NEMESIS #3 (OF 4)
What did the
iFanboy
community think?
Pulls
PENCILS: Steve McNiven
COVER BY: Steve McNiven
Size: 32 pages
Price: 2.99
This book is a big disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, it’s entertaining in an empty, easy kind of way. But the story really fails to deliver on the potential of its central concept: What if someone with the morality of the Joker employed Batman’s methodology? Sounds good. The nuances of the idea, if explored, could be very interesting.
But there’s nothing nuanced or even surprising in this story. It barrels along, delivering lots of action and the basic story beats you’d expect and very little else. The characters are completely two-dimensional, really only functioning to fill the roles they have to play and not providing any real personality to the book. The characters are so flat that when Nemesis does a very creepy thing to the protagonist’s kids, it’s very hard to care. We don’t have any sense of who they are. Same goes for their mother and for the hero-cop himself. We’re told about their (rather cliche) domestic problems in this issue, but we haven’t been shown any of it and it rings false.
This book would be a near-complete failure if it wasn’t for the fact that McNiven delivers the mindless action with such aplomb. Anybody could have predicted that Nemesis would break out of prison in a storm of over-the-top violence. But, damn, the scene in the middle of this book where he takes down a hundred prison guards in hand-to-hand combat looks really f-ing cool. And that’s what it’s supposed to be.
Art: 4 - Very Good
Find us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Some rights reserved.
Fantastic review, encapsulates my thoughts entirely.
That’s pretty good, a Joker’s morality with Batman’s methodology, but I disagree about the characterization view point, because I think we’re getting a picture of Morrow as being this sorta work first, family later kind of guy, something lots of peeps might be able to relate to; and the domestic problems, although we’ve heard them all before, doesn’t take away from the real impact the mundane may have in these people’s lives. I think we’re supposed to just imagine what’s happened, which can be sometimes more powerful than seeing images of it; so yea, I think the book is presented in a perverse, superficial sorta way, but it’s still fun to watch from the outside looking in, and is thought-provoking on some levels. I mean if it stimulated you enough to think of the central concept that you mentioned above, how did it fail to deliver?
@Franktiger: Note that I gave the story a 2 and not a 1. The concept is interesting and thought-provoking. But for me, being told that Morrow puts work before family and being told about the problems this causes isn’t as interesting as being shown. Because, let’s face it, we’ve heard it all before. It’s undoubtedly a fun book, and I think I gave it credit for that, but the superficial way it presents its characters just doesn’t do it for me. It leaves me wanting more, but not in the good way.