Broken Frontier

The rogue warrior Nemesis steps to the forefront to take the final cut on a millennia old vendetta against The Brotherhood and a conspiracy as old as civilization.

It doesn’t take long for Nemesis to take out two squads from the Brotherhood of the Blade. But the opening fight is just the set-up for a tougher battle as she takes on Majestic, Zealot, Savant, and Grifter of The Wildcats. Nemesis has more important things to do, however, and a child taken hostage is her ticket out of the melee. Flashback to an orbiting Planetary vessel and a 1925 entry in its guide chronicling the hidden influence on our world by two warring alien races, the Kherans and the Daemonites. Flashback even further to Mount Vesuvius, 995 BC and the vendettas of Nemesis, the living embodiment of vengeance. Her real name is Charis of Andrastea, warrior of the Coda Sisterhood, and she plays both sides against each other in this war. But to prove her true allegiance, her new Daemonite ally demands that she kill one of her own kind.

If, like me, the reader isn’t familiar with the character Nemesis, think Elektra with a magic katana sword and quips that are just as sharp. Shake a tree and that warrior woman character type will fall out in enough numbers to populate a small kingdom. So, when Nemesis comes crashing down on top of Elektra’s progeny, is there anything in Wildcats: Nemesis #1 that sets her apart? I think there is, and further think that she has enough gravitas to carry her own title, but Robbie Morrsion’s script makes it hard to see.

Wildcats: Nemesis opens with a swift, intense action scene then kicks the tension up a notch with a second round against the Wildcats. Throughout both there’s a very telling peek into Nemesis’ mind via first-person narration, as well as some good genre dialogue that’s punchy with just the right amount of superhero camp. And Nemesis taking a child hostage was a thoroughly unexpected curveball, given how "empathetically" she reacted when she first found the kid a few pages previous. Morrison splits the issue between a Present and a Past section, and by the end of this Present section his script engaged me enough to want to know more. What does Nemesis want? What brought this confrontation about? And where is it going?

That these questions were barely or not answered at all is the source of what’s wrong with the comic. Morrison puts us in the center of the action in the first two sequences, but because he doesn’t show us what’s being fought for, nowhere do we see its heart. One has to applaud the chances he takes shifting gears so radically from the height and tension of the first scene to the Planetary Guide section then to what presumably are the origins of Nemesis’ vendetta. But such a drastic shift from a scene with an important unanswered question to 10 pages of flashback needs some kind of real pay-off to keep the story moving. Sadly, the Past section has no pay-off and drags the story. We get plenty of history, context, Byzantine alien politics, and the beginnings of a conspiracy, but we don’t learn what’s so at stake for Nemesis that she’ll spend thousands of years seeking it. In fact, I had to go to Robbie Morrison’s site to get a hint of what the story is about; and while I re-read the issue now knowing that Nemesis is seeking revenge for the massacre of her fellow warriors, I still found it nowhere in the comic itself. Consequently, the conclusion rings flat, and what could otherwise be a pretty good first chapter is a frustrating read that fails to excite enough interest for chapter two.

Though the script is weak, the art rocks. Both pencillers—Talent Caldwell illustrating the Present section and Horacio Domingues illustrating the Past—shine in their depiction of contemporary New York and ancient Rome. Caldwell’s lines are sleek and fluid, with manga inspired touches to eyes and body types and strong fight choreography. He frames each shot well, disorienting the reader a bit with the sense of motion, but also making us feel the rush of conflict. Domingues, on the other hand, takes a different approach. His panels have a warm, sensual quality that locks the eye in during talking head sequences, while also celebrating the female body Heavy Metal-style when Nemesis and Zealot take the gloves off. Cudos are also due to Carrie Strachan on colors. Each section has such a distinct feel that it’s hard to believe—in a good way—that both were colored by one person.

There was great potential here, but it’s too bad that Morrison’s script isn’t up to the art that Caldwell and Domingues bring to Wildcats: Nemesis #1.