I vaguely remember 'Nemesis the Warlock' from my days reading 'The Best of 2000 AD Monthly'. I didn't buy a lot of '2000 AD', the weekly British science fiction comic, but did buy as many of their monthly collations as I could, these serving as relatively cheap graphic novels. Of course, the main focus was always 'Judge Dredd', but I enjoyed 'Robo-Hunter', 'Strontium Dog' and 'Sláine', along with Alan Moore series like 'The Ballad of Halo Jones' and 'D.R. and Quinch'. Prominent amongst that line-up was 'Nemesis the Warlock', which I recall being about as batshit insane as '2000 A.D.' ever got.

This was thirty five to forty years ago, so I didn't remember the stories. I found that I recalled the wild imagery of Torquemada and Nemesis the Warlock pretty accurately, as well as the conflict of futuristic Spanish Inquisition against demonic aliens. I remembered Grobbendonk too, Nemesis's familiar, who speaks Gibberish, quite literally as it's a dialect from the Fringe Worlds. However, it played new to me otherwise, with a whole slew of surprises. I wasn't expecting steampunk in 1983, for a start. That blew my mind. Neither was I expecting the crossover to the world of 'Ro-Busters' and 'ABC Warriors', neither particularly favourites of mine back in the day.

One valuable thing these collated '2000 AD' volumes provide is serious context. I probably read a book or two of these way back when, but likely not the first four in order and certainly not with a couple of introductory stories that predate the creation of the series proper. Apparently, 'Comic Rock' was where Nemesis and Torquemada both got their start. The goal was to spin stories from popular songs and 'Terror Tube' vaguely spun off from the Jam's 'Going Underground'. That was followed by 'Killer Watt', which was even less successfully spun off from a rock compilation album, 'Killer Watts'. It's easy to see why the series was quickly cancelled.

They're fascinating as history though, because they really exist to showcase a location instead of a set of characters. They're about the planet Termight, formerly Earth, the Mighty Terra, but the focus is the infrastructure used for travel. There are weird loop roads, then teleport tubes, even a black hole to make your morning commute seem trivial by comparison. They're a gift for an artist and Kevin O'Neill made them look unusual, even with clear 'Judge Dredd' influence. However, Pat Mills, a wonderfully talented writer, may never have written anything worse. While Torquemada and Nemesis are both here, they're not even at the cardboard cutout level yet.

Apparently, they were popular enough to warrant an actual series, so 'Nemesis the Warlock 'was born and suddenly Mills steps up his game, with the first book, 'The World of Termight'. Now it's a future I remember, with Torquemada and his army of Terminators religious zealots hunting down and killing aliens everywhere, not just on their own planet but across the Termight Empire. How dare alien creatures live on their own planets? Torquemada dubs them deviants and reminds the population of Termight to 'Be pure! Be vigilant! Behave!'

While Mills steps up, seriously exploring the edgy themes of death and difference through rather topical subject matter right now, namely genocide caused by religious intolerance and hypocrisy, O'Neill was clearly having a field day with the visuals. He has fun with Mausoleum and Necropolis, the underground cities that constitute Termight. He has fun with mandrakes, which are human/alien hybrids and even more with a bestiary of aliens. And he has an absolute riot with the design of Nemesis himself, a sort of dark satanic bipedal goat with a huge shovel for a mouth.

Surprisingly, there aren't a lot of showcase panels, though O'Neill throws detail into all of them, however small. The first glorious standout is a full page panel to illustrate the procession of the Terminators to the Feast of Zamarkand, where deviants are to be sacrificed. The Pandemonium rises, a vast insane organ/war machine, played by the hooded Brother Hades, which, unknown to Torquemada, whose phantom form overshadows everything, is really Nemesis in disguise.

Later, that's trumped by the image of Ydrasill Castle, the great donjon of the basilisks, which is a stalwart holdout to the siege of the Terminators, but maybe not for long. And, when, we arrive at Book IV, 'The Gothic Empire', we find ourselves in textbook steampunk territory. Apparently, the Goths picked up radio signals from Earth and, being chameleonlike shapechangers, chose to make over their own look and that of their entire society in the image of the early 20th century British Empire. Suddenly, we're looking at airships, steam trains and air velocipedes.

