reesesWeb

I bought a couple Nexus compilations yesterday at Golden Age. They're the first comic books I've purchased in perhaps ten years. The last ones were also Nexus.

Reading them, two things occur to me. The first is that I'm not a comic fan for a reason. They suck. The reason I think they suck is that I was fortunate enough to be exposed to this comic when I was a kid. I'm sorry, but if your formative comic experiences were Calvin and Hobbes and Nexus, somebody's going to have to pull a flaming pineapple out of his tuckus to impress you.

The other thing is that, as was the case with Calvin and Hobbes, while a particularly exceptional example of a consumable item may lead you to consume other examples by their proxmity, once the exceptional example ceases to become available, the others just aren't worth the effort. When I was a kid, reading Nexus, I bought quite a few comics. I'd go into the store to see if a new Nexus came in, and if it did, great, I'd buy it, and maybe five comics I saw on the way to the cashier. If a new copy weren't in, hey, I'm there already, right?

Once Nexus ceased to be published except as a blue-moon event, I stopped reading comics completely. Of course, this coincided with my turning 19, which may not be a completely unrelated factor.

But the point remains -- this is an exceptional comic. Well-drawn, making great use of a limited medium. The stories are incredibly well paced, and the storyline didn't get too whacky. When it made sense for the main character to be affected by his actions, he was, and the series basically ended.

What is the story? Let me summarise as tersely as possible.

A planetary governor of a post-Soviet socialist empire destroys his planet to stop a revolution, flees with pregnant wife to an abandoned moon, where his wife gives birth to a son. Mother wanders off, gets lost, and dies when her son is five. When the son is nine, a semi-omnipotent alien causes him to get headaches and the ability to cast the fusion energy tapped from the cores of stars, and the son then executes his father for his crime of murder on a massive scale. The rest of the series is more of the same -- headaches, unconsciousness, dreams of mass-murderers, whom he must then kill upon waking.

Yeah, it's wacky. Yes, it works.

On another note, why does this cough start late at night? I'll be ready when it's gone.

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