Nick Lowe (editor)
The Story: The final confrontation between DC police chief Morrow and cop-killer Nemesis.
What’s Good: Ummm… it sets up nicely for a sequel? It does finally let the reader in on what the story is/was, but it’s a little annoying to have the twist right at the end.
A lot of McNiven’s art is quite good. I still really enjoy the character design of Nemesis himself. We don’t see a lot of white in comic books and it is a really powerful color. In a lot of ways, white reminds me of vibrant red hair that some artists put on female characters. Colorist Val Staples was kinda enough to enlighten me that part of the reason why white (or red) is so powerful is that we just don’t see it in nature. We see a lot of off-white, but very little WHITE, so it really catches our eyes when we see it. Gotta wonder how he keeps it clean though.
What’s Not So Good: Honestly, this issue was a huge anti-climax. Last issue had a hugely bloody scene where Nemesis just destroys a squad of corrections officers with his bare hands. It may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but you read it and said, “Whoa! They’re not pulling any punches!” Then you saw that when Nemesis kidnapped cop Morrow’s teenage kids, he artificially inseminated his daughter with his son’s seed and said, “Double Whoa! Really not pulling any punches!” [Note: Although you do know that Millar toyed at least briefly with the idea of having the daughter get pregnant the old fashioned way and decided that was too icky.]
So, it was a huge disappointment that this issue didn’t have anything anywhere nearly that daring. Morrow is given a kind of Sophie’s Choice moment, but that plays out pretty predictably and isn’t as shocking as what happened last issue. And, then, I just wasn’t happy with the ending at all. I won’t spoil it, but after building up Nemesis as a really cool villian, the ending turns this entire series into a long #0 issue that is just prologue to a longer story. There is promise for the future, but I feel a little used buying 4 issues to get to this point.
Artistically I have only one complaint. For a comic that is supposed to be edgy, it sure would have been nice to see some variation in panel design. Every panel is quadrilateral, every panel has a border with a white background and almost every panel places the viewer’s eye in a normal perspective (as if you were standing there watching in person). It works fine for telling the story and I do understand and appreciate that this comic is probably heavily tied to a movie pitch, but I still think there are huge missed opportunities to have jumbled panels, oddly shaped panels, no background, no panel borders, etc. For example, when Morrow wakes up in Nemesis’ custody, why not have something like an black background, with a jumble of panels cascading across the page with entailed, Nemesis word balloons as Morrow regains consciousness? Just saying…
Conclusion: Not a “bad” comic, but very guilty of getting our mouths ready for something juicy and off-the-wall and then serving us a vanilla anticlimax of an ending. I do think that Millar and McNiven can go back to this universe in the future and tell some very fun stories now that the premise is out of the bag, but it made my reaction to the entire series into, “Awww, man! C’mon…”
Grade: C-
-Dean Stell
Grade
Conclusion