Nemesis #2

So a while back there was this crazy comic called Kick-Ass about a New York City teenager who decides to done the cowl, albeit sans cape. He has no powers or anything, just a drive to do good and kick a little ass. Nemesis flips that around, where some guy has decided to be a supervillian and a total dick in the process.

Mark Millar does a great job of making the majority of his panels mindbogglingly badass. Kick-Ass had it's decapitations and it's headshot kills, but Nemesis ups the ante with, and I am entirely serious here, with Nemesis doing a backflip on a motorcycle and taking out a helicopter. It's pretty awesome. But...

The thing about Kick-Ass that made it different was that it almost seemed possible. It was some kid who just put on a scuba suit and took to the streets. There was a sort of legitimacy in the fact that he got beaten up literally all the time and never really did anything too unbelievable aside from the amount of abuse he took. Nemesis not so much. Remember in The Dark Knight where the Batmobile becomes the Batcycle? That happens. That sort of jerks the realism of a supervillian/terrorist right out of your hands and replaces it with a ten year old boy saying, "DID YOU SEE THAT IT WAS AWESOME". Yes. It was awesome, now give me my realism back.

I like Nemesis, don't get me wrong, but I'm still a little disappointed in the fact that instead of taking the legitimate-story-telling road and instead went for just HEY GUYS LOOK AT THIS HE HAS A MOTORCYCLE. I like to look at cool things, but I expect a little more story from Mark Millar than I've been offered at this point. Eventually nobody cares if you have excessive gore and fuckwords in your comic if you don't have a good story. Kick-Ass? Good story and identifiable characters. Nemesis just seems like it's already been turned into a movie and they've removed a lot of the compelling themes and story elements in favor of explosions and jetpacks. I mean, if you look at our protagonist, Chief of Police Blake Morrow, you can already tell he is going to be played by Harrison Ford.

Maybe it's wrong of me to be expecting depth and an actual plot that doesn't seem like a Die Hard movie or something, but I was just expecting a little more for Mark. He does good work. I like seeing awesome things. It just seems like this is just a loose collection of them strung around a loose plot. I'm going to keep reading and hope a decent story blooms, but until then, I'm just going to look at the pretty pictures.