“Nemesis is a reversal of the Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark archetype,” its author Mark Millar told an interviewer just before the comic came out in 2010. “What if this genius billionaire was just this total shit, and the only thing that stood between him and a city was the cops?”
The execution was as horrifying as the set-up was straightforward. The titular protagonist—a twist on an paradigm beloved by hundreds of millions of moviegoers and comics readers—spent four issues committing crimes that the Marquis de Sade would have been hard-pressed to stomach. Take, for example, what he did to the son and daughter of his rival, a big-city police chief. After Nemesis kidnaps them and releases them as part of a bargain, doctors find out not only did he impregnate the daughter with the son’s sperm but he also, as one doctor explains, “rigged your daughter’s womb to completely collapse if we attempt a termination.”
Source: NewRepublic.com
