Review: ‘Nemesis The Warlock Definitive Edition Volume 4’ — My Essential Nemesis

The Definitive series of Nemesis the Warlock reprints continues, giving us one of the greatest of 2000 AD strips in a beautiful package. Oh, it truly is one of the crown jewels of 2000 AD, absolutely essential reading for you.

Okay, so this was meant to be a preview. But, seeing as this one actually came out in December 2025, it seems a little late to be doing a preview of it a good month later. So, a review it is. Hey, what can I say? December, crazy things always happen in December, and that always leads to the end-of-year rush towards us. The thing is, this is one of those books that I couldn’t just let pass by without mentioning it. Because, not a surprise to you I’m sure, it’s just bloody brilliant, just as all of these Definitive Nemesis volumes have been – a beautiful five-volume set of every Nemesis tale ever told (well, nearly), published in a gorgeous large-format size, with both softcover and hardcover editions to showcase one the crown jewels from the pages of 2000 AD.

The thing is, this one’s personal. This was the Nemesis when I first noticed Nemesis. Yes, I came onboard late. You’ll forgive me for not getting with it right from the start in 1980, I was but nine after all. That meant I rather missed out on the Kevin O’Neill, Jesus Redondo, Bryan Talbot years. In fact, it wasn’t until 1987, when I was working at Nostalgia & Comics Birmingham, aged 16, that I first really took notice of Nemesis in 2000 AD. And frankly, given the first cover by John Hicklenton on Prog 546, it was something you couldn’t help but take notice of. I mean, just look at this…

Oh yes, I actually remember the week it came in the shop. It was half term, which meant I was working midweek, there for the unloading of the boxes with this latest 2000 AD. Seeing that first Hicklenton cover made me stop and open the Prog, finding myself amazed by the sheer visceral nature, the nastiness, the gritty style of Hicklenton’s artwork. I was an instant fan, both of Hicklenton and Nemesis, and it was the work here that encouraged me to go back and read all the Nemesis that had come so far.

Sadly, Hicklenton’s life was cut short, way too short. Diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2000, he chose to end his life at Dignitas on 19th March 2010. But we still have his art to look back on, amazing, visceral, spectacularly brutal and totally different artwork that looks fresh and distinctive even now.

If you have an hour to spare, you can and should go watch Here’s Johnny, a documentary chronicling his illness and his response to it. It’s brave, it’s funny, it’s powerful stuff.

But back to this fourth definitive Nemesis volume, perhaps the strangest of the lot – which is saying something given all that’s gone before – where the enmity between Nemesis and Torquemada spills out across space and time. Inside are three of my favourite Nemesis tales – two by Hicklenton (‘The Two Torquemadas’ and ‘Deathbringer’), sandwiching the equally gorgeous, although wildly artistically different ‘Purity’s Story’ with David Roach on art.

Everything starts with ‘The Two Torquemadas’, set in the 15th Century as Torquemada, the mad, evil ruler of Termight, meets the first Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. And if no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, certainly no one, Tomas de Torquemada included, expects Two Torquemadas.

It’s all still driven by Thoth’s revenge for Torquemada killing Thoth’s mother. He’s headed back in time to hunt down and kill Torquemada’s ancestors, including Adolf Hitler, Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, Robespierre, and Peter the Hermit. Doing that has weakened Torquemada, whose hatred of Thoth is now only second to that of his hatred of Nemesis. Meanwhile, Nemesis and Purity are seeking Thoth themselves, only to have the trail go cold. So, they head back to the one man they’re pretty sure will be on Thoth’s target list – Tomas de Torquemada. When Nemesis’s Torq gets wind of it, he heads back himself – giving us two Torquemadas, both unspeakably evil, up against Purity Brown, agent of the Temight Resistance, and the demonic, chaotic Nemesis, whose mission to free the galaxy from tyranny is very much on his own terms.

The absolute joy of ‘The Two Torquemadas’ is suitably two-fold. First, you’ve got Pat Mills going way, way, way over the top here, really revelling in the grotesquery of all concerned, with just Purity acting as some semblance of humanity against both of theTorquemadas and Nemesis. Indeed, this whole volume is more about Tyrnanny finally realising that both sides of this particular fight are pretty much in it for their own ends.

