Loving the Alien: Nemesis the Warlock

The fifth issue of 2000AD: The Ultimate Collection features the frankly mind-bending Nemesis the Warlock. When people talk about the subversive side of 2000AD, it’s this truly bizarre story that quickly springs to mind. Pat Mills’s future version of an earth where quasi-religious fanatic Torquemada demands the annihilation of all aliens (or ‘deviants’ as he calls them) is brought to life by Kevin O’Neill’s startlingly grotesque, Bosch-like visuals in which clothes and buildings have a medieval/sado-masochistic look and everything appears to be alive.

                 It’s a strip that pulsates with anger, the work of two former Catholic schoolboys gleefully giving the finger to rigid authoritarian figures and dogma of all kinds. It’s somewhat hard to believe that this stuff was first published in the early-1980s, in a weekly comic aimed at pre-teens, one that shared the same stable as Tiger and Roy of the Rovers but, as managing editors from the time have since explained, it would have been foolish to tamper with a winning formula. And at that point, 2000AD had become a huge success with a significant readership among teenagers and college students.   

The titular character is the leader of an alien resistance force dedicating to alleviating the lot of those suffering under the yoke of the intolerant humans of Termight. The joy of the tale is in how readers’ expectations are confounded as the frequently hideous aliens are presented as sympathetic victims of the Klan-like human mob.  Kevin O’Neill’s artwork is sometimes so surreally detailed and deliberately unpleasant, it can be hard to look at but there are many unforgettable images here such as Nemesis’s Great Uncle Baal’s study with its fantastic collection of oddities including a chair made from a human skeleton, the joust between armour-clad female warlocks and the dizzying chase through the travel tube.

One of the most overtly political strips ever to appear in 2000AD, with its extreme depiction of what fear of ‘the other’ can drive people to do, Nemesis the Warlock remains as relevant as on its first appearance.