The Nexus Step Forward!

I have written about Nexus a few times at the old place, but not yet here I think. I still remember seeing the first magazine-sized edition of Nexus in Chicago of all places on a very brief stopover while I was taking the bus to Seattle. I had not extra cash and no province to buy it but it lingered in my memory and when I returned to my local haunts I landed the second issue and became an immediate fan. It was a few years I think before I found a copy of the debut I could afford.

The story by Mike Baron and Steve Rude of a young man tormented by his legacy of death on a genocidal scale was compelling to say the least. Here we have a man possessed of what seemed limitless power, who was driven to use that power to kill despotic mass murderers by his dreams. He was as the story opened a legend, a dark force that the killers across space and time feared.

He is a vigilante of the most potent kind, fully capable of destroying fleets of ships and pulverizing doomsday weapons. He's death incarnate but when he's revealed as Horatio Hellpop we find he's a tormented but reasonable fellow.

The saga of Nexus is told over three black and white issues, each magazine offering several chapters in the hundred page tale. We meet a beautiful woman named Sundra Peel who seeks to learn about the enigmatic Nexus and instead falls in love with the charming Horatio. He tells her his tale of suffering woe, of his father who demolished an entire planet, of his mother who left him too soon through no fault of her own, and of the powers that grew within him and could only be controlled by a vat of nutrients which kept him on an even keel.

We learn of the choices he makes, choices of both savage retribution and cool pardon. We meet the people of his world, all refuges who want safety and in some cases revenge, but who live under his care if not his order in a mysterious installation which seems to offer up whatever is needed. There are so many mysteries in the first three-part story that we know more will be needed, but also that first story is complete, a finely honed work all its own.

I read the story most recently in a handy paperback reprint title "As It Happens" which contains these first three magazines and four more of the standard color comic book variety when the audience needed more Nexus. Nexus has never really gone away, not really.

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