"The Next Nexus" by Mike Baron and Steve Rude

Just to let you know, I was a big fan of Nexus back in the day. I think it was one of the first comics that I loved for the art first. I liked Steve Rude's style then and I like it now. He uses a very clean style that makes me want to stare at the art all day.

For those unfamiliar with Nexus, it follows the adventures of Horatio Hellpop, who was chosen by an incredibly powerful alien being known as The Merk to be the conscience of humanity. His duties were simple: seek out and kill human mass murderers selected by the Merk, using Merk-supplied energy powers ("fusionkasting). Images of his victims and their crimes are sent to him in dreams. Once he receives a dream of someone he must kill, he has to do it fairly quickly or the mercurial Merk starts giving him monster headaches and the dreams become more vivid and wrenching. He is also given a tank that he goes into to charge up for and recover after his missions.

"The Next Nexus" is a collection of a four issue miniseries about what happens after Horatio has decided to give up the job and who gets the job next. Unfortunately for him, the only reason the powerful alien let him quit was because he had already decided on who was going to be the new Nexus: the Loomis sisters. The sisters were the children of one of Horatio's early victims, General Loomis, and they had sworn vengeance on the person who had killed their father. They actually sought out the Merk in an effort to get the power they would need to take on someone as powerful Nexus. The Merk granted them the power they wanted while showing why he had managed to make Horatio's life hell.

Overall, I enjoyed the story, mostly because I am familiar with the back-story and the beautiful art by Steve Rude, but I do have some problems with it. While I found the story interesting, I had a problem with the lack of character development. I can understand that Horatio and the other regular Nexus characters do not need fleshing out in this story, but it would have been nice to see the Loomis sisters developed a little bit more beyond the almost comical, two dimensional characters shown in the story.

Michana, the youngest sister, is shown as a spoiled brat. I think it was meant to show that she was, as the introduction described her, "a domineering little witch," but it came off as some cranky, almost psychotic child. Lonnie, the middle sister, is the "conscience" of the group. She is the only one of the three who shows any possibility of remorse for the things they are doing or are about to do to get revenge and that seems a little unrealistic to me. I mean really, I don't care how much you hate someone, I can't really see three people being that single minded about revenge for that long. That kind of hate eats you up inside and probably makes you more than a little crazy. Stacy, the oldest sister, is shown as this tragic figure who has given up everything in her quest for revenge. That might work in a bad production of Hamlet, but I expect a little more out of my reading material.

I really wanted to like this more than I did. I have fond memories of reading Nexus back when I was in high school and college, but either my tastes have changed more than I thought over the last 20 years or so, or this story just wasn't that well done. Overall, I would say that this is worth a read, but definitely not something you want to invest a lot of money in acquiring. If you can get as lucky as I did and find it for half off, go for it. Otherwise, stick to the main Nexus story.

I'll give this 6.5 stars out of 10, mostly because I really can't get over the art! The story itself was not bad, but the character development could have been much better.