Nemesis the Warlock: Killer Watt & Olric's Quest
Olric’s Quest owes its inspiration to Michael Moorcock. I think my feathers were more ruffled than most of my colleagues when he trashed my Prog One of 2000AD in The Guardian.
I’m blown away by Nemesis the Warlock: the Definitive Edition. My compliments to the publishers, Rebellion, and especially their designer Gemma Sheldrake for the truly inspired front and back covers.
Such a Definitive Edition requires a Definitive Commentary, a companion piece for when you’re looking at the beautiful art by art-creator Kevin O’Neill and the other talented artists that followed him. So it’s time for The Secret History of Nemesis the Warlock, an episode by episode revelation of what really went on behind the scenes.
Killer Watt
The validity of our approach is immediately obvious on page one of the story: a Concorde bird feeling a tube train to its young. With seven pictures on the page – talk about value for money! You will never, ever get that kind of imaginative image with conventional British comic thinking. I don’t know where Kevin got that idea from, but we built a story around it. I believe it may have inspired Amok, a robot mammoth lorry who was the star of our Metalzoic, published by DC Comics as a graphic novel.
We thought rather than rest on our laurels and just do another terror tube, we’d create a completely different form of travel – a teleportation ‘telephone’ line. The possibilities were endless and you’ll see them explored in the story.
Torquemada’s character is now developing, and he is already turning into an epic master villain. The combination of church architecture and electrical pylons is brilliantly conveyed in the final image and confirms the special visual look that Nemesis would have. Torquemada refers to deviants, but I had no idea what they were at this stage.
Nemesis, too, is starting to emerge as a character, even though we don’t see him yet. I wanted to really build up the mystery around who or what Nemesis was. That phallic blitzspear emerging through the teleporter caused Kevin and I great amusement at the time.
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