Just as one example of Mills’s ridiculousness working real well, there’s the very first meeting of the two Torquemadas, played for laughs, completely antithetical to the horrors of what both men have and will do. Tomas meets Torquemada, hears his claims of being a God, and immediately plots his torture, whilst giving Torquemada a guided tour of the torture devices, all to Torquemada’s obvious delight. All this comes to a head a couple of episodes later, after Torquemada’s been tortured for quite a while, only to come out with the sort of stories of wickedness that makes Tomas shudder.

The second joy of ‘The Two Torquemadas’ is, of course, all that Hicklenton artwork. Almost 40 years later, it still hits as hard, looks superbly, brilliantly different, a style that’s just nasty, messy, full of strangeness and exaggeration. Both in ‘The Two Torquemadas’ and ‘Deathbringer’, Hicklenton’s art is a visceral, incredible thing, and it thrills me just as much as it did that very first time I saw it.

By the end of ‘The Two Torquemadas’, we get the one difficulty with this Definitive Nemesis series, in that it claims to collect every Nemesis there is. Yet, of course, thanks to Mills’s propensity for linking his strips, it absolutely doesn’t. The whole thread of the three main stories in this Definitive Book 4 involves not just Nemesis and Purity tracking down Thoth, not just Nemesis doing anything he can to kill Torquemada, not just Purity’s tale of realising that being Nemesis’s second-in command is not what she thought, but a big plot point of a black hole threatening Termight, one that spins off with Nemesis and the ABC Warriors. Basically, following Book Seven, ‘The Two Torquemadas’ and again following Book Eight, Purity’s Story, we’re pointed towards those ABC Warriors tales. Surely, given Nemesis’s involvement in those, they should be included here?

But, as a difficulty, it’s a minor one. All you really need to know is that Nemesis and the ABC Warriors have a threat to deal with, and they do. The far more important part of all this happens here in ‘The Two Torquemadas’, ‘Purity’s Story’, and ‘Deathbringer’, where Nemesis and Purity track down Thoth, where Nemesis goes at it with Torquemada, and, most importantly, where Purity discovers the truth of her situation. That’s the brilliance of all this, just the single-minded drive that Mills at his best can deliver. Oh, and all that stunning art.

Yes, stunning art, which brings me nicely to Book Eight, ‘Purity’s Story’, where David Roach takes over art duties. On the face of it, you couldn’t have an artistic clash more violent than going from Hicklenton to Roach. Yet, it works so very well. The focus in ‘Purity’s Story’ is, d’uh, on Purity, so a change in art works stylistically, thematically. It’s something that Nemesis has always benefited from; each artistic change suits Mills’s shift in story focus or shift in location. It’s something that gives Nemesis such power and makes it, genuinely, one of the absolute greats of 2000 AD.

So yes, Roach’s art is just perfect for the story he’s telling. His classical style, such glorious linework, beautifully controlled, realistic albeit accentuated anatomy, all of it fits so well here in this Book, something that plays as a mere interlude yet proves absolutely vital to the ongoing storyline.

Yes, this is ‘Purity’s Story’, the tale of how she came to, as it says on page one of Book Eight, “Betray her own kind and side with a creature from another world? A fire-breathing demon with horns and hooves? What makes a human… love an alien?”

Whilst we learn of Purity’s origins and how she came to meet Nemesis and fall in line with him, being, as she thought, the only hope for saving humanity on Termight, the far more important questions come as the temporal and spatial effects of what’s happening free up her memories, memories Nemesis has manipulated and hidden from her. It’s a short Book, just the nine episodes, but it really sets up everything that’s to come, making Purity question just where she stands, her eyes opened to Nemesis, the alien she once considered her saviour, only to realise that his indifference to humanity, his chaotic nature, make him a rather unlikely messiah.

So much has been hidden from Purity that she starts remembering here, beginning with Nemesis’s plan that she should infiltrate the Terminght regime by making Torquemada fall in love with her. Again, as with so much of Nemesis, Mills plays it for laughs, which, given the benefit of years, only makes me, as a reader, squirm, as we see Purity and Torquemada cosy up to each other, the details of which, given all we know of Torquemada’s deviant desires, would be horrendous in the extreme. But no, here Mills skates over things, playing it for laughs, laughs that fall a little flat when you really think it through.

But still, the incessant drive of the book dominates things, Mills laying things out clear and simple, ‘Purity’s Tale’ is a tragedy, only made even more real that, by the end of it, Nemesis does his thing and memory wipes her of all she’s learned, yet another monster for her to deal with, those seeds planted, in Deathbringer.