This was 1983, crazy early for steampunk imagery like this. K. W. Jeter didn't even name the genre until 1987 and, in comic book form, 'The League of Extraordinary Gentleman', not uncoincidentally also drawn by Kevin O'Neill, didn't arrive until 1999. What's even more outrageous is that this was supposed to be Book I in 1980, but was deemed too much too soon, so they shelved it until they'd fleshed out the regular series in what would become the first three books, making this Book IV. It boggles my mind that so much of what would come later is hinted at here, in an array of historical and fictional figures mashed up together in a far future dystopia. Clearly someone was reading a lot of Blaylock, Jeter and Powers.

So Torquemada masquerades as Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel, though he's really the Phantom extracting spirit with a hyper-stiletto. The Hell Fire Club want a more modern society, based not on the early 20th century but the end of it. There's murder on the Equatorial Express in an overt Agatha Christie nod, Frankenstein holds court on the Rue Morgue and Isambard Kingdom Brunel has built a space elevator that's clearly based on the Eiffel Tower. It's all quite wonderful for this steampunk who didn't stumble onto the genre until 2010.

By the way, three of those books are reasonably substantial. 'The World of Termight' creates the backdrop to the series to come in serious style. It's not just the foreground elements, but even a succession of less important background characters. I loev Nemesis's Great Uncle Baal, exiled for experimenting on humans. He crashes a ball and animates dancing human skeletons with sorcery because, well, he can. He has a skull called Yorick and a skeletal chair called Henry that massages him when he sits down. None of that has any real relevance except background texture, but it's a bundle of fun, if you enjoy the dark side.

'The Alien Alliance', not reprinted in the 1980s when Titan collected these stories, is insubstantial by comparison, but it's still enjoyable, with a little back story for Torquemada and a prison planet for humans that's run by giant intelligent spiders. 'The World of Nemesis' makes things personal, introducing Nemesis's wife Chira and their newborn homunculus son Thoth, but then tearing the family apart in an unusual way, setting up future stories with Thoth for later volumes. Then 'The Gothic Empire', the longest story at twenty progs, as '2000 AD' issues were called, trawls in robots from now associated series.

I found it fascinating to dive back into the world of 'Nemesis the Warlock' after so long away. The stories are varied in quality but the art is always outstandingly weird and what I felt overall was a wonder at how unhinged it all was. This is far from traditional comic book storytelling. It's set in a dystopian future, which sounds like science fiction, and we certainly encounter plenty of aliens on plenty of worlds, but it feels more like fantasy—sometimes sword and sorcery, sometimes cosmic horror—and it plays out almost like a superhero action comic book. Eventually, of course, it finds proto-steampunk.

I remember the eighties in England. When these stories were being published, from 1980 to 1985, I was stumbling into the burgeoning horror scene, in both fiction and movies; discovering rock and metal; and exploring the occult in non fiction. All these things were being terrorised by censors, a continuation of the video nasty era that deemed so much material unfit for public consumption. All of them were trawled into the Satanic Panic era, driven by religious fundamentalists. And yet, here were Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill throwing all that outrageous imagery into a story about an era of religious zealotry conducting genocide across the galaxy. They had serious balls and they seemed to relish that, getting only more outrageous as they went.

'Nemesis the Warlock' eventually ran to ten books, all written by Pat Mills, which are all collated across three volumes, starting with this one. The artists varied, Kevin O'Neill being the first but, even within this volume, not the only. His cameo, as Brother Kevin in the Scriptorium focusing too much on his illuminated borders, ably highlighted how his detailed output affected the delivery, so it isn't too surprising that he'd move on. Jesus Redondo drew 'The Alien Alliance, while Bryan Talbot, whose 'The Tale of One Bad Rat' is stunningly different, finished 'The Gothic Empire'. ~~ Hal C F Astell