Then, following yet another little off-page diversion into the ABC Warriors, we’re into Book Nine: Deathbringer, my favourite of all Nemesis tales, where Hicklenton returned, more kinetic and nasty than before, for a tale that’s the absolute epitome to me of all that Nemesis was, as the Warlock and Purity track Torquemada to the worst of times… 80s Britain.

Oh yes, Mills fills the pages with a zeal of truthtelling, Thatcher’s Britain through an alternative Earth lens, where the time ripples of Thoth and the ABC Warriors black hole saga mean Torquemada’s had 10 years to manipulate things in a Britain that’s all too obviously holding up a Mills-mirror to all that Thatcherite Britain meant. It’s dismal, heartbreaking, horrible stuff. But damn, it’s so good, and Hicklenton is just the artist to deliver all that.

Torquemada’s here as the leader of the Reapers, the reality police, having grown from an agitator playing on the weaknesses of the common people, playing up the threats of aliens on Earth, mobilising the mobs. Now, as leader of the Reapers, he has the ear of the Prime Minister, a mandate to deal with aliens and anyone he deems as a deviant and against the country.

Not to mention his other persona, as a landlord offering a place of sanctuary from those in need, making him one of the richest men in the country. Absolutely a Thatcherite success story.

Yep, Mills was never one to shy from a heavy-handed metaphor.

And against all this, Purity’s role grows, knowing now just how manipulated she’s been all this time – as Torquemada says to her, ‘It’s all a joke to him. An alien joke. We’re insects, there for his entertainment.’ By the end of this cycle of tales, she’s a new character, freed from her slavish following of Nemesis, realising, quite rightly, that Torquemada and Nemesis are but two sides to the same coin, both sides giving nothing to the remnants of humanity on Termight that she’s always fought for.

And there we leave this fourth Definitive Nemesis volume, with just a nothing ABC Warriors, Deadlock, Nemesis one-off with art by an early in his career Carl Critchlow, very much in the fully painted Bisley style that was so in vogue at the time, leading into the Nemesis and Deadlock strip, which may or may not be included in the fifth volume of the Definitive Nemesis.

But damn, the three big Books in here, Hicklenton/Roach/Hicklenton, ‘The Two Torquemadas’, ‘Purity’s Story’, ‘Deathbringer’, are just the epitome of Nemesis, a vital moment in a huge saga, the moment where the supporting Purity finally takes her place, against all that epic sci-fi madness of Nemesis vs Torquemada, the two main characters proved to be but two monsters themselves. It’s a triumph of storytelling (not without its faults sure) that expands upon what’s gone before and drives it all forwards, unrelenting, unforgiving, an incredible read that holds up so well.

This penultimate volume of the Definitive Nemesis the Warlock series encompasses all of the cosmic conflict between Nemesis and Torquemada, the whole thread of the conflict over Thoth resolved here, yet more than anything else this one brings Purity front and centre to things, making us as the reader question the ‘hero’ of the piece. And more than anything else, for me, this is the artistic pinnacle of the whole saga, with Hicklenton and Roach just giving us such incredible imagery. Sure, I know, given the benefit of time, that there’s few that can better Kevin O’Neill’s vision, but there’s still that nostalgic thing in my head where Hicklenton blew me away at the time, and Roach then turned things 180. That’s hard to get away from.

But even casting aside all the years of nostalgia from me first seeing the work of both of them, they compare incredibly well against everything that had gone before. Artistically, this volume of Nemesis is a highpoint for me. A stunning moment in a story that’s a high point of 2000 AD‘s history, and absolutely an essential bit of reading for you.

 

NEMESIS THE WARLOCK: DEFINITIVE EDITION VOLUME 4

Contains the following:

Book Seven – The Two Torquemadas – by Pat Mills and John Hicklenton, letters by Steve Potter.

Book Eight – Purity’s Story – by Pat Mills and David Roach, letters by Steve Potter.

Book Nine – Deathbringer – by Pat Mills and John Hicklenton, letters by Steve Potter.

Nemesis & Deadlock: Wizards & Warlocks – by Pat Mills and Carl Critchlow, letters by Gordon Robson.

Originally published in 2000 AD Progs 546-557, 558-566, 586-608, & 700, (1987-1990)

And finally, that John Hicklenton documentary I was mentioning. Go watch…